In an era marked by rapid urbanization, climate emergencies, and evolving societal needs, architecture has a complex role to play, and a responsibility to engage actively yet sensibly with cultural, political, and economic considerations. In this context, Níall McLaughlin stands out for his balanced approach rooted in historical contexts, yet aware and responsive to contemporary challenges. His studio, Niall McLaughlin Architects, embraces a dialogue-centric approach, fostering a collaborative environment. ArchDaily's senior editor Maria-Cristina Florian had the chance to sit down with Níall McLaughlin and discuss his perspective on the role of architecture in today's society and the emerging challenges of architectural education.
The conversation took place during the second edition of FAST, the Festival for Architecture Schools of Tomorrow in Romania. The annual festival gathers the 5 schools of architecture in the country with the purpose of exploring the intersection of professional and educational practices within the field. It serves as an opportunity for students, academics, and practitioners to come together, exchange ideas and experiences, and contribute to the ongoing discourse surrounding architectural education. This edition was hosted by the Faculty of Architecture in Cluj-Napoca, and organized with the support of the Romanian Order of Architects (OAR).
Throughout the discussion, McLaughlin provided insight into the current landscape of architecture embedded in larger societal contexts, and the pressing need for architectural education to adapt to contemporary issues. With a career marked by notable achievements, including winning the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2022 for the Magdalene College Library, he reveals his process for working within historical contexts and references as well as his pedagogical approach. In addition to his practice, established in London in 1990, McLaughlin is also a Professor of Architectural Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Read on to discover the full conversation and his insights.
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Níall McLaughlin Architects' Magdalene College Library in Cambridge Wins the 2022 RIBA Stirling PrizeArchDaily (Maria-Cristina Florian): I know that time is an important aspect of your practice, can you describe how you understand this connection between time and architecture?
Níall McLaughlin: There is this concept of time that dominated 20th-century architecture, which comes out of a particular philosophical tradition, I think it comes from Hegel. It is this in a sense that time has to be justified in the moment, that time has agency and the historical moment has to be justified by the people living within it. The word zeitgeist is often used to describe the spirit of the age. The spirit of the age is not just something that you step back and observe from a distance, it is an active agent that is driving you to be who you are within a historical moment. This is one concept of time that I want to hold on to. If you listen to architects from the 1920s, for example, they are all talking about the zeitgeist, that it is their duty to fulfill the spirit of the age, as if the spirit of the age is a demanding taskmaster that is making them create the buildings that they create.
This is one concept of time. The other concept of time comes from a book I read called "Building in Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion" by Marvin Trachtenberg. He talks about the Albertian turn that happened early in the Renaissance, where the idea of a building is held by the author of the building in a set of drawings. So the building in its idealized form is created in a drawing. Everything that leads to that drawing is a preparation, and everything that happens after that is a risk. So, the idealized concept of the building is held in the architectural drawing. What this does is it removes the whole process of the becoming of the building and of the making of the building.
We can compare that to, for example, a Gothic church, like the one I visited here in Cluj. They were showing me the side aisles that have been widened. Where they once wanted a central aisle, they later decided to widen the side aisles, and it resulted in a blind arch at the end. This shows that the building was not only built, but inhabited and redesigned, not all at once but over a period of time, and all of these ideas were integrated into society. This is completely different from the Albertian idea, where the construction is a risk to the concept, rather than the concept becoming a dance between design and habitation. I want to get rid of the concept of time in architecture from this notion that the building has a single point of authorship, and in a sense, a single document of authorship through the drawing, and that it gets completed through the risky construction process, which can only erode the building. Often when I think about it, I use the metaphor of the building as a handful of water that you have to carry across a risky space and stop it from leaking through your fingers. This is a very neurotic idea of what construction is. I want to try to invert that in some way.
If we now look forward, the core challenge of our society at the moment is to deal with the climate emergency. We can't just think of that as a mechanical problem that must be solved mechanically, but rather as a societal issue. The first order of the problem is the climate emergency, but the second order is the discourse that occurs around it: what kind of society would be a good society that responds to the climate emergency, and what kind of architecture could that society make? For me, I started to think of architecture not as a privileged object with a single point of authorship, but that architecture is a process in time, which is bound by contingency, labor, imagination, and error.
The building stock, all of our buildings, taken together, are like a great tapestry, looping back and stitching forward. We see building culture as a communal performance in time, and the architect as being someone who operates within that performance and has a role within it.
I'm very interested in this idea of long continuity. When I'm designing, I always want to look back and find out where that design idea came from. I don't want to think of myself as 'the inventor' of an idea, I'm much more interested in who did that before me, did they do it differently, did I know that or had I come to a similar solution. It becomes a dialogue through time. T.S. Eliot, the great Anglo-American poet, has written a book called "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and he makes a beautiful observation. He says that poets will look at history for inspiration, but every new poem that is written changes every poem that has already been written. The dialogue is not a one-way conversation, upwards from the past into the present, but that the present is capable of changing the past.
