Some Things Last
I'm an architect, writer and collective organiser from Co Westmeath, Ireland, working across design, research and curation. I studied architecture in UCD and ENSA Paris Belleville, graduating with nomination for RIBA President's Silver Medal. My work focuses on city development, cultural communities, informal placemaking, and material identities, considering how architecture can cross disciplines as we search for future aesthetics and solutions to our multiple global crises. I draw inspiration from Dublin's inherent character, and the contemporary art, literature & music scenes which form my everyday.
I have practiced architecture in Dublin, Paris & London, on projects across Europe, Japan and the UK, & assisted Lesley Lokko's curatorial team on the Biennale Architettura 2023. I currently work with 6a architects and am a founding member of design collective Rubble. With Rubble I have co-ordinated and curated multiple exhibitions in Ireland and led workshops with Barleti University & the Architectural Association. I have co-presented 2 exhibitions with AATE Festival in Galway. I have published writing with Story, Building, Architecture Ireland, Type, Theatrum Mundi and Urban Design Group Journal.
Most essentially I'm looking for ways to enjoy our urban world together, form new spatial languages and shared mythologies, without relying on neoliberal strategies.
'In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,'
T.S. Eliot, Portrait of a Lady
'DIY' practices in grassroots cultural spaces, largely produced by non-architects, reveal everyday spaces within the city as places latent with circular methodologies, building space and communities, culture and aesthetics outside neoliberal templates. Here, genuine narratives are still formed, not just within a space but through its making.
While these spaces are precarious and often temporary, limited by the economic systems they exist within, they provoke a way of using and viewing the city which lasts. Aesthetics and ideas proliferate through the networks of musical, artistic, and social scenes.
In my previous research I explored such places as alternatives to the type of urban space produced under typical neoliberal practices, being defined through the determination of those using the space; messily, enthusiastically, without the limitations of traditional architectural production.
Between documentary and narrative, this is a story of spaces produced by people for their own specific aesthetics and ways of living, with complete agency and minimal capital.
The work links environmental degradation and social inequality with the diminishment of community and cultural spaces, or any real collective narrative within urban realms.
These spaces contain an array of disciplines which can be drawn upon, encompassing music, DJing, contemporary art, street art, poetry, scenography, graphics, literature, photography - each reflects an attitude in the search for a new aesthetic reflective of this era's social and ecological concerns. Such a collaged approach embodies the shared emergence of a circular aesthetic, offering a route towards an architecture which is responsive, communal and determined by the city's inhabitants themselves.