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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.

Michael Webb Writes a Feature on Niall McLaughlin in Mark Magazine

October 2013

Michael Webb Writes a Feature on Niall McLaughlin in Mark Magazine

Under the title ‘London Maverick’ Mark Magazine has profiled Niall McLaughlin and a wide ranging showcase of the practice’s work. The article includes projects from the Bandstand at Bexhill-on-Sea in 2001 to the Chapel for Ripon Theological College completed last year, the latter being described as a project that “restores one’s faith in the capacity of architects to reinvent traditional forms.”

The work of the practice is described as defying categorisation and characterised by “poetry and invention”. Drawing on the broad theme of materiality, the review reflects on the design process for a selection of projects including House at Goleen, the student accommodation for Somerville College, the Information Centre in Hull and the Housing for the London Olympics.