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John Dobbin

Depending on what you’re doing, August is either a welcome break before chaotic descent into improbable deadlines before the end of the year, or a vast Sahara-like wasteland of decision-less ineptitude, held in suspended animation until the key people return to the land of the living about September 4th. Anyways, I quite like it.

Essential viewing if you’re quick about it, is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film ‘The Conversation’ being shown in the IFI for its 50th anniversary, in a 4k restoration.  Filmed in 70s San Francisco, the movie is full of wonderful American modernism and brutalist architecture like the interior urbanism of John Portman’s Embarcadero Centre. Gene Hackman plays the reclusive phone and bug agent in a masterpiece of Watergate-era urban tension, alongside Harrison Ford.

Most importantly is the remarkable The Reason of Towns travelling exhibition and programme of events. Featuring the work of Valerie Mulvin and McCullough Mulvin Architects over 30 years of work by the practice in Irish towns, this initiative is supported by The Arts Council and many others. Travelling extensively over August and September, the series of events also features three specifically commissioned short films, featuring the work of Irish architects in town centre settings.

It’s your last chance this month to take in the juxtaposition of two Vermeer paintings: The Frick Collection’s Mistress and Maid and the National Gallery of Ireland’s Woman Writing a Letter. The former is on loan from the Frick Collection in Manhattan while it is being refurbished.

In a strange coincidence, it’s also the last chance this month to see another juxtaposition project, with Neighbours in Space and Time in the Irish Architectural Archive. The exhibition features Sir John Soane’s House and Museum and Grafton Architects’ Marshall Building, which now face each other in deference across London’s largest (and loveliest) garden square.

In Farmleigh it would be a great to see the incomparable Charles Duggan, Heritage Officer with Dublin City Council, with an illustrated lecture and discussion on Ireland’s largely unappreciated mid-century (and later) modernism. The lecture centres on the recent publication of ‘More the Concrete Blocks 1973-1999’, by Ellen Rowley and Carole Pollard.

The Irish Georgian Society members tour of the Casino at Marino also takes place this month, alongside a concert inside the Blue Room by Ramona Dineen.  Essential visiting if by some extraordinary oversight you have never visited one of Europe’s most important – and dinkiest – classical buildings.  Bring along your copy of Sir Albert Richardson’s ‘Monumental classic architecture in Great Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries’, if you want to truly walk the Georgiana walk.

A bit further afield, take in the historic building and garden tour of Beaulieu, on the River Boyne a few kilometres from Drogheda.  Built in 1680s, it is one of the oldest unfortified houses in the country and still lived in by the family who commissioned it, an extraordinary feat of client dedication.

Not a particularly architectural selection, but still an important one: August marks the 70th anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival. Get yourself down to Tower Records, where you can pick up Duke Ellington’s iconic 1956 live performance, on vinyl too if you’re a purist. Better still, I’m thinking of bringing my copy down to The Big Romance Album Night on Monday or Tuesday on Parnell Street, for some serious Dimenuendo and Crescendo in Blue listening action, alongside their crazy Spicy Margaritas.

While we are at it, does anyone know when the sunny weather is going to arrive?