Design Challenge and Design Ideas

REFLECTIONS ON focuses on how a space can change state through unintentional interactivity. This may come about through the interaction of the space with time, nature and/or people.

This exhibition comprises a series of episodes shot by final-year architecture students at University College Dublin in collaboration with communication designers at National College of Art and Design, Dublin. As the participants approach the end of our time as students, the occupy the edge territory between education and practice. As individual fragments, the videos have become musings and reflections on this condition, mapping their positions relative to the culture and practice of architecture. Some of the films captured the ethereal qualities of everyday encounters, foregrounding the incidental and trusting in chance. Whilst others document our experiments in critical discourse, testing methods of collective action to question accepted institutional and societal norms.

How the brief was fulfilled

Each film responded to the question ‘What can you do to make a (free)space undergo change?’, as a starting point, documenting spaces before and after our own interventions. The films thus engage with the transformative potential of space, and are a series of reflections on the ability of space to contain memory, free thinking and generosity but also resistance in the face of inherited social structures. Film as a medium allowed us to document the environments and situations around us that evoked specific aspects of space, time, existence.

The resultant works are neither generic nor specific: they explore without confirming any definitive agenda. Overall they share an ambiguous mood, slipping between anxiety and optimism, they betray our collective reflection on our position at the threshold between education and practice.

This interactive digital presence was created for the gallery space at The Biennale Architettura 2018, FREESPACE, Venice, Italy.