This year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition opens to the public on the 21st June which Níall has co-curated with artist Rana Begum two rooms of art and architecture. Our practice has been been extremely delighted to have had this opportunity and assisting with assembling and the intall of some of the pieces, from Boomserm Premthada’s elephant dung brick to a full size Khudu Bari flood shelter in Bangladesh by Marina Tabassum.
Niall McLaughlin has been invited to participate in a conference on Milson Island on the Hawkesbury River in Australia. Organised by the Architecture Foundation Australia, the residential event gathers an international field of speakers to explore a chosen theme. It will take place between the 28th and 30th of March 2014. This year’s theme will be ‘trace de la main’, taken from the comment by engineer Peter Rice that “whereas a Gothic cathedral will express the real and physical presence of the stone from which it was made, and of the masons who laboured over its construction so many years ago, very few modern buildings carry the same physical presence of the materials of which they were built. In short, ‘the trace de la main’, the evidence of those who built it, is not there.”