This lecture will present the challenges and opportunities of practicing architecture today.  In a world increasingly defined by virtual social networks and isolating personal technologies (smartphones, iPads, etc.), David will argue for architecture’s unique capacity to intensify  the social through the direct organization of space.  New technologies are now inscribed into the material forms of cities, buildings, and dwellings. While these technologies seem to erode the dominance of social relations based on proximity and physical gathering, their pervasiveness has paradoxically placed increasing importance on the interpersonal and the corporeal.  Responding to this paradox in ways formal and contingent, at scales large and small, David will argue for the amplification of social relationships by orchestrating embodied space.

Michelle Howard is an Irish Architect with a practice in Berlin and a Professorship in Vienna. She has spent much of her career collaborating with some of the most important Architectural practices in the world. Notably she spent 6 years from her 20s to early 30s collaborating with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in both the Genoa and Paris office and then led the project with for the IMAX Cinema complex, part of the Potsdamer Platz urban ensemble in Berlin. In the next 6 years until the end of her 30s she led the construction of two seminal projects for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Dutch embassy in Berlin and the Casa da Musica in Porto. „At last, so sighed the professional world, at last Rem Koolhaas makes with his Office for Metropolitan Architecture, which has had until now through polemic and theoretical furore an undisputed influence on world architecture, really really good architecture.“  Dietmar Steiner, Der Standard newspaper, Austria. Michelle continues to work occasionally with OMA in an advisory capacity.

Michelle Howard is a Professor of Architecture and head of the Platform for Construction, Materials and Technology at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She currently working on a publication which documents the platform and its working methods, called Research, Observe, Make and is due to appear in the coming months.

In her office in Berlin, called constructconcept, she maintains a small structure where she can both contribute to other projects and gain support when her own activities demand it and believes that good architecture is the result of great teamwork. constructconcept is committed to the fusion of design, construction and environment in architecture, without compromise. The interdependency of these elements is constantly reasserted, while existing qualities are rediscovered and enhanced. Rather than searching blindly for solutions we stand back and search for the real questions, finding inspiration in what is already there.

This lecture will identify the origins, trajectories and tangles of the many revolutionary landscapes that have criss-crossed the Atlantic since the late eighteenth century.  Moving from west to east, and from Philadelphia and Virginia to Dublin and Geneva, such reversed vistas will also question the implicit trajectory of much historical narrative. It will also explore how landscape tours became a precondition for revolutionary thought.

Finola O’Kane Crimmins lectures in the School of Architecture UCD where she directs the MUBC programme. An architect, landscape historian and conservation specialist, her first book Landscape Design in Eighteenth-century Ireland: Mixing Foreign Trees with the Natives was published in 2004 and awarded the inaugural J.B. Jackson Book Prize by the American Landscape Foundation in 2007. Her most recent book  Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting and Tourism in Ireland 1700–1840 was published in 2013 by Yale University Press on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. In 2013 she was appointed a fellow of Dumbarton Oaks by the Trustees of Harvard University, embarking on a research project entitled ‘Revolutionary Landscapes: Ireland, France and America 1700–1810’.

This talk will take a looping journey from the White Mountains of California via the Arctic Circle, the M11, the Lincolnshire Coast and the  suburbs of Dublin to the desktop of a computer in Wakefield, Quebec.

Rebecca Birch is an artist making films and spending time with people and landscapes. She is currently writing a PhD about a lichen-covered stick that has been in her care since 2011.  Alongside her practice she is co-director, with the artist Rob Smith, of Field Broadcast, an online live broadcast platform connecting artists in remote locations with viewers across the world.

Preceded by 16h30 book launch by Prof. Merritt Bucholz of ‘Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics’ by Lytle Shaw.
The Dutch Golden Age painter Meindert Hobbema lavished attention on oak trees, rutted paths, checkerboard cottages and swamps, while radically downplaying the human figures that typically “animate” landscape painting.  Recuperating this reversal of perspective as a major event in the history of painting, this talk develops a cultural and philosophical basis for Hobbema’s enterprise. Following talks on Jan van Goyen (2012), and Jacob van Ruisdael (2013), this lecture is the last chapter of a book in progress, New Grounds for Dutch Landscape, which reframes Dutch landscape painting not merely as a representational project, but as a matter of re-staging, within the medium of painting, the physical processes of Dutch land reclamation.

Lytle Shaw is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Admissions for English at The Department of English at New York University. He was awarded his Ph.D. 2000 (English) from The University of California, Berkeley and his Bachelor of Arts 1991 (English) from Cornell University. He currently teaches two elective modules at SAUL, Radical Description and Experimental Research. His work centers on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry and art. He is interested in how texts and art objects mediate, transform, and disrupt (rather than simply “reflect”) the cultural and social possibilities of their moments. His teaching and writing continue to focus on how recent poetry and art might not just relate to but in a sense become experimental versions of historicism, ethnography, documentary and landscape aesthetics.

Dominic Byrne is Head of Information Technology with Fingal County Council and has 21 years experience working in IT.  He holds a B.Sc. in Information Technology and M.Sc. in Information Systems.He is responsible for Fingal Open Data which was the first Open Government Data website in Ireland.  He is also a member of the Dublinked management team and is chair of the National Cross Industry Working Group on Open Data.  In addition, he is a member of the Digital Dublin Forum which worked on the recently launched Digital Masterplan for Dublin.