On the 22nd July Niall will be giving a talk at the Galway International Arts Festival. Niall’s lecture will be based on The Ghost Chapel, a web–like structural negative of the existing St. MacDara’s Chapel constructed by the Bartlett’s Unit 17. Ghost Chapel will sit on Galway’s famous Claddagh Basin with the accompanying exhibition Taking Time on show within the Festival Hub at the Festival Gallery. The festival runs from the 16th – 29th July.
Architecture critic Rowan Moore has written a review of the Bishop Edward King Chapel with the title “The Answers to their Prayers” that was published in the Observer Magazine. The article touches on the broader themes of the interpretation and appropriation of religious symbolism in architecture, and in this context praises the paradoxical nature of the chapel; “It is…heavy and light, a bastion and a boat, a wall and a drape. It has presence, but doesn’t dominate.” Describing the form and materiality of the building Moore writes, “The building is crafted and considered: it makes ideas physical: it has intentions and carries them out in its space and matter.”