The Reason of Towns exhibition coming to Mayo venue

AN engaging and provocative new exhibition on the tradition and future of the Irish town is to open in Áras Inis Gluaire, Belmullet.

Opening on August 16 as part of a national tour across Ireland in 2024 and 2025, The Reason of Towns is a new, ambitious exhibition of the work of one of Ireland’s most renowned architects, Valerie Mulvin.

Curated, commissioned and produced by the Irish Architecture Foundation and hosted in partnership with local arts and cultural organisations and venues, including Áras Inis Gluaire, this exhibition is intended to become a public occasion for the telling and retelling of true stories, lost traditions and possible futures for Irish towns and the people who live in them.

Initially travelling from Birr to Belmullet, then Trim as part of the 2024 summer tour, The Reason of Towns will be supported in each town with a one-day public programme, organised specifically for each town. Called the 'Talks of the Town', events will include walking tours, a community-led workshop and a panel discussion. Local residents, members of heritage and environmental committees, planners and researchers are encouraged to sign up.

Mark Ruddy, Belmullet-based architect, said of the exhibition: “As Belmullet town celebrates 200 years since its planned establishment in 1824, we are delighted to welcome the IAF and The Reason for Towns exhibition this August. Through this impressive showcase of the pioneering work of Valerie Mulvin and through the open-invite community workshop ‘Talks of the Town’, we hope to ignite a conversation on the importance of our town in a regional and national context.”

Organised around a series of immersive display ‘characters’ intended to engage and communicate to audiences in a variety of ways, the writings and buildings of Mulvin and her practice McCullough Mulvin Architects are exhibited through models, drawings, texts, and a series of slides, notes, personal memorabilia, building fragments and more. Together these reflect just a fraction of three decades of work on the subject of towns, recently gathered and published in Mulvin’s book, Approximate Formality, which was a starting point for this exhibition.

In addition, the exhibition also presents three newly commissioned films: The Shape is the Thing is a spatial-portrait of Clones, Youghal, Dungarvan and Templemore, describing their ‘ordinary-spectacular’ forms; Of Pride and Place documents 10 optimistic stories of action and change by architects working in towns across Ireland; while, finally, the exhibition will also present a new interview with Valerie Mulvin by broadcaster Vincent Woods, reflecting on her work and the subject of the exhibition.

Said Valerie Mulvin: “It’s a great honour to be working with the Irish Architecture Foundation to share my excitement and curiosity about the extraordinary character of our towns. In The Reason of Towns I want to celebrate their geometry, their materiality and their potential and to talk about the particular and the universal, to rediscover these great spaces, underpinned by the material qualities of their stones and walls and yards.

“In my book, Approximate Formality, the starting point of this exhibition, I proposed a way of seeing Irish towns as part of European urban culture.

“Woven through the exhibition is evidence - in 30 years of projects and buildings - of our ambition as architects to inspire, re-invent and communicate the value of formal and built grain and fabric in our towns. With The Reason of Towns, I hope we can start a conversation about the value of the local, about using and reusing everything that already exists, and what it really means to share space in towns, among those unique environments and communities.”

The exhibition runs from August 16 to 30 in Áras Inis Gluaire, Belmullet. The self-guided exhibition is open to members of the public to attend on a drop-in basis.

The 'Talks of the Town' one-day programme will open for registration in advance of each tour stop. In this way the exhibition becomes an opportunity for local issues to be aired and discussed in a national context, fostering civic pride and promoting local action.

Visit https://architecturefoundation.ie/ for additional information.