Date: 22.02.2018
Start Time: 19:30 (Please note later start time than usual)
Venue: Thomas Davis Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
Irish Architecture: a crisis in value and a call for the ordinary
Or…That This is the Age of the New Barbarian (AAI debate, 21st April 1964)
In this AAI Annual Critics lecture 2018, architectural + cultural historian Dr Ellen Rowley will bring us on a jaunt through 1940s and 1960s Dublin, and via the streets and LUAS lines of the city in 2018, so to better understand Irish culture’s deep undervaluing of architecture. Maybe it’s a crisis, she posits? But whatever is happening, Ellen asks us to consider a third category of architectural practice, between critical and commercial practices – the category of the ordinary and the everyday in architecture. Calling forth the condition of architectural obsolescence and examining architectural value systems, this lecture moves between contemporary and historic Irish building examples, reminding us that ‘history is not the past, but the depth of the present’ (Dalibor Vesely).
Image credit: G+T Crampton Photograph Archive-UCD Digital Library and Prof. J. Brady