Wednesday |29th MAY | ILARKS Open Lecture Series
6.00 -7.30 pm
Dermot FOLEY| Dermot Foley Landscape Architects | Dublin “Preciseness, vagueness. An experimental park in Dublin”
L’architetto Dermot Foley, professore all’University College Dublin ed autore del libro “Artifice” sull’architettura del paesaggio contemporanea in Irlanda, indagherà i problemi che incontrano gli architetti paesaggisti nel proprio lavoro. In particolar modo si parlerà del livello di indeterminatezza dei materiali naturali che si incontrano in un dato paesaggio e di come questa incertezza diventi un fattore imprescindibile da prendere in considerazione in fase di progettazione.
A porism is a proposition affirming the possibility of finding such conditions as will render a certain problem indeterminate, or capable of innumerable solutions. In our practice we try to draw with preciseness, but the materials with which we work cannot be fully known. When we work as landscape architects the magical qualities of living materials are known unknowns, or perhaps more usefully, known unknowables. These materials must be considered in processes and these processes can be considered in geometry. Uncertainty is a quality of all three phenomena: mutability of materials, inter-related dynamics of processes, and changing semantics of geometry. With our recent work, innovating with secondary-raw-materials and with complex archaeology, the exact format of even the inert materials is unknown to us when we are making the drawings. Since I wish to make drawings that emulate more closely the materials with which we will work, the drawings, no matter how precise, must also allow for openness and variation before and during construction. They must cater for vagueness. Layered plans, time lapse and various other types of drawing help us to keep the design and construction process open. I see the drawings as possible definitions of what geometry means in landscape design.
Dermot Foley is Principal with Dermot Foley Landscape Architects, which he established in 2001 in Dublin. Before setting up his own practice he worked in London and Brussels as a landscape architect. He was awarded Europe 40-Under-40 in 2010. He was an Adapt-r Scholar in 2016 and is a PhD candidate with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). He has received many awards for landscape design, landscape research and landscape conservation. Dermot is an Assistant Professor at University College Dublin (UCD). He initiated the EU FP7-funded research project on Resilient Cities in 2011, titled TURAS, which involved more than 25 EU research partners. His practice book, titled Artifice, is the first comprehensive publication on contemporary Irish landscape architecture and was published in 2011. Dermot’s practice-research interests include innovative ways of working with secondary-raw-materials in public realm and new ways to make drawings that reflect the process of designing with these materials.
