Project Highlights

Losing Myself was the sole representation of Ireland at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition in 2016. The Irish Pavilion was one of the highlights of the Venice Biennale, which attracted 260,000 visitors in six months. It was globally reviewed in diverse publications like The Lancet, WIRED, The Irish Times and Il Sole 24 Ore.

This is the first architecture project to examine dementia by bringing together research views from neuroscience, anthropology, health, art and design. It also introduces and explores the neurobiological perspective of allocentric and egocentric spatial referencing in architectural drawing for the first time. The work was shortlisted for the RIBA President’s Awards for Research in the Design & Technical category in 2017.

The authors have created a set of dementia design recommendations, called ‘16 Lessons’, advocating for a holistic approach to creating and sustaining design-friendly buildings and communities for all, available at www.losingmyself.ie

The impact of McLaughlin’s long-term research about architecture and dementia can be gauged by his lectures on the subject to institutions like the House of Lords and the RIBA and by his buildings and masterplans with intergenerational programmes such as his recent project Univ North, the largest modern addition to University College Oxford.

Since 2015, Manolopoulou has extended the research into an exploration of the role of open scores in collaborative architectural design (Montreal 2017, UCL Press 2020) and has contributed to the interdisciplinary handbook Arts and Dementia: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Mateus-Berr and Gruber 2020).