Captured in a 1500mm x 1500mm lead graphite drawing on tracing paper the research focuses on concerns relating to the changing waterscape of Clifden. The drawing tries to reveal water as having a continuing core role in the shaping of architecture, landscape and policy of the area surrounding Clifden. From source to sea, the relationship between the rural and urban condition, settlement, consumption of water, drainage, wastewater management, rainfall, contour, agriculture run-off, flooding, and the intertidal relationship of freshwater to seawater are all brought into focus in this time of urgent re-evaluation. 

While drawing this research I found myself being drawn more and more to the cartographic work of Tim Robinson – the idea that a map can communicate more than just an objective reading of a place. The emphasis on figure-ground, subsoils, contours, water bodies and rainfall meant that I was drawing a condition as much as a map. A moment in time – 2nd September 2020 – was chosen to elaborate on this condition. This was a day of intense rain that now lives in the recent memory of the town’s inhabitants. In a few hours early that day the weather station at Connemara National Park Automatic, located in near Letterfrack around 8km north east of Clifden, recorded an unprecedented 60mm of rain. Homes and schools were evacuated after flash floods which came after heavy rainfall overnight, causing the Owenglin River to break its banks. Local observers said the speed at which the flooding occurred in the town was unprecedented. I wanted to highlight this event as a way of marking our perilous future and threatened relationship to water as a consequence of climate change.

I would like to present this map as a springboard into considering how we as architects will need to embrace an ever-more erratic weather forecast in the future. 

In late 2021 I received a bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in order to carry out an element of personal research My aim was/is to use the frame of county Mayo to examine the unexplored potential of its built environment in a similar way to that of A Lost tradition by Valerie Mulvin and Niall McCullough. Creating an Atlas of the  county that would add to this base of knowledge, whilst also establishing a catalogue of references that will inform and enrich my work. A series of examinations that I hope will become an ongoing investigation. 

The book of references is to be composed of a number of structures, buildings and spaces from within the county. Mapping their location. Surveying them. Analysing their construction, their form and their relation to the landscape (physical, historical or by toponym). 

There was also an opportunity to take advantage of modern computational methods in order to carry out these surveys in immense detail. Local surveyors Kilkelly Geo Spatial Solutions have agreed to be involved in the proposal. They will guide me in the technical skills involved in composing 3D point cloud models of each Building/Structure/Space, through a combination of laser scanning and photographic surveying. 

The idea had been that these detailed point cloud scans would form the basis for a series of analytical and exploratory drawing and model studies. While I have used drawing and modelling to explore and understand the structures it was point clouds themselves that remained the most fascinating and the richest product of the study to date. I've largely concluded this element of the work in late 2023 but would like to secure further funding to expand on the topic, with potential new directions. 

The architect’s notebook should I propose be read primarily as a register of time. Memory, sequence, and material presence are all richly embedded -consciously and unconsciously- in the practices of the architect’s notebook. It is an associative and parallel refractive mirror to the construction of buildings, which is taken as the primary currency of the architect’s agency. But notebooks become through time, autonomous from the physical witnessing of the events of construction, directly or indirectly. This coexistent dilemma of buildings and notebooks, provides an invaluable window into an interpretation of architectural meaning and value.

I would argue that the notebook is the most fundamental measure and translator of the objective and interpretive dimension of the architect’s relationship with the past and present. Mapping constantly circulating thoughts and observations, tracking the shifting focus of a distracted gaze, and acting as the inevitable diary of day-to-day events, the notebook is a shadowboxer with the operational tactics and creativity of the architect’s modus operandi. 

Unlike the formal quantifiable drawings of the building process, or the discarded overlays or jottings of momentary solutions in the studio, notebooks take on (as do buildings) another life and relevance, to that for which they were originally intended. This opening up of a consequential space of interpretation is inbuilt, and within the practices of keeping a notebook. It provides an inevitable distancing of authorship and events, through time. This ability to transcend and translate ideas beyond chronological time and events, and to look both forwards and backwards, if not sideways, through the phenomena and schema of history, in a Janus type operation, situates the notebook in a unique position of interpretation, oscillating between the temporal and historical world. It becomes a conduit for encoded notations in the translatory and reciprocal space of past and present, which we struggle to articulate as history. 

Taking the connective and associative practices of the observational notebooks of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (some of which are held in The National Library of Ireland) and in turn considering how they are viewed and valued today in the context of history and the reconstruction of his masterwork The Glasgow School of Art, the ‘enabling fiction’ 1 of the notebook, and the Janus like ability to look forwards and backwards through time, will be discussed and explored. 

Historical research requires the ability to analyse and interpret information from various sources and formats to understand places and the people that use them at different times. The use of drawing in historical research can enhance the exchange between architects and historians and lead to more imaginative approaches to understanding places. Graphic anthropology is a method of studying people and places through drawing, framed by the ideas of architect Ray Lucas (2020) and anthropologists Tim Ingold (2010) and Manuel Ramos (2004). In a process similar to translation, drawing is asked to respond and reflect ethnographic knowledge acquired in the field. We argue that employing graphic anthropology in historical research, specifically towards creating ‘building biographies’ (Kopytoff 1984, Skoura and Madden 2023), can contribute to our way of understanding the diverse nature of places and the people who inhabit them. 

