THIS MONTH:

Rebecca Jane McConnell

History, despite its reputation, is not especially good at staying put. It does not sit there, noble and complete, waiting. It is trimmed, captioned, strategically ignored, sometimes painted over by a famous man with a tragic amount of confidence. History is not lost, exactly – it is curated. July’s programme is about that edit: who has been cut, and what gets footnoted. 

Mark Magee’s Distant Echoes at Market Place Theatre in Armagh closes on 4 July, which allows you just enough time to correct the error of not having seen it. Magee paints 1970s Lurgan – my Lurgan, as it happens; I went to school there – with an uneasy mix of social realism, Bowie, punk iconography, and the lingering static of the Troubles. It is nostalgic, but more importantly forensic.  

Here is something that should not need to be said, but apparently does: Ireland’s housing crisis is also a crisis of spatial knowledge. We do not know, with anything like sufficient precision, where our vacant buildings are, what condition they are in, who owns them, or what they might become. This is not merely a data problem, it is a national failure of imagination. On 7 July at MoLI, the UCD Earth Institute’s Building Stories event makes the case for a National Buildings Platform: trusted data, accessible datasets, evidence-led planning policy. I know ‘accessible datasets’ feels a tad Black Mirror. But! without this work, we are left making decisions about buildings in the dark. The event is free. It is at lunchtime. There is no good excuse. 

EASA Seanchaí 2026 descends on Waterford from 25 July to 9 August with five hundred architecture students from over fifty countries in tow, organised around the seanchaí – the Irish storytelling tradition – the idea that narrative and memory are structural forces, doing load-bearing work in the built environment whether we acknowledge them or not. I have watched students arrive at events like this as one person and leave as another: with new friends, possibly in possession of a new manifesto, and no longer quite willing to accept the version of architecture they were handed before this. If you know an emerging architect – or if you are one – attend at Waterford in late July.   

 On the same day – 25 July – Belfast Pride takes to the streets, and the MAC is doing something quietly radical in response. A Quiet Pride at the MAC Belfast runs from 1–3pm, free and drop-in: a room where you can sit, read, knit, write, or have a cup of tea with other quietly proud people. This is, in its gentle way, a profound piece of public architecture. Accessibility is the design, it is the argument, and it asks, with unnerving directness: who is this city for, and who has been expected to enjoy it? 

And then there is Eileen Gray. Need I say more? OK I will.  

On 24 July, the Hugh Lane Gallery hosts a free online talk by UCD PhD candidate Paula Arning on Eileen Gray: Textiles, Space and the Feminine Modern, centred on villa E-1027. It understood privacy, intimacy, movement, sun, rest, illness, desire, and the choreography of ordinary life. Le Corbusier, in a gesture that remains somehow both outrageous and completely unsurprising, painted murals on the walls without permission. Imagine seeing a masterpiece and thinking: ‘What this needs… is me!’. The editing out of women from architectural history is not an oversight, it is a structure and system. Arning’s talk is free, and online. I will be there. 

See you at the quiet end of the parade.