Somerville College Student Accommodation in Oxford was awarded a certificate of commendation for the RIAI Silver Medal for housing 2011-2012. The award is to encourage excellence of design in housing by giving public recognition to architects responsible for buildings of exceptional merit. It is awarded five years after the competition so the building can be evaluated in a mature setting.
Information on the award can be found here.
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.”