Visit Infra-Éireann – Ireland at Venice website HERE.

Infra-Éireann presents ten infrastructural episodes across a period of a hundred years. Placing architecture within a technological and cultural flowof national and international dimensions, it explores the operations of infrastructure in the making of modern Ireland at a range of scales from the detail design of objects to entire landscapes and other social and physical territories.

How modernity is absorbed into national cultures usually presupposes an attachment to previous conditions and a desire to reconcile the two. In an Irish context, due to the processes of de-colonisation and political independence, this relationship is more complicated.

In 1914, Ireland was largely agricultural and lacked any significant industrial complex. The construction of new infrastructures after independence in 1921 became central to the cultural imagining of the new nation. The adoption of modernist architecture was perceived as a way to escape the colonial past. As the desire to reconcile cultural and technological aims developed, these infrastructures became both the physical manifestation and concrete identity of the new nation with architecture an essential element in this construct.

Photo by Alice Clancy.

Infra-Éireann is NOT delivered by IAF  and is delivered by Infra-Éireann – Ireland at Venice for more information please visit this website.