Sunday, November 16, 2008

Installation images from my participation at the Irish Pavillion at the 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture 2008

Views from the one of the saloni rooms at the Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, former residence of the Duchess of Parma-Sept 2008 The installation consists of a TV shaped armature housing a slide projector, back-projected,that displays 24 looped photographs from the photographic series 'Deconstructing the maze'

Web Link to the Official Irish Biennale website

Also includes a really cool video piece that brings you thru the exhibition space www.thelivesofspaces.com/
Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, -View from the Academia Valporetta Station

Designers Conceptual drawing of the armature that housed my slide show

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Donnelly Mirrors

Donnelly Mirrors, a subsidiary of US car parts supplier Magna International opened its factory in Naas, Co. Kildare, Ireland in 1968. Here the company manufactured mirrors and windows for automobiles all over the world. Due to fierce competition, high costs and falling sales the company closed in 2007 with the loss of 525 jobs when it moved much of its production to North America and Spain. As it stands currently in August 2008, the factory is a space in-between, a room half-stripped of its furniture, its properties disintegrating as time passes on. No longer the thriving employer in the locality, but neither a fully blank space either. It becomes a difficult arena to absorb and comprehend. What happens to such a space when its people, in this case its employees, are no longer needed there? What “qualities” does that in-between space that cross -over place of abandoned factory floors and the industrial landscape, take on? Does the process of the abandonment of industrial architecture also erase the memories, or are they possibly intimately wedded to the space that is being left behind? And can a deeper understanding of the “cavity”, (i.e. the space left behind) rather than the “solid”, also inform our understanding of the creation of architecture, or, in this case, the creation of anti-architecture?