issue 02

ASA

Welcome again to the christmas issue of ailtireacht magazine. We the ASA are your official society. So remember if you have a problem, complaint, suggestion or just want to help out (please!) we have lunch time meetings every tuesday in the crit pit.

So far this year we have had a hugely successful Sangria Halloween Ball, the refounding of our magazine and the first movie night in a number of years. In the upcoming months we will see the return of the Architecture Forum (early February), the ASA Lectures and the ASA Ball.

The Sangria Ball this year had a slight change of tack with the presence of the Architects from UCD and the mish mash of partygoers from the Environmental Society which definitely added some spice to the night.

Our panel of judges for the costume competition was made up of three representatives from ArchSOC and three from ASA, who duly spent their time observing the various efforts put in by all. The catego-ries for judging were: Best Effort, (won by a guy from UCD who had dressed as an O’ Briens Sandwich wrapper) Most Original (John O’ Callaghan for his version of Ash Williams from the Evil Dead) and Best Dressed (Interior Architect and former student of Architecture Susie McAdam, for her Marie Antoinette). The standard of costumes across the board was really high, and to those who didn’t come in costume, you know what’s expected of you next year.

Our first film night in years, showing Metropolis, was held in the Crit Pit (A Nightmare Before Christmas will be our 2nd on on the 10th December), was accompanied by popcorn and jellies, which was enjoyed by several people eager for a distraction. The ArchSOC Christmas Party in Radio City, organised by our UCD counterparts, was enjoyed by a reasonable DIT contingent. Coming soon is our end of term party on the 19th December. This time, in conjunction with the Architectural Technicians, the event will be held in The Vaults (keep your eyes open for posters with the details). So get your snow shoes on, it’s gonna be a busy Christmas.

Congratulations to the 07/08 third year class for there suc-cessful book launch for Utopia: Ballitor, on the 16th of Oct. They certainly set high stan-dards for student publications.

We are looking forward to the review of the book in this months Architecture Ireland Magazine which will be out next tuesday the 16th.

It is on sale at the RIAI book-shop on Merrion Sq and the Winding stair bookshop... a perfect stocking filler for loved ones!

David O’Brien

SESAM 2009

interview with Andrew Clancy

Andrew Clancy is a third year architectrual tutor in DIT , he also tutors in Queens University and runs a successful practice with Colm Moore.

It seems that each year in architecture students explore and progress a different aspect of the profession, what in your opinion is the emphasis in third year? In third year we seek to explore the architects role in society, as part of the collective endeavor that is the built environment. Every building has a value and plays a part in the fabric of the city. Careful study, generosity, modesty and negotiation are required to make good interventions. The third year studio is a laboratory for informed debate and exploration of this process. Each piece of work, research or design builds towards a coherent whole and in-flects on all other projects in the year.

This years theme is wasteland, what was the motivation behind this choice? It seemed appropriate; questions surrounding this theme were raised last year, so we are looking to explore the nature of discarded or marginal space. Bolton St is an area where all the boundaries of many areas meet; Broadstone, Phibsbourgh, the Quays, O’Connell St, and yet don’t gel. It’s a key piece of the city that doesn’t seem to work. A big part of the studies this year are about public realm and a sense of ownership, to try and broaden these from a consumption based monoculture to present richer possibilities. It’s about un-derstanding the architect’s role to give more back than merely the building de-sign, to design for more than just the immediate function of the building.

Teaching Architecture and practising architecture are two very different disciplines; in what way do they inform and benefit each other for you? For me there’s no divide between the two. Architects are always learning and teaching, weather that’s with clients, other architects or students. As a practical art architecture needs practitioners involved in education. Both Colm and I teach in Queens and DIT, conversations and research move constantly from college studios and the firms studios and back again. I don’t think I could practice without teaching or vise-ver-sa. This time of year brings with it numerous stressful deadlines and hand-ups. What advice would you offer to students on the brink of losing their minds from student woes? Stay focused on what you want to achieve. If you find you have thought yourself into a standstill, change your methodology; make a mod-el, change scale, be brave! Try and develop a critical distance from your work and use this to move it forward. Finally before you finish work each day it is important to find something good you have achieved dur-ing the day (a photo, a model, an observation) and put it on top of your desk for tomorrow, then you can start each day with a good note.

