INTERNATIONAL RUGBY EXPERIENCE ON TV

October 2024

We were excited to learn that our International Rugby Experience building in Limerick has been featured on Episode 1 of Dermot Bannon’s Super Spaces, a television programme in Ireland focusing on well-designed spaces for living, working, socialising and play. The famous Irish architect meets Paul O’Connell, Irish rugby legend and Chair of the Board for the project. Together they engage in the rugby experience and admire the architecture. “This building could be described as a cathedral to rugby — and rugby is a religion for some people,” Paul says before joking about the volume of visits from “architectural nerds”!

A short clip from the broadcast is available on our website here.

‘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.