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.
‘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.