Helen-Rose Condon

first year

Some like it HOT….well bright anyway. Christmas is almost upon us and the 1st year studio is draped in all things festive. We even have a tree, not a real tree of course as that could compromise the spirit of our current studio project!

Work load had been fairly intensive but it’safter simmering down a bit after the submission of the Tower of “tiny” Blocks. Applause must be awarded for those who managedto cut all these tiny blocks and then manage to stick them all back together again. You’d sooner stick these timber terrors to your thumbs and scalpel before one an-other! I won’t name names but there were a few cases of people awak-ening to balsa face*.

Unfortunately there was a poor contingent from 1st year attending the Architecture Christmas ball in Radio City. Perhaps it was the timing relative to a hand up, or else the cheap drinks at Bondi, but it was a good night all the same. There was also some dude there who was just hell bent on breaking all the glasses, pure odd!

Our current studio project is designing a shelter for a nature en-thusiast in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow. We are pretty much half way into it now at this stage, but the real fun will start next week. Thankfully we don’t have exams to contend with.

Finally hats off to Mark Davy who won the Design a Banner competi-tion, exciting stuff, so it was, and it was some much needed light-heartedness for the pressure cooker that is 1st year studio.

*where one would find the most uncomforting and horrific realisation that they fell asleep on a small piece of balsa wood and through the actions of perspiration, or in more severe cases loc-tite glue, would find this segment fixed to there snoz, cheek, or perhaps forehead.

Aidan O’ Shea

first year

second-year

Learning, safety and fun (In that order)

Learning: Currently, we are designing Montessori schools for a number of sites across Dublin. The usual rag bag of sites was given to us. The lucky ones got a leafy site in Donnybrook while the less fortunate of this world ended up down a back alley in the liberties with circling crows and air of danger and misery. After the requisite site visits we began the design process. Slowly the vague shapes and forms gain more shape and form until the shapes and forms resemble buildings that people could conceivably live in. Well little tiny people. Inevitably more people are us-ing CAD for this project than the last one, so the rate of people screaming at computers has risen immeasurably. Not helped by the confined space in which we work. Thankfully (or not thankfully) we may be moving to Linenhall in the New Year, where it may just be possible to stretch without knocking over someone’s coffee.

Safety: Don’t put the pointy end of the compass in your eye. Don’t put the rest of the compass in your eye. Be-ware of wolves. Always take care when using a scalpel or Stanley knife and ask an adult to help if you can. Don’t talk to strangers.

Fun: In between learning and being safe we also have fun. For example the hat party in the Bernard Shaw. And the joint Christmas par-ty with U.C.D. last week where six us tore Richview apart…and drank all their mulled wine. And the fun in the anticipation of going to Achill Island for our next project. And……learning. Which is fun.

Aidan O’ Shea Petie Barry

third year

Mambo italiano!

Just 4 weeks ago we said our final (misinformed) goodbye to months of group work, and set off to Milan. Where we were greeted with rain that we hadn’t seen the likes of since the summer.After an hour bus drive from the city centre we reached our hostel, and oh what a hostel it was. The lack of toilets, showers, and plugs meant that we didn’t have to worry about wrecking the gaff.

While James was watching AC Milan, the rest of us were tracking down concrete in Switzerland. Photos, even sketches were not enough for us. I’m sure the locals were a bit miffed with the sight of forty foreigners ooing and aahing and stroking their build-ings.Had we discovered a Swiss Blarney stone equivalent? No, but the concrete was boardmarked.

Next stop Verona... eventually... where the only problem was that our hotel wasn’t actually in Verona, but in a beautiful lakeside re-sort (mid November it was really buzzing).

