RIAI PUBLIC CHOICE AND CULTURAL AND PUBLIC BUILDING AWARDS
JUNE 2023
The International Rugby Experience has been voted Ireland’s favourite building in this year’s Royal Institute of Irish Architects (RIAI) Public Choice Award. The building was selected by the public from a shortlist of 53 projects and was described by the RIAI judges as having “a strong civic presence and a quality akin to a city hall, library or gallery. The façades are given a sculptural quality through the articulation of vertical brick piers and the façade bay proportions complement the Georgian streetscape. Its scale successfully addresses both the immediate, local context, while also announcing itself to the wider city”. The building also won in it's category of Cultural and Public Buildings.
THE WELCOME BUILDING
SEPTEMBER 2017
The Welcome Building in Bishop Auckland consists of a new viewing tower and central ticketing hall for the The Auckland Project. It acts as an access point and gateway to the wider site whilst also giving views over the town and landscape setting. The tower – a timber framed structure – is now well under way on site.
The building team has worked tirelessly and with the highest level of precision, to build the in-situ concrete lift shaft. Working from the ground up seemed to take an age.
Meanwhile, the enormous larch glulam beams have been carefully crafted and manually grey-oiled in the joiner’s workshop.
The frames are now being lifted into position on site and suddenly the building can be seen. Almost in an instant. As if the past four years had happened in the blink of an eye.
We are so excited and proud – even – to see this fantasy project becoming real at last. But with completion on the horizon, time seems to now move all too fast.