SAUL, AGL & Fab Lab project featured on ArchDaily article, "The Best Student Design-Build Projects Worldwide 2016"

Opening Reception and Prize Ceremony by Professor Edmond Magner, Dean, Faculty of Science & Engineering 7pm, Tuesday May 24th in the UL Foundation Building

On Altering Architecture is an attempted taxonomy of interventional design, a description and to an extent a classification of the issues and approaches relevant to the work, as a specialism within Architecture itself, just as the making of new buildings might also be considered.

Can you save the remnants of a historic castle by building a new house inside it? William Mann will present architectural interventions at Astley Castle, covering its many design challenges. Astley is a remote site with rich historic resonance: a moated castle, lake, church and the ghost of pleasure gardens are grouped around a shallow ridge. With its restoration now complete, you look out from twelfth and twenty-first century construction to fifteenth and seventeenth century walls - the dialogue across the centuries frames contemporary conversations. On a somewhat similar theme but bigger scale William Mann will also talk about the tendency to demolish and build new in the city - and how the frequent regeneration ambition to erase the past is fundamentally flawed.

Modern architecture in Ireland reached a high point in the early 1960s and one of its most celebrated figures was Robin Walker. Born in Waterford in1924, Robin Walker studied architecture at University College Dublin from 1942 to 1947, and later under the legendary Le Corbusier. He also worked alongside Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. Upon his return to Ireland he became a key agent in the shaping of the emerging modern nation. This talk discusses a selection of his projects, showing drawings, models and photos of the original buildings. It will further consider the rehabilitation of these and other structures, and explain relevant examples.

This talk considers the position of Irish medieval buildings in the early years of twentieth century. Focusing on the treatment of the tiny oratory of St. Lua at Killaloe, Niamh NicGhabhann will examine the ways in which the ruins of the medieval past were used to signify a range of political, religious and cultural ideas and attitudes.

Patrick Lynch discusses the creative processes of one of London's most critically acclaimed architectural practices in its theoretical and cultural context. The work of Lynch Architects is remarkably diverse for a relatively small practice, ranging from large urban buildings to product design and academic research. This talk situates the practice's recent buildings in London alongside earlier projects within a tradition of decorum and urban depth. Lynch establishes the continuing relevance of the classical concept of mimesis in modern culture, and reveals the communicative role that memory, history and typology play in the contemporary architectural imagination. Mimesis and Imagination also explores the vital role that physical creative work and craft play in design, recovering the critical grounds for a poetics of civic architecture.

This reading is part of the Spatial Poetics Series at SAUL, curated and run by Lytle Shaw (SAUL and New York University). Investigating the terrain shared between contemporary poetry and architecture, this series of seminars and public poetry readings is sponsored by the School of Architecture and the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Limerick. Keston Sutherland will give the second poetry reading of this series at 5pm on Thursday 10th March 2016 in the SAUL Studio, CG-042, Main Building, University of Limerick

The Office of Public Works (OPW), or “Board of Works” as it has also been called, was established in 1831 by an Act of Parliament. Historically, the office had responsibility for drainage schemes and other large civil and public engineering projects. Today, it is the Government’s principal engineering agency, advising on the management of everything from flood risks to estate portfolios. Among its chief responsibilities are the ownership, upkeep and maintenance of government and historic buildings in Ireland. The OPW has responsibility for the care of 780 heritage sites in Ireland, including national monuments, historic parks, gardens and buildings.

Lithuanian-born artist Aleksandra Kasuba is known for her large scale works in brick, marble and granite, and most notably for innovative environments of tensile fabrics. She is credited with “creating several families of closed system shapes of unbelievable richness and complexity.” In the field of tensile fabric structures, according to Frei Otto, her work “stands out as a strong personal vision [...] The results of her investigation are among the most extraordinary to have emerged in years [...] Forms derived from complex geometries display a mature sense of tension dynamics.”