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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.

Top Award for Chapel at Civic Trust Awards

April 2014

Top Award for Chapel at Civic Trust Awards

Niall McLaughlin Architects were delighted to receive the National Panel Special Award for the Bishop Edward King Chapel at this year’s Civic Trust Awards Ceremony, held in Blackpool earlier this month.  The award is one of eight Special Awards that are presented in addition to the Civic Trust Awards, to celebrate projects that are deemed to be outstanding in a specific area. The National Panel Award is given to the scheme that the National Panel members select as their favourite from among the Award winning projects. David Pritchard, chair of the Civic Trust Awards National Panel, described the Chapel as ‘an uplifting building’ and said that their decision to give the Chapel this top award had been unanimous.