On the 9th March at 7pm at the Barbican, London. The lecture entitled Taking Time will explore the role that buildings play in giving form to extended time. Níall will argue that architecture represents the durability of communal bonds. This insight is important in helping us to rethink our discipline in a world where embodied investment in our existing building stock has urgent priority.
Tickets can be purchased here.
Niall McLaughlin has written a piece for the RIBA Journal on the symbolic use of architecture within early Renaissance Art. The essay describes observations based on a visit to the ‘Building the Picture’ exhibition, currently on show at the National Gallery in London. The exhibition gathers together architectonic works by the Italian masters of the 14th-16th centuries that explore real and imagined architectural space.
The article observes how the Renaissance artists’ enthusiasms for displaying their newly discovered skills of perspective and knowledge of the classical forms are conflated with a religious symbolism. The tropes of classical architecture are used as visual metaphors for the divine and eternal. The article explores the effect of these spaces on the viewer and the reasons why the idealised architecture tends to alienate rather than engage.