Pictured at the Defining Space Conference (l-r): Hugh Campbell, Gary Boyd, Douglas Smith and Anthony Vidler
The international interdisciplinary conference Defining Space took place recently in Newman House and the National Gallery of Ireland. Funded by the Humanities Institute of Ireland (HII) and the UCD School of Architecture, Landscape and Civil Engineering, the conference attracted 130 delegates, including more than seventy speakers from over twenty countries and a wide variety of disciplines.
The aim of the conference was to investigate the relevance of the spatial paradigm in theory and practice across the arts and social sciences. A number of recurring themes emerged: the use of drawing as a means of grasping and constructing space; the importance of empathy to an understanding of modern conceptions of space; and the negotiations of place that characterise contemporary urban life.
Organised across two sites, the conference provided a stimulating setting for scholars and practitioners from different backgrounds to explore the elusive and contested notion of space, establishing both the divergences and common ground essential to meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue.
The event was organised by Dr Hugh Campbell, UCD School of Architecture, Landscape & Civil Engineering and Dr Douglas Smith, UCD School of Languages & Literatures. Keynote addresses were given at the National Gallery by Barry Bergdoll, Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Steve Pile, Professor of Human Geography at the Open University and Anthony Vidler, Dean of Architecture at the Cooper Union, New York.
An accompanying exhibition, curated by Emmett Scanlon and Sarah Cremin of CAST Architecture, showed how seven young Irish architectural practices responded to the theme of Defining Space. This exhibition re-opens on November 9th in the Red Room in Richview, UCD.
