This paper discusses the use of a pedagogical method / artistic experience based on Live Action Role Play (LARP) methodologies which have been developed by Mark Durkan and their use in architectural education. 

Versions of LARP can be used as a form of performative education that puts the student within a context as opposed to looking in from the outside. It has been used in other educational settings, particularly in the Nordic countries. More often used it to explore past worlds, we are using it to explore the future. 

In vertical studio ‘Future Food’ in the architectural programme in Technological University Dublin we use it to explore possible futures. We work with a group of 28 students to set down what they believe 2050 might feel like, and then to explore actually living in, and designing for, that future. 

1. In a group workshop they co-create what they imagine Ireland is like in 2050 

2. Responding to prompts they each create a character who lives in this future. 

3. Using meditative exercises they ‘step into’ this character. 

4. They then play out a scenario where they must work as a group in this future landscape. 

5. They spend the semester designing buildings for a community consisting of the invented characters set in this future world. 

We have carried out this project three times. In the paper we will discuss: 

1.The LARP methodology as an embodied and performative education method to engage meaningfully with invented future worlds. 

2.The outcomes – We will present the worlds created which are evidenced by newspaper clippings, personal stories and the building designs, described using the resulting student design projects. 

Our modernist influenced buildings of the latter half of the twentieth century were a reflection of aspirations; forward looking physical expressions of optimism, projecting a new vision for Ireland, positioning itself in an international cultural landscape. As these vanish does part of the story of how we understand ourselves vanish with them? 

This is the starting out premise of a project for Visual Communication students at TU Dublin called ‘Vanishing Dublin’(1) . Students are asked to consider the significance of the 20th century built heritage of Dublin and its ongoing erasure, and to reflect on how this informs collective memory and views of ourselves. The students are introduced to the Irish Architectural Archive and are tasked with examining the material evidence here and from other sources in relation to a series of buildings, asking how this can be represented and reimagined in a communication design context. This is a project in capturing past, present and future implications – questioning ways in which to perform and activate the (otherwise inert) archive. 

‘Vanishing Dublin’ has been run over a number of years with different cohorts of students, culminating in various iterations of pop-up exhibitions by the students. We wish to share insights on this theme – performing the archive – through case-studying student engagements, processes, methods and visual outputs that allow students to defer sole representational position of a documentary archive to reimagine its active re-presenting affordances. 

(1)‘Vanishing Dublin’, borrows its title from the book by Flora H. Mitchell published in 1966. 

Documentary film footage by the Lumière Brothers allows us a unique lens through which to view Dublin city at the turn of the twentieth century. Moving images reveal the occupation of the urban realm, as city dwellers go about their daily lives, as they interact with the architecture of the city. The UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (2011) celebrates the interconnectedness of historic sites, and the layers of social, environmental, and economic significance they represent. Archive film serves to document this overlap of tangible and intangible heritage – lost structures and forgotten urban patterns, traditions, communities, hardships, challenges, delights, and social rituals. This interpretation of urban heritage was central to Dublin plays itself, a collaboration between the Irish Film Institute and the Irish Architecture Foundation. The initiative involved guided walks interspersed with archive screenings, allowing participants to experience the city and view the urban setting, sites and structures depicted within the films. Each walk took its own form, driven by the conversations and observations of the group. The experience prompted the development of a postgraduate seminar entitled Archive film and the twentieth-century city, in which archive footage was paired with readings of the time, inviting insights and observations to be layered over understandings of the contemporary city and reflections on its future. This paper explores the development of this engagement with archive film as a pedagogical tool within the architectural curriculum, and an inspiration for broader interpretations of urban heritage and design thinking within the city. 

Architectural engineering draughtsmanship of the nineteenth century evolved from a technical legacy. Codified as geometrie descriptive by Gaspard Monge in 1798, the use of shading, shadow projection and colour washes transformed the standardised visual language of architectural design. From elevation, plan and section, to the used of shadow projections calculated by geometric equations, depth-perception could be achieved on a flat surface. Building materials were communicated using a strict colour-coded system which was universally understood by the engineer, architect, contractor and bricklayer. This paper will present a detailed analysis of this technique as demonstrated by the engineering draughtsmen of the former Great Northern Railway (Ireland) and situate the role of the hundreds of surviving drawings which has enabled the architecture of Ireland’s second-largest railway companies to be fully scrutinised and placed within its broader architectural context. The drawings also acted as legal contracts for construction, and their afterlife as artefacts sees them used as a research tool for architectural heritage conservation. The influence of descriptive geometry is still used in computer aided design practices, in order to communicate projections, recesses and perspective, and thus the techniques of the past continue to shape the design of our architectural futures. 

