First Year Studio

FIRST YEAR 2020-21 TRIMESTER 2 - TEMPORARY WORKS

This trimester focuses on the city. In particular, the idea of the city as a cultural artefact that retains and reveals aspects of the society that created it. Students are invited to make work that reflects on the interconnected themes of the temporary and the permanent.

Although some cities are created at a moment in time and thereafter maintained, more often than not, cities are remade continuously across time. They retain embedded within their existing fabric multiple fragments and layers of previous conceptions and their corresponding physical manifestations. In effect, the city can be seen paradoxically as the site of the permanent iteration of temporary works. No matter that each strives for some form of permanence in their physical and conceptual construction they’re invariably usurped by the habit of subsequent invention. What remains permanent is the consistency of their undoing and conversely their remaking.

In the act of building temporary works are an instrumental component of the process of construction. Just as these interim constructions are an aid to making buildings, so we can consider the thoughts and ideas that we use to underpin a project as a form of temporary works that structure its becoming. Little of this thought process might survive in what is built, but without it we could never arrive at the endpoint.

LOCATION

The Archery Range located in Iveagh Gardens close to St. Stephen's Green is the proposed location for the project. The Gardens were designed and laid out by Ninian Niven in 1865; however, the history of the Gardens dates back over three hundred years, from modest beginnings as the Earl of Clonmell’s private lawn they went on to host the splendour of the Dublin Exhibition Palace in 1865. During this time, they’ve passed repeatedly between private and public use.

URBAN WORKSHOP

The report on the opening of the International Exhibition for Arts and Manufactures in Iveagh Gardens, Dublin in 1865 begins, “The building in which we are now assembled owes its origin to the desire to supply a want that long existed in this city, that is, of a structure where the citizens might enjoy rational recreation combined with the elevating influence of the Arts”. In the spirit of the great international exhibitions held throughout the nineteenth century, the Dublin exhibition of 1865 brought together under one roof the plastic and fine arts alongside the industrial innovations of the day. While the greater part of the complex constructed for the exhibition no longer exists, the vestiges of that event still linger across the site influencing decisions regarding its future development. New cultural venues linked to place by the ties of history have recently opened, or are mooted for development. A Museum of Literature is currently housed in the Aula Maxima of the institution that once accommodated Henry Newman, Gerard Manly Hopkins and James Joyce. A Children’s Science Museum is destined for the site of the old halls of industry, while a re-engagement with Nivin’s reconstituted landscape is envisaged for an enlarged National Concert Hall.

Students are asked to design an Urban Workshop to fulfill the original ambition for the site and enhance the offering provided by the neighbouring cultural institutions. The venue is to be open to all the citizens of the city. A place where making and thinking are combined and set within a broader landscape of recreation and artistic endeavour. The building will provide the facilities, equipment and technical expertise for: the making of models, material assembly, production of prototypes and product research within a shared working environment. It will provide single practitioners and small enterprises with the necessary infrastructure to investigate and innovate while hosting public events and educational programmes for both adults and children alike.