Il Sole 24 Ore

In the Irish Pavilion in the Arsenale, Niall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou explore the contrast between the architect’s best intentions for an Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Dublin and the way in which it is experienced, inhabited, and spatially understood by patients and staff. Here, architecture is presented not as a product, but as the facilitation of a process of inhabitation, which may not align with the view of the designer : ‘the architect’s world”, say the curators, “is based on a knowledge and stability of the project which is not accessible to patients who can’t synthesise the information from their environment. They experience a fragmented world; and, because there is still recourse to deep memory, a world that is filled with a phantasmagoric and unbidden procession of other spaces and times.” Not to be missed!