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BIENNALE ARCHITECTTURA 2018

JUNE 2018

Biennale Architecttura 2018

The 2018 Venice Biennale opened to the public on the 26th May. This year’s theme “focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers”.

Our contribution is a collection of six large-scale models, each representing a hall for gathering that the practice has designed. These models are placed upon a rotating table which is a calendar and a cosmic machine. Each hall has a different purpose yet they all bring people together in a rhythmic and cyclical fashion daily, weekly and annually. The specific uses of each building are regulated by a calendar of events, rituals and times of congregation. Their calendars are inscribed on the outer rim of a turning table. The table can be rotated by hand. When you turn it, varying light falls upon the models representing the passage of the sun through the day from dawn to dusk. It is a manual and mechanical process.

The intention of presenting these models in this way is to emphasise the relationship between the enduring frames of the buildings and the endless procession of fugitive elements that pass through them periodically.

YALE ADVANCED STUDIO

MAY 2015

Yale Advanced Studio

Niall completed teaching his Advanced Studio for the Spring Semester in the School of Architecture in Yale University. The students presented projects based upon the theme Unreal City. They looked at the impact of devolved powers on the development of London as a quasi-independent global city, almost without a hinterland. Niall taught with faculty member Andrew Benner.

The final review was attended by Billie Tsien, David Kohn, Jennifer Leung, Pier Vittorio Aurelli, Petia Morozov, Frida Escobedo, Alan Organschi, Mike Tonkin, Michael Schlabs, Tatiana Bilbao and Bob Stern.