No Fixed Form: The Infra-Éireann – Making Ireland Modern Pavilion and the Sites of Modernity

Gary Archibald Boyd,John Mclaughlin

doi:10.5334/ajar.60

Gary Archibald Boyd, John Mclaughlin

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5334/ajar.60

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Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between architectural design and research in the context of a particular example, the development of the Irish pavilion for the 14th architectural biennale in Venice 2014 (Infra-Eireann) and its reiteration and expansion in Ireland for the State’s centennial celebrations 1916–2016 (Making Ireland Modern). Originally responding to Rem Koolhaas’s call to investigate the international absorption of modernity, the pavilion sought to engage with the properties of the architectures of infrastructure in twentieth and twenty-first-century Ireland. Central to this proposition was that infrastructure is simultaneously a technological and cultural construct, one that for Ireland occupied a critical position in the building of a new, independent post-colonial nation state. Presupposing infrastructure as consisting of both visible and invisible networks, the idea of a matrix became a central theoretical and visual tool in the curatorial and design process for both the pavilion and its contents. To begin with this was a two-dimensional grid used to identify and order what became described as a series of ten infrastructural episodes. These were determined chronologically across the decades between 1916 and 2016 and their spatial manifestations articulated in terms of scale: micro, meso and macro. What emerged in the design and research process was a dialectic relationship between the pavilion and its content as logistical and conceptual concerns merged to realise an adaptive framed modular structure, imagined as an embodied manifesto and, analogous to infrastructure, as having no fixed form.

Highlights

This essay reflects upon the relationship between research and design in the context of a particular example: the Irish Pavilion for the 14th Venice Architectural Biennale in 2014, titled Infra-Éireann, and its reiteration and expansion back in Ireland as part of that country’s centennial celebration of the period between 1916 and 2016, titled Making Ireland Modern (Figures 1 and 2)
Entitled ‘Absorbing Modernity’, Rem Koolhaas’s call for the national pavilions at the 14th Venice Biennale presupposed that there had been a flattening of national characteristics within twentiethcentury architecture and their replacement with an international language borne from technological and cultural changes and transfers [1] (Figure 3)
Rem Koolhaas and others have suggested a similar disconnection between the contemporary socio-economic condition – defined by the likes of Zygmunt Bauman as ‘liquid modernity’ or by Manuel Castells as the ‘space of flows’ – and an architectural culture that tends to valorise the autonomous ‘Thing’, a disconnected artefact which is somehow free from these wider phenomena, and which is only realised through the creative instinct and tacit judgement of its author, the architect

Summary

DESIGN RESEARCH ESSAY

No Fixed Form: The Infra-Éireann – Making Ireland Modern Pavilion and the Sites of Modernity. Responding to Rem Koolhaas’s call to investigate the international absorption of modernity, the pavilion sought to engage with the properties of the architectures of infrastructure in twentieth and twenty-first-century Ireland Central to this proposition was that infrastructure is simultaneously a technological and cultural construct, one that for Ireland occupied a critical position in the building of a new, independent post-colonial nation state. Presupposing infrastructure as consisting of both visible and invisible networks, the idea of a matrix became a central theoretical and visual tool in the curatorial and design process for both the pavilion and its contents To begin with this was a two-dimensional grid used to identify and order what became described as a series of ten infrastructural episodes.

Introduction

Conclusion