THE LIGNACITE LECTURE 2018
OCTOBER 2018
At Sadlers Well’s on the 16th October Niall will be giivng a lecture alongside Kim WIlkie titled Cultivated Land. ‘The mythical state of man living in nature never existed. We have always significantly altered and managed our landscapes for practical and symbolic reasons. We will explore the relationship between man and cultivated land, how this shaped our world and gave rise to the possibility of architecture. We will explore the future of our relationship with nature in these islands’. Tickets can be reserved through the Lignacite website here.
‘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.