A few quiet glasses of wine later everyone had given up on a mad night...only three of us were left when nature called.A kind guard showed us to the public toilets, from where we could hear the distant noise of what could only be drunken chanting. We ran towards the sound where our suspi-cians were confirmed, we had stumbled upon the local night club! A quick swim in the freezing lake later and we were back home to spread the good news.

Fast forward 24 hours and we were night-club bound- lecturers and all. After show-ing the locals how partying was done, a mass swimming session took place and ev-eryone went to bed trouble free.

.....Oh , and we visited the building of the year! Niamh Chambers

third year

fourthyear

Waiting for Godot?

It is commonly known that the architectural student will face multiple uphill struggles during the course of their studies, but lately does anybody else find that studying architecture’s a bit like Waiting for Godot? Be it the creative saturation, the project intensity, work overload or the physical exhaustion from the combination of all three, it sometimes seems like the forward momentum may only exacerbate our depressed mental state or lead us slowly but surely to the loony bin. What are we waiting for, when does this relentless cycle change, when does this get easier.

The reason though??? The reason I have raised these issues; the first semester of fourth year is all about theatre and as such the ma-jor design project was New National Theatrical Centre for Ireland . Senator David Norris wrote to the school of architecture in DIT ask-ing us to investigate the GPO as a possible site for the new Abbey Theatre; Year Head Noel Brady only agreed to undertaking the proj-ect so long as the three other proposed sites were included in the study; Dr Quirkey’s on O’Connell St, the existing Abbey Theatre site and George’s Dock. It certainly wasn’t an easy project; the very substantial brief gave us a lot to grapple with. Ultimately it was a very challenging and interesting project and, as usual, one met with mixed success. The next stage of the project sees us team up with third year architectural technology to find out all the things wrong with our theatres, hopefully to how to fix them, and take our projects to a more realistic place, perhaps one in which The Reces-sion is merely a scary bedtime story architects tell their children at Halloween.

We look forward to a busy Christmas with a bunch of hand-ups the far side of it – we inch closer to fifth year – Godot’s just around the corner…

MintyNiamh Chambers

fifthyear

It’s Theses not Thesis’s

So the last time any of you have seen the mythical beast that is a Fifth Year was probably very early on in the whole thesis process. Since then there have been several generations of every thesis idea. We have started and restarted until finally settling on something concrete, only to work ourselves into a circle of ideas and come back to the same topics.

To put it simply we have been asked to come up with a theory, a site and a building type. Easy peasy. I think what has been surprising to everyone is the level of criti-cal thought that has been involved in the formulation of a the-sis. We assumed that the thesis was just a big project that we got to choose ourselves. It turns out that the thesis is a three headed beast that lives on your back for every hour of every day. Where be-fore we wondered what people got all worked up about, the reality is a very different experience, nothing like anything we have done be-fore. There are still the familiar days where you seem to make a big breakthrough, the days where you are simply doing the drudge work and then the days where you seem to do nothing at all. The past few weeks were succinctly put by a classmate as “I got a puncture about 3 weeks ago and I’ve been trying to fix it ever since with a hammer”. Hopefully we have now made it to Cycleways and bought a full new wheel. We’ll find out at the first External Reviews, the first time our ideas get a real testing in public. All are wel-come to come and hurl architectural abuse on the 16th, 17th and 18th in the Crit Pit. Please be kind.

Lucy Riordan

fifthyear

Lucy Riordan

funnies

ucd8:00 a.m. R.T.* Sitting. Sitting here, wrapped in a plastic sheet. Five hundred of us. Eight centimetres tall. All emp-ty but brimming with po-tential. The shutter ris-es.

9:40 a.m. R.T.Number 94318 went on to become a Cappuchino. Num-ber 94325 went on to be-come the greatest Latté since August. “An Ameri-cano?” – “Yeah”

10:30 a.m. R.T.Brown jacket and cross-ing a vast square, sur-rounded by small trees, all square.“Alright?”“Uhhh, got a crit today.”“How’s it going?”“Don’t have a clue what I’m meant to do.”“Stressed……..”The words die away as we duck beneath the arched canopy of dying leaves. Heavy door and a grand staircase. “Oh thanks.” Long frown. This is tough going. Someway to go yet.

