THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
OCTOBER 2016
The competition winning design for major alterations to London’s Natural History Museum, by Niall McLaughlin Architects and Kim Wilkie Landscape Architect, has been given planning approval by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. We will create a new civic square at the junction of Exhibition Road and Cromwell Road, a new entrance from South Kensington Underground Station and a series of garden galleries, extending the life of the museum out into its grounds.
To read Dezeen’s feature on the project, click 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.