The theme for the 13th annual conference of the All-Ireland Architecture Research Group (AIARG) invites discussion on how architecture imagines and reimagines its history in preparing for the future.

Our title derives from historian Lewis Namier via Roy Foster’s recent remembrance of the histories written by architect Niall McCullough. To imagine the past and remember the future upends our expectations of how we relate to both and shifts our focus from the spatial to the temporal in architecture.

In this conference, we propose to invert the traditional relationship between architecture, time, and design. 

We invite architects, architectural historians, architectural writers, and educators to reflect on the relationship between history and architecture, to rethink historical research as an imaginative practice that illuminates the present and the future, and to consider time as a vital material of designing and building.

• The historical research of architects and extended practitioners.

• The demands of heritage/conservation, retrofitting, infill, and building for the future in historical sites.

•  Adaptive re-use and sustainability in processes, practices and systems.

• The exchange between architects, historians, and futurists.

• The return and reworking of past technologies or methods.

• The histories and futures of embodied carbon.

• The proofing of current design projects as future heritage.

• How the tools of the architect (drawing, model making, designing) can expand our architectural histories.

• How the tools of the historian (research and writing) can inform design and evaluation processes.

• Teaching architectural history beyond the study of precedents.

• Architecture’s ancestral futures.

The conference will include a workshop chaired by Megan Brien and Aoife-Marie Buckley (both PhD candidates in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity) where early career researchers and postgraduate students can present a three-minute ‘seedling’ project or paper with the opportunity, much like the studio crit, for constructive criticism and peer feedback. The wider goal for this session is to expand architectural pedagogical tools to architectural histories and to develop collaborative and reflective research practices through emphasising the interconnected relationship between history, architecture, and design. 

Note that the session will require pre-registration and numbers will be limited. Please email both abuckly@tcd.ie and mbrien@tcd.ie by 5pm on Friday 8 March 2024.

Each attendee will be required to prepare in advance 1 single A4 page for discussion, to be used in any imaginative way the presenter sees fit to present their topic.