On the Town: Squares, circles and triangles featured large at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin this week. The principles of spatial geometry were explored to create five architectural experiments and the resulting designs are now on view at the RHA.
"People are seeing themselves in the mirrors as they go through the space so they themselves become the exhibition," explained architect Róisín Heneghan, of heneghan.peng.architects, about their exhibit. The other architectural designs came from FKL Architects, Boyd Cody, Hassett Ducatez and Dominic Stevens.
Peter Cody of Boyd Cody Architects, said their project was concerned with "playing with scale".
Architect Dominic Stevens, from Leitrim, explained how his design allows people to experience "two different spaces and two different scales" as they walk through and step up to stick their heads into a hole and another space.
The brief set out by Patrick T. Murphy, curator of the exhibition, Practising Architecture, was "to offer the viewer the opportunity to experience an aspect of architecture" that bypassed the traditional methods used in displaying architecture in galleries.
Architect Arthur Gibney, president of the RHA, said "the academy was anxious to engage with architects. It's a very untypical exhibition. It's essentially about architectural space and relationships. This is an exploration of voids and solids in spatial geometry."
Architect and Green Party politician Ciarán Cuffe TD said "we are lacking in visual education in Ireland and exhibitions like this are great at showing what's possible".
Others at the opening included architects Tom de Paor, Peter Tansey, Antoinette O'Neill, (who is architectural officer with the Arts Council) and artists Robert Ballagh, James Hanley and Mick O'Dea.
Practising Architecture runs at the RHA, 15 Ely Place, Dublin, until Sunday, March 28th.