STIRLING STORIES
AUGUST 2018
Following the exciting announcement of our inclusion on this year’s Stirling Prize Shortlist for our Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre in Oxford, Niall will be taking part in the RIBA’s Stirling Stories. The talks take place on the 11th September at London’s RIBA on Portland Place and on the 27th September at York’s Everyman Cinema. The shortlist consists of six buildings and these events provide an opportunity for the architects to present and discuss the unique stories behind their projects.
‘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.