Describing Architecture reveals unseen aspects of architecture as a creative practice, alongside its critical relationship to the visual arts and the work of artists.
For 2014, the exhibition explored the theme ‘Memory and Place’ and contained work across a wide range of media, from architectural models to drawing studies, and work from a broad spectrum of national and international artists in painting, photography, mixed-media, audio and film. In response to the ‘Memory and Place’ theme, this collection of work considered how a sense of place is registered and recorded in collective and individual memory, and further asked how a narrative of place both real and imagined can develop.
In 2015, Describing Architecture will be continuing its exploration of the ‘Memory and Place’ theme in order to provide a rich, multidisciplinary platform to explore connected ideas and discourses around place, space, practice and representation.
Distinguished Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, argues in his essay ‘Space, Place, Memory and Imagination’ that ‘buildings project epic narratives’, reaffirming the view that the creation of place is fundamentally integral to society’s attachment to memory, individual and collective – to human constructions of space and its use. On a domestic level it can be seen as the vital, although often unnoticed, linguistic distinction between house and home — a difference we innately know and sense in our bodies. What then defines a given place and how do its particular characteristics condition the various ways it is used? How might place shape human interaction, restricting or enabling sociality?
Pallasmaa stakes out the position that architectural structures ‘domesticate space for human occupation by turning anonymous, uniform and limitless space into distinct places of human significance, and equally importantly, they make endless time tolerable by giving duration its human measure’. Following on from the work of Pallasmaa and relevant to the ‘Memory and Place’ exhibition, several interrelated questions can be identified to be explored:
– How, for example, can the memory and history of a site lead to the development of a newly imagined or continued sense of place?
– How does architectural practice engage with the conditions of place and how might a sense of place be developed during the design process?
– Can architectural practice in and of itself engender place and place-making?
– How do the quantifiable metrics of space develop into the characteristics of place?
– Is there a connection between how things are made and the experience of place?
Curator, Antóin Doyle
September 2015