In chapter 2 of Books Downstairs, come and hear Ruth O’Herlihy, Eibhlín Ní Chathasaigh and James Albert Martin discuss their new books in conversation with architect and architectural historian Livia Hurley.

Both books deal with cities – Dublin and Chicago. The books anticipate a conversation on how we come to know a city and the reciprocal exchange that happens between people and the cities in which they live and in which architects and others act.

Dublin Exchange, the second publication in the Exchange Series, responds to a specific moment in the city’s architecture history. In 2021, architect Niall McCullough (1958–2021) died. McCullough was one of Dublin city’s most significant writers on architecture and the city. For Dublin’s citizens, architects, and writers, his was a significant legacy of research, history, passion, intelligence, and argument for Dublin. The ‘exchange’ of the book’s title makes reference to the work of McCullough but projects forward with words and photographs reflecting aspects of Dublin today.

Soil Lab: A Built Experiment is a critical reflection on the making of Soil Lab, a project built with a community in North Lawndale, Chicago, and hosted by the Danish Arts Foundation at the 2021 edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The pages give space to a conversation that stretches far outside both the confines of the Soil Lab’s site in North Lawndale and the short duration of the biennial. The book is a meeting place for the voices which contributed to the Soil Lab project, and it maps their constellation of disciplines — across architecture, art, anthropology, ecology, craft and community work — and global geographies, including the US, Denmark, Ireland, Puerto Rico and Austria. The story of the project, and the many lives and threads that it brushed up against, is told through histories, criticism, photographic essays, instruction manuals, soil recipes and interviews.

This is chapter 2 of Books Downstairs, a new series of conversations on books about architecture, organised and hosted by the Irish Architecture Foundation.

It is free to attend, but space is limited. Book early to secure your place!

Reserve your place.

Photo courtesy of Eibhlín Ní Chathasaigh and James Albert Martin.