In 1977 the work of Chloethiel Woodard Smith and Denise Scott Brown were addressed in the same chapter of the pathbreaking book Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective edited by Susana Torre. Since then Smith has faded into near oblivion while Scott Brown is the subject of a quickly increasing body of scholarship. Smith described herself as an “applied” rather than a “theoretical” architect, and it was this pragmatism that accounted for her success in running what was in 1977 still a much larger practice than the one that Scott Brown shared with her husband Robert Venturi. Yet there are many important continuities between the two women, both of whom considered themselves to be planners as much as architects, both of whom were committed to ordinary users of architecture, and both of whom addressed the place of the car and the highway in the postwar American city. Comparing their careers casts light on how these two women were able to carve out space for themselves in what was in the 1970s one of the most masculine occupations in the United States. 

The paper focuses on two examples of residential architectures from the beginning of the twentieth century, and the socio-cultural contexts in which they were situated. The female realm – home, is observed integral to the process of its becoming and its purpose as a conveyor of social and political messages. 

The comparative case study of two houses and their historical context: Haus Marlene Poelzig, Berlin 1930, designed by Marlene Moeschke-Poelzig, wife of renown German architect Hans Poelzig, and the residence for Makbule Atadan, Kemal Ataturk’s sister, Camlı Köşk, Ankara 1935-6 by architect Seyfi Arkan who was Poelzig’s student, emphasizes the fragile anatomies of female representation in the period between two wars. On one hand we see a house designed by a woman for her own and the needs of the family, and with support of other female designers (landscape); on the other - a representative house created for a woman involved no input from her. 

And while the western narrative of post-war female emancipation is that of movements, political engagement and initiatives, the same period in Turkey is characterised as imposed, implying passivity despite significant female endeavour preceding it. Analogously, expressing practicality as a direct reflection of the maternal thought, Marlene created a home of beautiful necessity, seemingly unaware of the opportunity to create an architectural, formal, statement. Makbule received the house, the lifestyle and the role which came with it, in a polished package of glass and steel, from which nostalgic visions of domesticity were eradicated. 

The architectural discourse had always considered the symmetry between spaces and people that inhabit them, but the relationship between these two houses and the women behind their names seems proportional: their accidental roles were complimented by the structures the purpose of which was to underpin a social and political narrative. As such, they gave them strength, and eventually, they unobtrusively allowed their disappearance. 

This paper applies E.P Thompson’s mission of rescuing working-people in history from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ (1963) to the history of women architects in the making of the discipline of architecture. It traces the history of condescension, culminating in historical erasure, back to the professionalisation of architecture as a discipline in the C19th by considering the potential for structural discrimination embedded in the history of architectural education. The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘discipline’ as both ‘a code of behaviour using punishment to correct disobedience’ and as ‘a branch of knowledge typically one studied in higher education’. This paper reflects on both terminologies as they apply to the position of women in the history of architecture. It utilises the National Life Story Collection Architects’ Lives, Matrix Feminist Architecture Archive, and the archives of the Architectural Association to reflect on the experiences of women architects in the twentieth century. In doing so, it highlights the gender disparities affecting women in architecture and the problems posed by Authorised Archival Discourse in excluding women’s voices from the archival record and argues for a radical reengagement with the role of women in architectural history in order to better understand present-day exclusionary structures. It suggests that a feminist praxis focused on positionality, intersectionality, and intermediation with end-users emerges from the experiences of women architects of the past which can inform current architectural pedagogy and practice in the future. 

– for every building made there is a resultant hole somewhere else, following on from key this observation Kiel Moe notes: 

‘This should completely and indelibly alter what architects sometimes refer to as “placemaking.” The dramatic irony of improving one place at the price of another is no longer a tenable architectural proposition.’ (1) 

This paper initially ponders the past and present history of material extraction in Ireland in what has been called Reciprocal Landscapes (2), before moving on to explore the potential engagement of architects with a low carbon future. One of the measures available for this engagement is the understanding of a construction material’s embodied energy and its resultant carbon; this method of energy assessment facilitates an exploration of a radically expanded geographic and temporal understanding of architecture. Embodied energy in this way, is the trace of an architecture’s reach from its site back out to where its component parts were sourced. 

