As part of the Bartlett’s Spring International Lecture Series where experts, visionaries and skilled professionals from across the world come to share ideas and give invaluable insight, Niall will be giving the inaugral lecture on the 20th March. Niall’s talk titled ‘Six Pockets of Time’ will look at how architecture is, at heart, an embodiment of time. Niall will show different conceptions of time evident in six projects.
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.