UCD College of Engineering & Architecture

From the Dean

In Medias Res

Architecture is fueled by talk. Even the most laconic of exhortations to free what’s built from what’s written (Mies: ‘Build, Don’t Talk’) relies on language. Through every stage of its existence, from earliest inklings to practical completion, the architectural project, described in drawings and models, is sustained on a sea of words, which are used to describe, to propose, to explore, to specify, to negotiate, to fix. Architecture is building talked about.

No surprise then that a school of architecture should be awash with words. A walk through its rooms on any given week will find students and staff engaged in conversation - in pairs, in small groups, in larger gatherings. Drawings, models and projects are the matters at hand, but conversation is the medium. Bodies are disposed accordingly, clustered around a common point, facing across a shared subject, addressing an agreed topic. Mapping these dispositions, a terrain emerges in which knowledge is assiduously talked through rather than categorically set down. Everyone participates in this activity, simply by being part of the conversation.

So it is that the school’s centenary celebrations have been dominated by talk. Lisa Cassidy’s Herculean feats of recording the recollections of a cast of key protagonists and graduates from as far back as 1941, described elsewhere in this volume, have set the tone. The full narrative of one hundred years of architectural education is still being constructed from these recordings, and from the photos, documents and archival material so memorably displayed and so helpfully annotated during the centenary’s opening event. But the assembling of the archive has huge value in itself.

The centenary website records the graduates year by year, from the first - Vincent Kelly in 1917 - to the class of 2011. Inscribed on the ceiling of the Red Room, this roll call is already incomplete, about to be added to by another group of graduates, many of them involved in the ceiling’s making. Even as it looks back, the school keeps moving forward. The website is structured so that wherever you land is the present; one way is the past, the other way is the future. In medias res: this is the school’s territory. Hence, many of this centenary year’s events have focused on formative moments rather than summative achievements. In his First Encounters talk, Professor Cathal O’Neill recalled his decision, following graduation, to go to IIT to study with Mies. It was, he said, by no means certain that he was going to go there. Gropius and Wright were also teaching in the US, Corb and Aalto had featured more prominently in his education. In retrospect, of course, the Miesian trajectory seems predestined, but seen from the viewpoint of a young, ambitious graduate in the mid-fifties, it was one of many possible paths, none of them clearly visible.

Henri Bergson described beautifully how ‘the past, in its entirety, probably, follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it..’

But even as the past is constantly swelled by the present, the future keeps coming into view. Each of the more than two thousand journeys through the school to date was made facing firmly forward. Inherent in the very word ‘project’, the future is built into every presentation of every project of every student of every year of the school’s hundred-year history. That’s what all the talk has always been about: we had an idea about the future.

Professor Hugh Campbell

April 2012