Loggia Student Workshop, EASA 2009, Val Camonica, Italy.

In August of 2009, I was a Tutor for a student workshop in the European Architecture Students Assembly (EASA), located in Angone, Northern Italy. My co-Tutors were Sean Attley, Kevin Kelly and Paul O'Brien, and the workshop group consisted of 30 students. The theme was supermARCHet, concerning branding in architecture and its negative effects on Italian cities. Our team responded by re-interpreting the medieval Italian meeting/ market place typology of the ‘Loggia dei Mercanti’. We created a prototype, which like the typology was based on a series of rules giving it the flexibility to respond to many sites. However, LOGGIA is not simply a realisation of a system of rules. It is about the establishment of patterns and the addition of eccentricities to break them. Pattern and eccentricity are inseperable. LOGGIA is the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by Irish students in an international design + build student competition and it currently serves as a meeting place and art gallery for the local community group. It has been published in PLAN Magazine, Architecture Ireland and received of a Special Mention in the Architecture Association of Ireland Awards 26.

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