“Pointless, taking two days now….listen, did you hear about…”“Yeah, terrible.”“It’s like the bloody trenches in here.”“There goes another one I’m afraid. Do you think you’ll survive?”“It’s a tough bloody life. The Lives of Spac-es”

The hand picks me up for the final time. Still a drop left. Clunk, plas-tic head against the steel hoop and I’m down amongst the blunted blades and corrugat-ed cardboard, waiting for the final disposal, shrouded by a plastic sheet.

* Richview Time

10:45 a.m. R.T.Sitting here. Rise. Gulp.“Jesus, didn’t sleep a wink there.”“All nighter?”“Yeah, don’t have a clue what’s going on.”“Did you get the e-mail?”“Yeah, impossible. Are they serious? Was it like this last year?”“There was a bit more free-dom. It’s a little more rigid this year. How did your presentation go last week?”“Don’t know. Constructive I think. I know what I need now.”“What’s that?”“A new lift.”“What’s the scheme about anyway?”“I forgot.”“What did you think of the Biennale?”“Ach, it was alright. The Arsenale was the best part, bloody stone broke at this stage.”“Here, how’s that 1:100 material study going for you?”

The Lives of cups

Robert G. de Fleur

Robert G. de Fleur

architectural tecnology

Second year Architectural Tecnology

The new year came with a slap in the face, as we were thrown straight into a research project. From the Pompidou Centre in Paris to the Monte Caras-so in Ticino, our introduction to the aesthetics and materiality of large scale commercial buildings began in ernst.

Our first class night took place inBon-di. Celebrating Lee & Mairead’s Birth-day, with drinks at 3€, a good night was had by all!

Following this, our second major proj-ect was the Timber Construction Proj-ect, which brought back those late night cramming sessions to the studio. With houses originating from places as afar off as Toronto and Tokyo, it was a real challenge to detail design to the Irish Climate.

Next on the calendar was the tradi-tional ‘Vertical Wednesday’ which was a great laugh! ‘Vertical Wednesday’ is

First year Architectural Tecnology

So….. We’ve made it into first year! Thrown into the deep end, up to our eye balls in projects, assignments and hangovers.

We started our mystical journey in mid September. Everthing seemed grand until the end of fresher’s week when we had tostart this thing called “work”. We were eased into our st-dio projects but as the nights grew longer so did our hours, athough morale stayed high. As the briefs were handed out at the beginning of the week students stayed focussed on their work and were enthusiastic as prospects of a course night out was on the horizon!

Week 6 came and we were all surprised with a day trip to “The Brick Factory”, Kilkenny castle and a delightful lunch with wine (mmm….). Laughs were had, friendships were made (espe-cially with the Technical Guidance Documents) and projects were…completed-ish? So, all in all it’s goin’ good y’all!

an annual event organised by the De-partment of Architectural Technology, in an effort to bring all three years together. Beginning with a table quiz organised by the third years, we then had the a range of games presented by Carl; which revealed some truths about students and even some of the staff, yes you know who you are! The games finished with Giant Twister which was won by John and Lyndsay, there were no casualties which was good given the circumstances, Alcohol + Giant Twister = ??? The day was topped off with a trip to Bondi. (Yes, we love Bondi)In the run upto Christmas, we will be working on our Steel Project, finish-ing with a joint SSAT and ASA Christ-mas Partay on the nineteenth. Come. Everyone’s Going.

Lee Corcoran + Matt Healy.