‘Considering energy as something to design, embodied energy is not so much a necessity tied to sustainability but more an opportunity to enhance spatial and experiential values’ (3) 

Within both my architectural practice and in our Material Stewardship Studio/lab at TU Dublin, the spatial and energetic consequences of a specified material are explored with the use of the material narrative drawing. This is a fusion of geography and architecture – the geography of farming, of extraction, of industry and transport, the communities that have grown around these and the resultant architecture, a new vernacular. David Benjamin (4) notes that embodied energy should be designed not just tabulated and thus needs to be drawn to be relevant. In our practice this is what informs the cultural dimension of embodied energy - the pleasure in knowing the material origin, how it should be maintained, what happens to the material later, its reengagement with the earth or with construction – a material geography. 

Ireland is currently experiencing a housing crisis which has resulted in a housing system that is not meeting the needs of enough of our people. To address this shortage, National Policy aims to increase the supply of housing by an average of 33,000 per year over the next decade[1]. If this output is achieved using a ‘business as usual’ approach to embodied carbon, we will not meet our carbon targets[2]. 

This research will build on an earlier study entitled ‘Viable Homes’[3] undertaken by UCD and the IGBC, which examines how we can maximise housing output and minimise carbon emissions for low-rise, high-density housing. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, four key barriers to compact urban growth were identified, including building regulations, space standards, planning authorities and market preferences. This paper will focus on latter of these issues. 

“If I can't see the headlights of my car from the sitting room, I don't want the unit.” Anecdotal evidence provided during engagement with industry experts through semistructured interviews suggests that home-buyers have particular preferences which make the development of compact urban growth difficult, if not unfeasible[3]. The next stage of the research will engage directly with home-buyers through a large scale survey to determine their preferences when alternatives to the typical Irish low-rise, low-density suburban model are provided. 

It is envisaged that this research will begin to provide evidence-based data on consumer preferences that inform the type of housing being delivered in Ireland in the future. 

The New European Bauhaus is an initiative launched by the European Commission aimed at culturally connecting the citizens of Europe to the transformational aims of the European Green Deal. It takes a novel approach to harnessing the creativity of citizens and civil society to stimulate positive outcomes, informed by the initiative’s core values of sustainability, inclusion, and beauty. The title Bauhaus draws parallels between the revolutionary programme of the historical Bauhaus and the ambition of the new Bauhaus to inspire urgent radical action to address the social and environmental issues of today. The historical Bauhaus reacted to a range of pressing cultural and social issues by seeking to marry new industrial processes and materials with the application of art to give aesthetic and practical shape to contemporary design. The New European Bauhaus seeks new ways of thinking about such issues as resource use, circularity, aesthetic quality, and technology to inspire a fundamental change in our relationship to nature, with a particular focus on the built environment. Drawing on PhD research attempting to relate the New European Bauhaus to the low-carbon transition of Irish towns, this presentation explores the ways in the which the historical Bauhaus inspired and informed the new Bauhaus, examining parallels between the two, and assesses the appropriateness of the title Bauhaus for the new initiative. The role of the historical Bauhaus in the New European Bauhaus represents a concrete example of design history impacting the present and informing current efforts to address key societal challenges. 

This paper questions the orthodoxy that all ‘peace walls’ should be completely removed from the urban fabric of Belfast over time. Instead, it questions whether these urban artifacts can, in future, form the spine of an education and heritage site exploring the spatial and historical aspects of the conflict known as ‘the Troubles’. Taking into consideration the potential challenges and difficulties of conserving elements of west Belfast’s ’peace walls’ for future posterity, it draws from observations of two very particular sites of transformation in Berlin - firstly the transformation of the site ‘Gestapo-Gelände’ into the Topography of Terror Documentation Center and, secondly, the remains of the Berlin Wall resurrected as a site of memory as the Berlin Wall Memorial. Both projects are notable as they deal with landscapes of trauma which include authentic remnants of the infrastructures of domination and division that become their subject of examination. In both cases, the landscapes hold very significant material traces of past events.

In a similar manner to how the German government successfully established the Bernauer Strasse area in Berlin as an area of extraordinary urban and political significance, this presentation explores the possibilities of a speculative future urban plan of West Belfast. In dealing with the retention of select Belfast ‘peace walls’, these material artifacts are treated as one would treat any archeological complex of international standing. In a future scenario, the ‘peace walls’ can form the backdrop for a new urban museum park that presents the story of how the events of the conflict transformed this place forever, and left in its wake a set of monuments to its ongoing contestation, both politically and spatially. 

