Discourse formation in architecture exhibitions - an oligoptical approach

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dc.check.date2027-12-31
dc.contributor.advisorMcCartney, Kevin
dc.contributor.advisorRascaroli, Laura
dc.contributor.authorMcLaughlin, John
dc.contributor.funderUniversity College Cork
dc.date.accessioned2024-09-26T11:20:18Z
dc.date.available2024-09-26T11:20:18Z
dc.date.issued2023
dc.date.submitted2023
dc.description.abstractThis thesis is submitted for the degree of Ph.D. by Prior Published Work by a practicing architect who joined the university mid-career. The publications were written for a series of international biennale exhibitions between 2012 and 2020. The spatial designs of the pavilions were conceived as embodied manifestoes rather than as supplements to the texts, so that the relationship between them has become the object of the study. In this way, architectural discourse is ‘made public’ (Latour, 2005b: 14-43), and the exhibition acts as a discursive space. The first chapter of the thesis locates the origins of these publications in response to debates about autonomy and criticality in architecture that began in the nineteen-seventies. This part of the thesis concludes by drawing on more recent work by architectural theorists questioning the autonomy of architectural artefacts under globalisation, where the production of components is often displaced geographically away from the global north (Heynen, 2002: 378-399 and Cruz, 2013: 205-216). The second chapter of the thesis concerns the pavilion as an architectural typology. This chapter then analyses the national pavilions built in the Venetian Giardini following World War Two and reads them as representative architecture of the geopolitical order that emerged at that time. In Part Two, the first prior publication was the catalogue of the Pavilion of Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012. The pavilion highlighted the fact that Ireland is one of the most globalised countries in the world and that, in a digitally networked world, prominence is determined by connectivity to the emerging global networks rather than by geographic centrality. The second and third prior publications were chapters in a co-edited book titled Infra-Eireann: Infrastructure and the Architectures of Modernity in Ireland 1916-2016, that was researched and written in response to Rem Koolhaas’ theme for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale Absorbing Modernity, where national pavilions were asked to research the previous hundred years of modernisation (Koolhaas, 2014: 22). In response to Koolhaas’ theme, the book explored the ways that modern infrastructures had been used by the newly independent Irish state to make Ireland modern. The fourth prior publication was a co-authored paper published in ARENA Journal of Architectural Research in 2018. The paper explored the relationship between the research and the design of the 2014 pavilion that embodied both a support structure and a way of seeing. The fifth and last of the prior publications was written for the second Biennale of Artistic Research in Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen over the winter of 2019-20. The exhibit and the associated published paper, focused on a real project for the National Archives of Ireland, restructuring the building to provide space for exhibitions as a means of making public the research that happens there. It reimagined the Archive as a ‘productive space of conflict’ (Miessen, 2019: 9-28). In Part Three, the Commentary on the Corpus of Research begins by theoretically framing the prior publications in response to the questions posed in the first part . It challenges the idea of an essential culture, and it proposes an alternative reading of culture that follows the great theorist of decolonisation Edward Said. Section two of the Commentary follows Bruno Latour and cuts through the opposition between autonomy and criticality that developed in architectural theory at the end of the twentieth century. As an alternative to the ‘panoramic’ way of seeing, Latour proposes an ‘oligopticon’ where ‘sturdy but extremely narrow views of the (connected) whole are made possible’ (Latour, 2005a:181). The third section of the Commentary situates the pavilion-making practice between words and works and submits this as an example of the ‘halfway house’ that Halina Dunin-Woyseth proposed as an alternative to the two existing models for doctoral research in architecture (2006: 81-100). The thesis concludes by arguing that these two alternatives were both predicated on the respective autonomy of theory on the one hand and of practice on the other. Following Latour, it proposes a hybrid practice, constructing oligoptica, where theory is enacted through design.en
dc.description.statusNot peer revieweden
dc.description.versionAccepted Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationMcLaughlin, J. 2023. Discourse formation in architecture exhibitions - an oligoptical approach. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.
dc.identifier.endpage199
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/16456
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherUniversity College Corken
dc.rights© 2023, John McLaughlin.
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subjectArchitecture exhibition
dc.subjectDiscourse formation
dc.subjectOligopticon
dc.titleDiscourse formation in architecture exhibitions - an oligoptical approach
dc.typeDoctoral thesisen
dc.type.qualificationlevelDoctoralen
dc.type.qualificationnamePhD - Doctor of Philosophyen
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