Tony O’Brien & Brian O’Shaughnessy

open house review

Open house 2008It seems like a long time ago at this stage but on the 17th to the 19th of October the third Open House Dublin took place. The event was a complete success, with many new additions being added to the list of regulars, including some in Dun Laoghaire, Tallaght and Finglas. Trying to fit as many buildings in as possible is always a challenge but having a volunteers pass is always a big bonus when it comes to things like queues and prebooked places.Top tours1. Temple bar gallery and studios, McCullough MulvinThis was the first and best I was on, led by Valerie Mulvin herself. Valerie and the Gallery’s curator brought us on a very comprehensive tour delivering a perfect balance of information about design strat-egies, planning challenges and cost issues. It offered great in-sight and appreciation into a building I’ve seen many times but nev-er explored. Thank you Valerie.2. Donal Hickeys house up in Killester, This was a great tour led by the man himself. We were guided very thoroughly through his office and private home. The building itself was stunning and its great to see he practices what he preaches. If you missed out don’t worry you can watch Donal and family on www.rte.ie/tv/aboutthehouse/20080923.html

Biggest let downs1. The waterfront, Hanover Quay, Burke Kennedy Doyle.I arrived to the standard beautiful show apart-ment to be greeted by an estate agent and given a sheet promoting the development and outlining the costs of the apartment. Is this what open house is about?2. Alto Vetro, Grand Canal Quay, Shay Cleary Ar-chitects.This was a much hyped impressive new develop-ment, and had large queue outside. The biggest disappointment about this was that even though the tour was led by Shay himself he offered no insight or personal information and seem to lack the enthusiasm that should come from designing a building of this calibre. But yes the view was great from the small show apartment we visited.

Cecily Quetin-Weeks

funnies

Derek KeatleyCecily Quetin-Weeks

Review of A2 Lecture

A2 Lecture Review

Its great to see that the AAI is still supporting and promoting its up and coming talent. So on the 27th of November the, er, 2 architects from A2 presented their work to an unfortunately dismal crowd in the largest theatre in the Trinity Arts Block. This young practice headed by Peter Carroll and Caomhán Murphy is based in Dublin1. The guys presented an impressive list of projects from small extensions on restricted sites to the large new French school.Starting out with their entry for the 4 under 40 Lisbonne Architec-ture triannale they showed their impressive display. Continuing with a modest house extension called the folding tent, they progressed through a variety of scales and materials without losing any atten-tion to detail.

The Projects such as their beach house were far more thouroughly in-vestigated over other projects such as their housing development in Dunmoreeast, however for a practice that seems to hold morals under high regard I find it odd that they didn’t seem to have any problems designing holiday homes.

They had paired similar projects under headlines such as “Holding, Weathering, Layer”. The talk to slide ratio was successful, mov-ing the audience along at a brisk pace while not losing the audi-ences concentration or comprehen-sion. If you managed to overcome the somewhat languid tone of both peter and Caomháns voices that is.

Overall I left the lecture mild-ly stimulated but not to the de-gree that I felt leaving Andrea Deplazes’ sensational lecture a couple of weeks ago. I know its hard to compete with a firm whose relentlessly picturesque Swiss sites are doubtlessly a dream to work with, but the Irish still have a long way to go… Cecily Quetin-Weeks & James Mc Cormack

tec help

Top tips for what not to buy at christmas When buying a laptop for use in Architecture, the most important thing to consider is not RAM but rather a Certified and Compatible Graphics Card. The majority of applications used by fellow class members are made by Autodesk.With the right tools, you can get the follwing results….

• The most recommended Graphics Cards are the Quadro FX cards by Nvidia.

• Nvidia is the market leader and work extensively with Architects who work for Autodesk. Together they have developed a new driver for AutoCAD 09 called “AutoCAD Performance Driver” and for 3DS Max 2009 and driver called “MAXtreme” both drivers have the potential to give improvements in performance of 40% in speed. These new drivers greatly help users who find AutoCAD 2009 a bit slug-gish. These drivers are free to download at www.nvidia.com • The most important role of graphics cards is now evident in Ado be CS4, as Photoshop, Illustrator etc... are now powered by the Laptop’s Graphics. This makes working in Photoshop much easier and less taxing on your overall Laptop.

