And They All Lived Happily Ever After! Utopian Construction across Archive, Architecture and Art

Inspired by ANU’s ‘The Secret Space: Palimpsest’ multimedia installation – which reflects on the relationship between individual idealism and the practical establishment of a new state – an invited panel moderated by Una Mullally (author and journalist) will explore the utopian ideals and narratives of the revolutionary participants and the early architectural ambitions of the new Irish Free State using archives held in the National Archives, architecture and art.

These themes will be explored within the historical and social context of Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s when the nascent state undertook a campaign of modernisation, embracing cutting-edge architectural design and construction technologies as the country embarked upon the world stage as a newly independent nation.


Speakers’ biographies
Owen Boss is a visual artist based in Dublin. In 2009, he co-founded ANU Productions and as Co-Artistic Director, his work includes: ‘These Rooms’ (Art:16 Arts Council Commission); ‘Sunder’ (Dublin Theatre Festival); ‘On Corporation Street’ (HOME Manchester Commission); ‘Sunder Development’ (National Museum of Ireland); ‘Pals – the Irish at Gallipoli’; (National Museum of Ireland) and ‘Beautiful Dreamers’ (Limerick City of Culture).

Lar Joye is Port Heritage Director at Dublin Port since 2017, leading the Port Heritage & Communication Team to create a distributed museum network throughout the Port estate. Previously he curated the award-winning ‘Soldiers and Chiefs: the Irish at war at home and abroad from 1550 to the present day’ exhibition at Collins Barracks, described as a museum within a museum. More recently he has partnered with theatre company ANU Productions on the plays ‘Pals – the Irish at Gallipoli’, ‘Sunder’ and ‘These Rooms’ and he is a member of the Irish Film Institute’s Newsreels project: ‘The Irish Independence Film Collection’.

John McLaughlin is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor of Architectural Design at University College Cork. He co-curated the exhibition ‘Making Ireland Modern’, the principal architectural project of ART:2016 and he co-edited the volume Infrastructure and the Architectures of Modernity in Ireland 1916–2016 (with Gary Boyd). His eponymous architecture practice designs cultural and heritage buildings and was responsible for the masterplan for public spaces in the National Archives, Ireland.

Ellen Rowley is Assistant Professor in Modern Irish Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning + Environmental Policy, University College Dublin. She is an architectural and cultural historian, a teacher and a writer. Interested in architectural obsolescence, the intersection of social histories and buildings and the place of the Catholic Church in Ireland’s built environment, she has published extensively including Housing, Architecture and the Edge Condition (2019, Routledge, Taylor + Francis) and (co-editor), Making Belfield. Space + Place at UCD (2020, UCD Press).


Moderator
Una Mullally is a writer from Dublin working across journalism, non-fiction, screenwriting and poetry. She writes a weekly column for the Irish Times on society and politics and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. She is the author of an oral history on the marriage equality movement in Ireland, In The Name Of Love (The History Press, 2014), she edited the Repeal the 8th Anthology (Unbound, 2018) and is currently an Associate Artist with THISISPOPBABY.