Imagined Ireland

‘Our island is not so much densely inhabited as densely remembered, densely imagined’, Andrew Clancy writes in AR’s June issue which explores the architecture, cities and landscapes of the islands of Ireland. The architecture of Tom de Paor is perhaps the most powerful and evocative example of this imagined Ireland. The Pálás, an art house cinema in the western Irish city of Galway, is a mad fantasy of a building, the alterity of the silver screen permeating as if it had been mixed and poured in situ with the concrete body.

This lecture celebrates the AR’s June issue about the islands of Ireland, following a sister event in Dublin, Foreign Correspondence with Andrew Clancy, Shelley McNamara, Lisa Godson and Cian Deegan.

Tom de Paor graduated from UCD in 1991, establishing his practice in 1991. Since the completion of the visitor centre at Ballincollig, completed in 1994, the practice has expanded its expertise to a diverse range of projects in the public realm culminating most recently in Pálás, a cinema in Galway. De Paor also works on exhibitions, sculpture, film and print publications and is a regular visiting critic and lecturer at schools of architecture nationally and internationally including the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

A monthly international architecture magazine since 1896, The Architectural Review scours the globe for architecture that challenges and inspires, combining fearless storytelling, independent critical voices and thought-provoking projects from around the world.

Image: Dennis Gilbert

This lecture is organised in partnership with The Architectural Review: