THE SAHGB ANNUAL LECTURE: A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE SHAPE OF BUILDINGS TO COME
FEBRUARY 2025

On the 13th March Níall will be talking at The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain as part of their annual lecture. the evening will be looking at "how can architects and architectural historians, between tasks of being chroniclers, designers, analysts, constructors and commentators, find ways to collaboratively rethink heritage and conservation practices while addressing challenges brought on by these large-scale changes and implications in buildings, resources, energies, policies, laws and environments?"
Tickets can be purcahsed 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.