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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.

Worcester College Competition Win

January 2014

Worcester College Competition Win

Niall McLaughlin Architects are delighted to have been announced as winner of the competition to build a new theatre for Worcester College, Oxford. The scheme was picked from among a strong shortlist, including proposals by Hawkins/ Brown, Ian Ritchie and Purcell Architects. The competition brief was to design a 160-seat theatre, together with flexible studio space, seminar rooms and a small bar to be situated within the sensitive site of the College’s listed gardens. The scheme aims to improve the spaces between the old and new buildings of the College and resolve the relationship between these structures, the gardens and the network of small courts around the edge of the site.