See: http://www.peacewall-archive.net 

The intellectual tradition of respecting ‘the valid contributions of all periods,’ as codified in the Venice Charter, has informed the study and conservation of buildings from the monumental to the vernacular. Yet with few exceptions, scholars of institutional architecture remain focused on original ideas, frequently dismissing later alterations as detrimental and displaying limited interest in their present state. 

Asylum sponsors encoded their buildings with multiple messages for different audiences, but later generations were influenced less by a founding vision than by the conditions of their continuing service. The close study of buildings and landscapes over the longue durée, from conception to ‘afterlife,’ can help to recover these intervening layers of meaning. Omission and even outright absence tell their own stories: decisions not to build, not to maintain, and even to demolish, are all ripe for hermeneutic interpretation. 

This paper proposes that there is value in setting aside ‘originalist bias’ when studying the interventions of every era, employing diverse sources to illuminate periods when ostensibly little is built. Whether by preparing morphological diagrams at the scale of the site, or by tracing the evolution of a single element such as a window, such extended temporal exploration of complex sites offer a more rounded understanding of these places in our own time, as well as offering insights to their future trajectories. 

This is an abstract for a short paper about shared experience of interrogating readily available historical mapping, historical built and archaeological surveys and architectural inventories as sources to understanding the cultural layering of the physical fabric of historic urban areas as the basis for heritage-led regeneration. The starting point of this research was a study of Aungier Street, Dublin, the first planned suburb in Dublin. On foot of the restoration of the Charles II to the throne in England, the court returned to Dublin Castle and the development of a royal quarter with high-end residences commenced introducing a new way of construction and architectural style. Working with historical mapping, planning and archaeological records, the persistence of building plots and primary fabric detected, the research undertaken confirming the presence of very significant up-standing archaeology and the identification of a subsequent and unique architectural heritage still present in the streetscape. 

The legacy of this work and its application elsewhere concluded that a very limited understanding of pre-Georgian construction and development exists and on-going research not only into the medieval thoroughfares of Dublin but also of C17th – early C18th fabric of historic Irish towns and cities was necessary. This work has enabled the identification of a range of indicators of early urban fabric and has opened up new areas of urban survey, planning policy, conservation practice and scientific analysis into the construction and fabric of early urban buildings. 

Research has revealed that many extraordinary early urban buildings survive in plain sight as part of the evolution of our town squares and streetscapes. The closer consideration and examination of the layers of building by successive generations has revealed primary fabric and provided a window into the physical and social change of an urban quarter, to inform future generations. An understanding of their respective qualities, materials and construction is necessary to develop sustainable practices and uses and crucially develop better collaborations and exchanges between practitioners who view them from differing perspectives. The publication of ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’, a guidance on early urban buildings, their identification and reuse, scheduled for 2024, will include an essay by Niall McCullough calling for the careful reflection and consideration of fragile layered buildings, their reuse and re-imagining. 

This publication represents the collaboration of many practitioners and researchers who have provided key insights and knowledge on the subject, with coordination by National Monument Service and National Built Heritage Service. 

This paper presents an architectural project for adaptive reuse as an example of practice-based approaches to history in architecture. The National Archives of Ireland was founded in 1988 and incorporates the remains if the Public Records Office that was destroyed by an explosion in the Battle of Dublin during the Civil War of 1922. It is housed in the former Jacobs Biscuits factory on Bishop Street in Dublin. John McLaughlin Architects were commissioned to design new public spaces for exhibition and dissemination within the Archives building. Our design develops the relationship between the building as artefact, and the building as archive. The design approach builds on a body of design work exploring how exhibitions can act as spaces of discourse and memory, and a body of architectural conservation work on the adaptive reuse of twentieth century buildings. Our design for the National Archives building pares back recent linings and reveals the original cast-iron and concrete structure of the Jacobs factory as a ruin in reverse. In this way the factory building is recovered as an artefact in its own right. 

The Archive is the national space of memory and is fundamental to the construction of our history. The institution acts as a locus where statements of events are formed into histories that can challenge the dominant discourses in society. It is the place where history itself can be “brushed against the grain” (Benjamin: 1969) and where the taxonomy of exhibits can enable new correspondences to emerge. Considered this way, the Archive functions both as a repository of history and as a space for the generation of new knowledge.