INDIAN INSTITUTE OR ARCHITECTS LECTURE
SEPTEMBER 2022
On the 22nd September Níall will be giving the Keynote Speech for the Indian Institute or Architects Northen Regional Conference in New Delhi. Niall will talk about his practice involved in placing modern new buildings in highly sensitive historic settings. He will show how modern architects can enter into a dialogue with history to create a sense of architecture as a representation of continuity in time. He will discuss the new focus on materials with low embodied carbon, like wood and stone, as a response to the Climate Emergency.
‘ETERNAL PROBLEMS’, RIBA JOURNAL EXHIBITION REVIEW BY NIALL MCLAUGHLIN
JUNE 2014
Niall McLaughlin has written a piece for the RIBA Journal on the symbolic use of architecture within early Renaissance Art. The essay describes observations based on a visit to the ‘Building the Picture’ exhibition, currently on show at the National Gallery in London. The exhibition gathers together architectonic works by the Italian masters of the 14th-16th centuries that explore real and imagined architectural space.
The article observes how the Renaissance artists’ enthusiasms for displaying their newly discovered skills of perspective and knowledge of the classical forms are conflated with a religious symbolism. The tropes of classical architecture are used as visual metaphors for the divine and eternal. The article explores the effect of these spaces on the viewer and the reasons why the idealised architecture tends to alienate rather than engage.