Ireland Pavilion's 'Losing Myself' exhibition at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of Venice Biennale addresses to an important brain disease affecting over 46 million people worldwide. Curated by Yeoryia Manolopoulou and Niall McLaughlin, the gear gold drawing machine creates some sort of mosaic of information to interact with sufferrers of Dementia and this immersive installation tries to envisage a building architects designed for people with dementia through their own experiences. 

Image © WAC

The installation questions the notion of the building as a singular conception, and by extension, those architectural representations that insist upon buildings as finite and whole objects. The project is a reflection on the lessons learned through a decade of designing buildings for people with dementia.

Image © WAC

Alzheimer's disease is a form of dementia, one of a range of conditions that progressively degrade the synaptic connections within our brains. The condition erodes the ability to plan and to remember. It becomes gradually harder to situate yourself and to navigate your way in the world: two capacities central to the experience of architecture. The curators have worked for a decade, designing buildings for people with dementia.

Image © WAC

The exhibition's attempts to reflect on our own experience as architects working to ‘improve the quality of life while working on the margins, under tough circumstances, facing pressing challenges’. The curators have chosen the medium of a time-based projected drawing to embody our ideas. The drawing reflects upon the way in which the human mind constructs intertwined representations of situation and memory: what the poet Philip Larkin calls ‘the million-petaled flower/Of being here.’

Image © Lez Barker

''We are striving to expand our understanding and inform our practice, in the life of this project and into the future'' says the curators of the exhibition. ''The plan of any building is an architectural representation of the human need to be situated within an environment that provides orientation'' they added.

Image © Lez Barker

Using time-based projection, the machine redraws the experience of this plan as collectively witnessed by sixteen people using the building over the course of one day. The coherent, fixed plan an architect depends upon can never be fully brought into being by the building's occupants: they cannot use memory and projection to see beyond their immediate situation and can no longer synthesise their experiences to create a stable model of their environment. 

Image © Riccardo Tosetto

This produces a fragmentary 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. The overlapping, perhaps conflicting, experiences of the inhabitants question the notion of the building as a singular conception, and by extension, those architectural representations that insist upon buildings as finite and whole objects.

Image © Lez Barker

Image © Riccardo Tosetto

Initial sketch. To facilitate this study, the curators have redrawn the plan, subdividing it into rectangular areas of focus. The ratio of these rectangles of focus is set at 4:3, to mirror the aspect ratio of a fullscreen projection. Image courtesy of Losing Myself.

Image courtesy of Losing Myself.

Protagonists: The drafting hands embody 16 inhabitants of The Orchard Centre as they occupy parts of the building. The occupants draw fragments of the plan, because they cannot hold its totality in their minds. As the day passes, drawings accumulate and assemble a collective understanding of the building. Image courtesy of Losing Myself.

6am - 12pm Morning [Spring]

Respite clients wake and begin to rise. Some look towards the gardens. Night staff leave and day care staff arrive, followed soon afterwards by the staff of the Alzheimer's Society of Ireland headquarters. Breakfast is served and daycare clients begin to arrive by bus. People chat and the radio is turned on. The gardeners tend the planting beds, watched by a group of occupants who have stepped out for a cigarette. A meal is prepared in the kitchen. Image courtesy of Losing Myself.

12pm - 6pm Afternoon [Summer]

All meet for lunch in the dining hall. Some inhabitants go back to their bedrooms, but many stay in the social areas. Some play pool, some meander from room to room, others rummage through the bookshelves. The staff in the Alzheimer's Society offices are busy. It is someone's birthday, so tea and cake is served in the dining room. There is dancing and singing: someone plays the piano. Day care clients begin to leave, and staff in the kitchen prepare the next meal. Image courtesy of Losing Myself.

12am - 6am Night [Winter]

Most residents are asleep, though some rise at times to use the bathrooms. Staff supervise, speaking in whispers. Deep in the night, the call line in the offices rings, though generally the building is quiet. A client wakes and plays the piano softly. Sea waves hit the Blackrock shore. Image courtesy of Losing Myself.

> via Venice Architecture Biennale / Losing Myself