The focus of our work extends to translating textual, visual and video archives, oral histories, academic research and other sources into drawings, in a process that allows the overlap of different layers of information into a single drawing. Influenced by Denis Cosgrove (1999) and Laura Vaughan’s (2018) insights into mapping as subjective and culturally laden, our drawings reveal layers of meaning, often incorporating contradicting views towards a nuanced representation of place. 

This paper will discuss a series of drawings made within the StreetSpace project, that explore graphic anthropology as a systematic and analytical tool to understand the history and heritage of places. 

This paper investigates a situated architectural discourse. 

A photographic, part-plan of floorboards in a bay window. The floorboard lying in the centre of the image has PLEASE LIFT ME UP written on it — the plea beginning in dry timber, and ending in sodden wood to the right. There are paint splatters at the base of the skirting running along the top of the image, before returning into the room and down the righthand, short edge of the image. 

This paper examines house, home and landscape — a relational architectural ecology formed in the stories this house tells me, the stories I tell it, and the stories this house and I tell other people, as I circulate, inhabit, make, and re-make my home in image and text. 

Water, light, matter; draw, burn, course. 

Jane Rendell proposes architecture may be written in words, building upon the collapsing of distinctions, and upon art-writing which intersects theory, criticism and practice, with art history and performance (Rendell: 2005). Drawing from the work of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Beatriz Colomina, Emma Cheatle, Rendell, and Dora Zhang, this paper examines the intersection of architecture, photography, and historiography, pivoting around the linguistic turn to explore the sensuous similarities and sensuous correspondences of language sought by Benjamin in a relational textual practice. Architecture-writing emerges as writing which in its situated critique and response takes a form of architecture — expanding discourse on the house, the home and the landscape in the image of the writing, and the writing of the image. 

This paper discusses how Uncertain Futures developed a situation-based approach to community engagement while working with the community in Ballykeeffe, County Kilkenny as part of the Town Ecologies program run by Workhouse Union. The group were tasked with developing and applying co-design and participatory public engagement skills within a rural context. 

Uncertain Futures collaborated with the community to create collective imaginings for the future and identify design opportunities for Ballykeeffe Amphitheater - a cherished community-led cultural and social amenity. The venue has grown over the course of 20 years through the visionary organising committee’s stewardship and the time and resources of dedicated local volunteers. 

When we met the community group, we walked the site and they enthusiastically told us of past plans for the amphitheatre, all of which were filled with strong social and cultural values. We recognised that our goal was to facilitate the community to collectively imagine new spatial experiences for the future cultural landscape of Ballykeefe Amphitheatre. Thus, we developed a process of ‘soft data’ gathering. This method allowed us to record information in a way that captures moments from people’s experiences which are fleeting between remembering the past, and projecting into the future. 

Recording people’s connection to the amphitheatre in this way led us to co-designing proposals for the community that served as the basis to producing a feasibility study for Ballykeeffe called ‘Telling our Story’. This story and the process behind forming a nimble approach to engagement will be further discussed in the proposed paper. 

Leopold von Ranke called upon his fellow historians to establish “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.” The aim to ascertain objective facts about the past left little room for imagination, yet reconstituting the densely interwoven fabric of the past requires the same faculties we employ when engaging the future. Siegfried Kracauer – not a historian but an architect by training – called upon “the historian’s imagination, his interpretive designs.” 

This paper offers a reflection on the fraught practices of constructing knowledge based on a case study, the Concert Hall collage by German American architect Mies van der Rohe of 1942 and the architect’s interactions with fellow architects, students and artists at the time of its creation. I must tread carefully when making assertions, offering interpretations and even speculating on the personal motivation of the individuals involved, especially since I include anecdotal evidence and oral histories, because they tend to be – consciously or not – re-tellings (and re-writings) of one’s history as one would like it to have been. 

With hindsight and foresight, we negotiate the indeterminacy and contingencies of human interaction. In approaching the past as an open question, we “entertain the possibilities of the future as an open question, a negotiation with the passions and pitfalls of freedom,” as art historians Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk remind us. Without instrumentalising the past, I propose to pick up and follow the intertwined threads that make up the tapestry of history – and then, with delicacy, weave my own. 

The paper examines the many and occasionally competing narratives that can potentially emerge from the design and construction of a monument dealing with the commemoration of a traumatic historical event. The study is grounded in Nicosia, a city widely known for its long and turbulent history. The authors use their experience of designing and building, after winning the competition, a monument for the Greek Cypriot prisoners of the 1974 war. This is a public work of art erected in the south side of the buffer zone that divides the city in a north and south part, and very close to the first checkpoint that opened between the two sides. It is actually the very location these prisoners were released after being transferred by buses from the north. Combining both abstraction as well as photographic material of the events, the project raised the interest of many different local groups, with each viewpoint touching on a different aspect of this highly sensitive topic. The selected monument is of particular 

interest not only because it expresses the ambiguous nature of artefacts of commemoration, but also because its complex history with the various processes of construction, echo at various levels the multi-layered history of the city itself. Through on onsite observations and interviews with professional bodies and other actors involved in the making of the monument, the goal of this paper is to illustrate the ambivalent relationship between official history and commemoration practices as well as the emergence of multiple and diverse narratives regarding a historical event that can be told by, in, on, and through, a work of public art. 

The conference will include a workshop 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.