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Marcus Donaghy

Common Ground – Anarchitecture Diary – Dialann Anáiltíreacht – Ar Imeall

This being deireadh-fómhair, or end of harvest, approaching the jigsaw of forthcoming events one might start the diary with the unmissable Architecture at the Edge gathering interlinked events, exhibits, student projects, and visits including perhaps Hybrasil if you can find the piece to fit on the horizon.

October, the season of AAI evenings and Saturday morning visits sets in, including the post-pandemic resumption of the AAI Awards exhibition opening night, a giddily ecumenical evening where young and old architects get lost in the delight of their various endeavours’; exchanging batons – form, follying, function. – 17th October 2024

Before Halloween draws too near Open House lays out its architectural apples for us: people throw open their abodes, strangers cross thresholds, savouring others architectural rations. The IAF, a matchmaker between public and architecture, indoors and out, openly tabling a buffet of places set out for you to graze upon. And volunteers with all sorts of careers help hosts receive their guests.

‘The best of plans the worst of plans, the plans that go awry’…The ark of the IAA (Irish Architectural Archive) hosts an exhibition in relation to the inner suburb of Cabra – Best Laid Plans in photographs by Mandy O’Neill.

What would practice or study in our towns and cities be without these portals through which we (ex)change places, ideas, and best of all experiences?

As the evenings draw in, we can gather for lectures and yet the days are mellow enough for raking sun-warmed guided walks and site-visits. Fortify yourselves with these excursions and encounters. Get out of the office into the field.

And then there is the dive indoors in daytime to the RDS halls for the RIAI Conference – this year dedicated to the city. Should that be extended to architecture as an agent of convivial space, whether immersed in the Atlantic or engaged in the city – neither an insular container, but an opening to one another. Plunge in and have your say. The schools and Rubble – a new collaborative of recent graduates – table a menu “Collective Interference” – a counter-balancing nuance for the over expo-sure.

So passing from the equinox into October scan the calendar of festivals harvesting autumn light and air. If you miss anything just imagine what it might have been like to be there.

Fifty years ago, Gordon Matta Clark and a band of associates asserted that they had exhibited Anarchitecture show at 112 Greene Street NY…some question whether that show ever happened, but the idea of it, much like that of Hybrasil, seeded all manner of illuminating actions, cutting open edges around the globe, from Splitting a house in Englewood – 1974, to Day’s End at Pier 52 on the west side of Manhattan, to the conic intersect man-handled out of condemned Parisien structure adjacent the Pompidou the following year, each joining space with light, and then in ’76…..Window Blow-Out at Idea as Model disturbing the bow-tied abstractions of the NY Five and nascent pomo-musing, with the realism of Matta Clarke’s depiction of dereliction in the Bronx.*

Don’t hold your breath, join in and undo your assumptions.

 

This entry is written on a day when remembering the late Hugh Campbell architect of Tralee and Chinon/Les Roches St Paul. Cousin and friend of my father, whose sketches I watched appearing in pen on paper in the sweltering summer of 1976, perspiring open-shirted on the south-facing terrace of our home in Tullamore. In response to my mother’s questions his felt pens unlocked options on the sun-soaked paper in front of us, doors swung open – how our childhood abode might be configured slightly otherwise, as our family evolved…unbuilt adjustments as it turned out but inspiring the seed of an idea in me – and a possible answer for adults when they would ask what you might be when you grew up.
Still too soon to say for sure but, it’s a holding tactic.
20:20pm 20th September 2024

(*) For more on GMC refer to ‘Day’s End’, ‘Splitting’, ‘Conical Intersect’ and as to whether ‘Anarchitecture’ was ever staged or exhibited on Greene Street refer to Mark Wigley: Anarchitecture 101.5–Cutting Matta-Clark (September 27, 2017)

In October 1924 Andre Breton published his “Surrealist Manifesto” – join the dots and translate at will.

Anáil – breath a tharraingt– to draw breath
Tíreacht – the most westerly lighthouse in Europe