IAF Summer School

The Irish Architecture Foundation’s 6th annual Summer School, Material Echoes, is a day of participatory workshops and creative experimentation.

Taking place on Saturday 5 April 2025 in Dublin, this full-day event is free and open to anyone with curiosity about architecture and the city, with particular relevance for architects, artists and creative practitioners of all disciplines.

The IAF Summer School offers participants the opportunity for collective exchange and collaborative making during two guided workshops. With a focus on playful interpretations of the city and new modes of representation, we invite you to join in as we discuss, make and create!

Collaboration with LINA fellows

The workshops will be led by design and research collective Rubble (Ireland, Spain, UK) and Lucille Leger and Jacques-Marie Ligot (France). All are featured LINA Fellows, and the IAF Summer School is presented as part of the LINA programme of architecture events taking place across Europe.

Date: Saturday 5 April 2025

Time: 10:00-17:00

Venue: Studio 6, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2, D02 AC84

Booking: Booking is first come, first served and will close on 31 March or when we reach capacity. Reserve your free place.

This full-day event will feature two linked workshops. Participants are encouraged to join both workshops.

10:00-13:00 – ‘good for nothings’ workshop with Rubble

‘Why is everything made of trash?’ Dean Kissick, Five Years

And what in fact is trash? What is ‘good’, what do we value? When is a characteristic or piece of the city considered valuable? At a point when circularity and re-use are becoming ingrained as concepts within architecture, we begin to consider more deeply what it means to work with the existing and how we can find our own character within the melee of junk and discard which we have to work with. How do we think about the aesthetics of reuse, both of materials and implicitly the ideologies which existing forms and places represent?

Together we will make a wilfully purposeless ephemeral scenography. Freed from function we can explore narrative and performative building practices, those which connect the inhabitant to the city through the act of interpreting it and altering it, considering the potential for new and playful aesthetics which arise from processes of repurposing.

Over the course of the workshop we will discuss these ideas collectively and consider how the way the city is built impacts our daily enjoyment of it. The workshop aims to equip participants with some basic DIY strategies and, more fundamentally, a feeling for the notion of appropriation itself, the understanding that our relationship with the city can be reciprocal and that we can each find space to build narratives within it.

13:00-14:00 – lunch (not provided)

14:00-17:00 – ‘Learning with Ghosts’ workshop with Jacques-Marie Ligot and Lucille Leger

This workshop, inspired by Ligot and Leger’s Periple Duet residency-on-the-move, will explore the spectral nature of architectural representation, particularly architectures of light and observation. Participants will collaborate to create a collective model incorporating images and texts from their personal histories. This collective model will serve as both a subjective architecture and a three-dimensional poem. Using the cadavre exquis method, it will offer an opportunity to reflect on the elements that haunt our everyday spaces.

We invite participants to bring a sketchbook / notebook and three printed images of architectures related to light or light infrastructures (such as lighthouses, astronomical observatories, street lighting, reflections and more).

More information & how to apply: linked in the IAF website