AD: How do you approach teaching architectural design in a way that balances the need for historical awareness with fostering original creativity among students?
NM: The school that I thought in, in London in the 1990s, had this very strong agenda that students have to be thrown back on their own resources, on their own subjectivity, and be freed from the clutter of history, so that they could produce new ideas. In my experience, that doesn't happen. James Joyce, my hero, says 'Imagination is memory'. I think that is beautiful because we are a mimetic animal, we invent through copying, through mimesis, by combining things, and, once again, by stitching back and stitching forward. Once we accept that, it's a much richer world.
However, we have to think about this creatively, because when you are teaching students, you can't simply ask them to copy the past. Instead, we've taken this idea of precedent that we teach in the design studio. What we are saying is: how do you learn how to interrogate that project from the past? If I'm designing a building and I'm thinking of Villa Maria or Mies van de Rohe's Villa Tugendhat, I don't want to just flick through a magazine or book and select this or that detail to imitate. What I need to do is to go into and under the building and come back out through it in some way, so that I can understand how that building is a manifestation of ideas that were at large in its time. There needs to be a way of objectively interrogating your resources in order to win the imaginative awe, rather than just cut and paste.
AD: Continuing this topic, if you were to give one advice to fellow teachers in architecture schools, what would that be?
Trust your students to change your mind.
AD: How about addressing the students, what would be your message?
NM: I do feel worried, particularly in the advent of AI. To me it feels like a tsunami, it's so big that I don't know how to comprehend it. Maybe it won't be the same for them, maybe it's just the water that they swim in. I find it undermines so many of my ideas of what architecture is, I think it's a huge challenge. The abstraction rationalization and instrumentalization of building culture can be very problematic. I spoke with a lot of students here today and they're like my students, they believe in a certain idea of what architecture should be, and then they get thrown into a world of practice that doesn't really support that idea.
This exists at a cultural, and economic level, big structural factors that have to do with the way that buildings are produced. While walking around the city, you can see these different economic political cultural models laid out in different parts of the city. My sense, when I looked at them, was that the most problematic aspects are the most recent ones. To be clear, there are some very good new buildings, but there is an idea of what building development is that you can see coming over the horizon of the city that worries me for building culture at large. I think the students really need to look at these aspects and to those challenging them. Among them, I really admire practices like Berlin-based studio bplus.xyz (b+), which has just launched a citizen's initiative for EU legislation that would encourage the renovation of existing buildings and stop speculation-based demolitions in an effort to lower carbon emissions.
I think architects have to be much more assertive in trying to create the world that would allow the buildings that they believe in to thrive.
AD: Turning towards your practice, you often say that you are not in search of a particular style, yet, viewed from the outside, your buildings do have a sense of coherence. What are some of the threads connecting them?
NM: The coherence of style is not necessarily searched for in an visual way, instead it speaks of a set of attitudes regarding design and construction, and the way in which design is embedded into the communities and the society that you are creating for. I suppose my core thought, when I'm practicing, is that I go out to each new client, each new situation, and see them as opportunities for me to produce something that I could not have produced myself, yet I bring a certain fastidiousness of eye, fastidiousness of detailing. There is probably an imaginative visual somatic world that I bring to the projects.
I like to describe the moment when we meet a client with the image of two rivers joining, each carrying their own load of cargo. Their meeting creates this moment of turbulence, where the differently colored waters start to mix. I love that moment, waiting for that dialogue to produce something that would align so that the two rivers can never be the same again, they become something else together. In this moment there is the real imaginative opportunity. Often, it's deeply frustrating, the client sometimes comes back with proposals that you don't know what to do with, but you have to see that moment as a difficulty that would eventually lead you forward.
AD: In many of your projects, the structure of the building takes on an aesthetic and architectural role, allowing the buildings to be both expressive and paired back. How is your collaboration with experts of other disciplines, like structural engineers?
NM: Generally, the structural engineers are involved from the onset. I worked very hard to find the right engineers, there are very few of them with whom you can have a great creative dialogue. A lot of them will think: what does the architect want me to do, how can I fix this problem as quickly as possible? I have Simon Schmidt as one of my engineers, and he is like a tutor, revealing aspects that I hadn't thought about, and engaging in a back-and-forth dialogue. In some ways, we are teaching each other. At best it feels like that, but it needs very special people to be like that.
For me, the clarity of the structure is very important. Some said that the two great authors of the 21st century were Peter Behrens and H. P. Berlage. Behrens thought that architecture is an accumulation of form, and Berlage thought that architecture is a stripping away of things. I am a Berlage type of guy.
