RIBA SILVER MEDAL JUDGING
NOVEMBER 2015
In October Niall was one of 5 judges for this years RIBA President’s Silver Medal alongside Alexander Brodsky, Alan Jones, Carme Pinós and David Gloster who chaired the judging. The awards are given to the most outstanding design portfolios from work submitted by schools of architecture worldwide. The 2015 Silver Medal went to Finn Wilkie from the Mackintosh School of Architecture and the Bronze to Boon Yik Chung from the Bartlett School of Architecture. Marie Price from The University of Westminster won the Dissertation Medal.
‘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.