PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLITICS IN EUROPE
MARCH 2024
Yesterday Níall was one of the responders at the book launch of Parliament Buildings: The Architecture of Politics in Europe, edited by Sophia Psarra, Claudia Sternberg and Uta Staiger. Níall spoke alongside two other responders, Mari Takayanagi, Senior Archivist at the Parliamentary Archive, and Lord David Anderson of Ipswich, a Member of the House of Lords. Niall’s presentation was based on his model of the Palace of Westminster for the Alternative Histories exhibition in 2020. The film of Alterntaive Histories can be viewed 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.