Endurance

Last year the unit entitled ‘Endurance’, offered by Catherine Blainey and I at Queen’s MArch level, continued to explore ideas of material culture and form as a receptacle of meaning. The territory offered here is intentionally broad so that each student is encouraged to define their individual voice.

Our studio is a place where conversation is understood as a design tool and objects (drawings and models) speak. For us, these conversations are the joy of teaching in the university. An example of one such exchange is the work of Rachel Aitcheson and Beth Mogey. Examining Dublin’s Liberties, their separate proposals, developed in concert, posit a critique of contemporary generic urban planning and present a cry for a return to the ‘Art of Building Cities’.

Responding to a recently constructed student housing development, Rachel’s proposal is for keen adaptations to the existing fabric in and around these hermetic buildings, finding space for intimate human interaction in the careful calibration of doors and passages, leftover gaps and crevices. Drawn out in walks and explored through choreography, these spaces between were measured in time, from the quotidian to the archaeological. In all of this was a quiet search for a gregarious architecture.

A different movement can be seen in Beth’s proposal for cooperative housing, one that restlessly explores various scales of city building. From designing a city quarter to a building ensemble, to the interior of a room, to a window sill, this work captures the city as an unfolding landscape of rooms and one where the exterior can also be experienced as an interior. For all its endeavour, this is not total design but something more infrastructural, an attitude that leaves space for others to develop and dwell in.

Although not in The Liberties. The work of Ellen Dunlop was very much a part of this same conversation. Whilst chasing Orson Welles through Carol Reed’s Vienna in The Third Man, Ellen became obsessed by scenography and the city. Drawing parallels between post-war Vienna and Belfast, the project examines the architecture of artificial light. Making small interventions in and around the Northern Bank Building, Ellen sought to recompose the city at night as a safer, more convivial place for humans and animals alike.

In all of the work, here and by others, we witnessed a great care and understanding of the social implication of urban form. In a time when every student feels the pressing need to confront how we live, here, there is no simple recourse to supposed radical or paradigm shifts, so often called for and most probably the primary reason for our current malaise. Instead we see a reassuring demonstration of how the great skill and techniques of our discipline can draw people together in communities and in doing so contribute to real and meaningful change. 

PAUL LARMOUR

This book recounts the life and works of a select number of Ulster architects who played a significant part in forming the architectural landscape of Ulster in the period of the 1920s to 1970s. Each of them not only produced some individual buildings of special interest but most also had careers which were notable for their invariably pioneering example and sustained performance, their overall contribution seemingly significant enough to set them apart from the rest of their professional colleagues. Available from: Ulster Architectural Heritage, The Old Museum Building, 7 College Square North, Belfast BT1 6AR T: +44 (0)28 90550213 or order online at www.ulsterarchitecturalheritage.org.uk/shop Price £36 (hard back) & £28 (soft back).