Cleggan | A Sequence of Acts
I am an architecture graduate from University College Dublin, currently working at Grafton Architects. My practice explores architecture through a methodology developed around three interconnected stages: observing and interacting, interpreting and re-presenting, and embodying through making. Working across research, drawing, film and construction, I investigate how time, place and shared labour shape the built environment.
Alongside professional experience at Grafton Architects, McCullough Mulvin Architects, PlattenbauStudio and the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I have pursued an independent practice through exhibitions, collaborative making and design-build workshops. This has included exhibiting work at the Royal Hibernian Academy and participating in EASA in Finland and SESAM in Italy, where collective construction acts as a way of learning through making.
I was awarded the Bruce Shortt Memorial Prize for the most outstanding studio project at University College Dublin and was nominated for the RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship. These experiences have reinforced my interest in architecture as a slow, material and collaborative practice that moves fluidly between observing, interacting and making.
I am motivated by projects that combine thoughtful research with direct engagement, believing architecture can strengthen relationships between people, place and time.
This project began with a practical need: replacing the entrance to my family's farm in Donaghmore, County Laois. Rather than treating the entrance as a finished object, its construction investigates architecture as an ongoing act of observing, drawing and making. Working alongside my father, the project explores how shared labour can reveal the social, material and temporal conditions of a place.
The work is rooted in an evolving methodology developed through a series of tests exploring Time as a knowing(ness) of Place. Architecture emerges not as a singular design outcome but as a continuous process of interpretation, where each act of making generates the next. Drawing becomes a way of understanding place, while making becomes a way of embodying that understanding; film becomes a tool for documenting these relationships as they unfold in real time. Together they create a living archive where architecture is understood as an accumulation of time.
To date, the project has produced an extensive archive of drawings, prototypes and hours of unedited film documenting the construction of the entrance and the mundane realities surrounding it. Rather than recording architecture retrospectively, the project captures the act of making itself, placing value on time as the fourth dimension of practice.
Through the LINA Community, I propose to develop this archive into a film while continuing the construction of the entrance and extending the work towards a new intervention within the disused farmyard. Conceived as a place for making, gathering and reflection, the proposal will invite collaborators to participate in its construction, testing how collective acts of building can strengthen relationships between people and landscape. In response to the depopulation experienced across rural Europe, the project asks whether architecture can become a form of carer, reframing rural isolation as a productive condition for reflection, shared knowledge and mental wellbeing.