Autodesk has now standardised their software requirements by specify-ing they require Compatible Graphics cards. Before buying a laptop check to make sure you have the right graphics card for the job. Otherwise you may have made a costly mistake. Check your graphics card at www.au-todesk.com

Niall Kane

Review of A2 Lecture

Cecily Quetin-Weeks & James Mc Cormack

Imagine for a moment you are writing a screenplay. Your hero needs a profession, something photogenic that won’t interfere with the story. He’s got to be rugged but artistic. He’s a passionate man, well-educated but raw. He drives women wild. A doctor? Perhaps, but doctors make ambiguous protagonists, with their encyclopaedic brains and chilly fingers. He could be a lawyer, but an audience will naturally assume a lawyer to be compromised at best and villainous at worst.

One exception is the young, idealistic lawyer with a hot wife and a tousle-headed moppet child, but John Grisham owns the patent, so forget it. Musician? Unreliable. Journalist? Untrustworthy. Suddenly a lightbulb flashes. Architect! Everybody loves those guys.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, the imaginary architect of popular prejudice was a serious, tweedy fellow, invariably accessorised with a pipe and a roll of blue-prints tucked beneath one arm. Nowadays he is an aspirational figure of blinding brilliance. Are they remotely plausible, these newly minted yuppie gods? Well, we have seen Adam Sandler and Keanu Reeves - neither of whom one could comfort-ably imagine designing, say, the Milau aqueduct - fooling around with cardboard models as if the Pritzker prize were a mere dab of uhu away.

The phenomenon really took off in the 90s, when the burgeoning media and public interest in architecture prompted a steady stream of pencil-twiddling heroes. The protagonists of Indecent Proposal, Fearless, Housesitter, Jungle Fever, In-tersection and Sleepless in Seattle are all in the same business. Best of the bunch is Richard Gere in Intersection, forever grumbling about column placement and fenestration, to the amusement of real architects.Female versions are much harder to find, but they do turn up: Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in One Fine Day manages to juggle her architectural career with the twin commitments of childcare and boffing George Clooney, an impressive feat by anyone’s standards.

The architect is an archetype, marinated in cinema history: he is intelligent, scrupulously fair-minded (Henry Fonda’s juror No 8 in 12 Angry Men was an ar-chitect), wealthy and creative. He’s secretly romantic, like Tom Hanks. He’s hubristic but brilliant, like Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno. And he’s a fantastic lay: witness the scene in Jungle Fever when Wesley Snipes has sex with Anabella Sciorra on his own drafting table. Back to the drawing board in-deed.

Of course, not all movie architects are models of hunky sensitivity. Some of them are psychopaths. Charles Bronson’s avenging vigilante in Death Wish was an architect, and while the film paints the character as nominally heroic, you could hardly describe him as a role model. Mind you, Bronson is a paragon of virtue compared to Boris Karloff in Universal’s 1934 chiller The Black Cat. As the demented Hjalmar Poelzig, Karloff lives in a nightmarish expressionist man-sion, runs a satanic cult and keeps his female conquests in glass display cof-fins, a decorating quirk that even the most aggressively postmodern designer might consider tasteless.

Blueprint of a hollywood hunk

Paul Arendt - The Guardian, Friday October 20 2006

8th

dec

Dem Vidjoes Exhi-bition opens at The market Studio, Smithfield

8th

decNows the Time Exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery

decMexican Lecture se-ries, Tatiana Bilbaio

11th

dec

13th

AAI site visit Burren House, Niall McLaughlin

dec19thChristmas holidays

dec

Christmas Day25th

feb05th

issue #02

article deadline

what’s on

Paul Arendt - The Guardian, Friday October 20 2006

next contribution deadline thurs 5th Feb

ASA contact details: asaboltonst@gmail.comshane - 0872535966

editors: helen rose condon & cecily weeks

front cover; models by Brian Fitzgerald, Nelly Breen, Mark Halpin

if you would like to have your company name and logo here feel free to contact the ASA about a sponsorship package