Re:Design

Tuesday, 5th October, 2010.

A team of architecture students from SAUL, the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick, was commissioned to design an indoor installation to facilitate the viewing of a documentary film as part of the Table of Contents exhibition. The conception and design of this installation was to become part of this exhibition project on creative practice as an exemplar of architectural creativity. – ‘The Drawing Board’ are Edel Murphy, Diarmuid O’Súilleabháin, Adrian Clery and Jan Frohburg.

Taking inspiration from the many depictions of St Jerome in his study, the Drawing Board proposes creating a ‘room within a room,’ a situation that induces focused attention whilst maintaining a tensioned balance between the imposing presence of LSAD’s Church Gallery and the intimate experience of watching artists’ creations unfold before your eyes. The proposed intervention intends to remove the viewer from the simultaneous confines of the white-walled exhibition space and the former church, and to provide a distinctly different sensorial experience that allows the space to be viewed in a new way.

Set out to control movement, to arrest the visitors’ wanderings through the exhibition the installation guides them around and up into the viewing space. Aiming to create a threshold situation rather than containment, the design explores possibilities of a raised platform in combination with a suspended or transparent envelope. With an interest in slowness comes attention to detail and texture that informs the choice of materials. The design engages materials that combine apparent lightness and sensuality with an assertive strength vis-à-vis the eclectic church interior. – With the project limited to a minimal budget, the design takes recourse to using borrowed materials and rendering an elementary spatial condition by defining two sides of an enclosure and the floor.