The Scale of Distance
Join us for conversations with architects of the Irish diaspora on design, distance and what it means to feel at home in the world today.
Ireland has long been shaped by migration, movement and lives lived across seas and borders. The Scale of Distance brings together architects from the Irish diaspora to explore what distance and home mean when their experience of place, belonging and identity has been formed in more than one country.
Through a series of live online conversations, invited architects will reflect on the cities and cultures that have shaped their work and their relationship to Ireland. With reference to the rooms and places in which they now live, speakers will share how architecture responds to questions of memory, housing, technology, politics, climate and belonging.
The series creates space for a different kind of architecture and place conversation, one that moves between the professional and the personal, asking not only how we design homes, but what it means to feel at home in the world today.
Open and free to all in Ireland and around the world, the series will take place online via Zoom webinars. Each session will also form part of a publicly accessible archive documenting contemporary perspectives on home, diaspora and the built environment as experienced by Irish architects abroad.
All webinars will be hosted by Peter O'Grady.
Click on the dates to read more and register.
Dates and times
Creative influences can be simultaneously rock solid and constantly in flux. We all have inheritance, strong foundations gained in education, but lessons learned in youth are — and should be — challenged as we grow into our careers. Some drift away, some persist. Some endure despite ourselves. Some are only ever received at one remove, but are equally important.
Rory will take a meandering route through work and life experiences to reflect on these themes and how they impact his work today. By looking specifically at the domestic realm — homes he has lived in and those he has designed for others — ideas of belonging and distance will be explored.
Working between Hong Kong and Ireland, and through projects across China and southern France, Superposition founders Donn Holohan and Espeth Lee have spent the past decade occupying a position that is neither wholly outside nor inside any one context. This condition has shaped the way they work and think about what it means for architecture to be local. Although geographically and culturally distinct, these places are increasingly connected through systems of extraction, supply, technology and production, bringing their material cultures into closer alignment than might at first appear.
Drawing on recent residencies, fellowships, exhibitions and projects, they will consider how materials, skills and construction knowledge move between places and whether architecture can move beyond dominant models of scalability and material substitution. Rather than rejecting these systems of production, the work asks how they might be recalibrated to accommodate specific resources, skills and environmental conditions and how distance might sharpen an understanding of place.
Further details coming soon.
Further details coming soon.
Image: Backpack Housing by Superposition in collaboration with Urban Ecologies Design Lab, Hong Kong.
Speakers
Webinar 1 speaker
A native of Clones, Co. Monaghan, Rory Corr studied at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow, before 10 years in London working for Baynes and Mitchell Architects and 6a architects. Here, Rory formed a great interest in material research and sustainability, buildings for the creative arts and working with existing, often historic, fabric, developed through senior roles on some of the practices’ most prestigious projects.
In 2021 Office Corr Higgins was established to explore these interests further through built projects and research. Rory leads the Glasgow office of OCH, with fellow Mac alumnus Brendan Higgins running the Bristol office. OCH is currently working on residential and cultural projects across the UK and Ireland. Most notable is Timespan, won in an open competition in 2024 with Assemble. OCH was part of a team shortlisted for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2023.
Rory also teaches at the Mac and contributes regularly as a guest critic to educational institutions across the UK.
Webinar 2 speaker
Donn Holohan and Elspeth Lee are founders of Superposition, an architecture studio integrating teaching, research, and practice. Working between Hong Kong and Ireland, the studio merges vernacular means and methods with digital tools to make architecture which is specific rather than generic, pragmatic but not utilitarian, and grounded in a community-centred view of evolving tradition and place.
Donn Holohan trained as a cabinet maker before studying architecture at University College Dublin. His research centres on building culture and the climates, tools, and materials that shape it. Elspeth Lee studied at University College Dublin and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and is a registered architect in the UK and Ireland. Her research examines social, material and temporal systems through which architecture is produced. Together, their work positions making as a cultural and collective act. Their first book, Material, Making and Place, is forthcoming with RIBA Publishing.
Webinar 2 speaker
Elspeth Lee and Donn Holohan are founders of Superposition, an architecture studio integrating teaching, research, and practice. Working between Hong Kong and Ireland, the studio merges vernacular means and methods with digital tools to make architecture which is specific rather than generic, pragmatic but not utilitarian, and grounded in a community-centred view of evolving tradition and place.
Elspeth Lee studied at University College Dublin and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and is a registered architect in the UK and Ireland. Her research examines social, material and temporal systems through which architecture is produced. Donn Holohan trained as a cabinet maker before studying architecture at University College Dublin. His research centres on building culture and the climates, tools, and materials that shape it. Together, their work positions making as a cultural and collective act. Their first book, Material, Making and Place, is forthcoming with RIBA Publishing.
Webinar 3 speaker
Born in Belfast in 1981, Déirdre McKenna is an architect and urban designer. She studied architecture at University College Dublin and has worked in architectural practice in London, Dublin and Lausanne. Since 2018, she has been the municipal architect for the Ville de Renens, Switzerland, where she is responsible for building strategy, project procurement and programmes of transformation and adaptive reuse.
Understanding contemporary urbanisation as a durational project which is never complete, she advocates for complex and open-ended architecture that invites multiple forms of engagement and appropriation.
The Ville de Renens currently has projects underway with some of the most highly regarded contemporary Swiss architectural practices, including Comte/Meuwly, MacIver-Ek Chevroulet, Conen Sigl, GayMenzel, ALIAS and DU Studio.
Webinar 4 speaker
Ray Dinh is a Melbourne-based Irish architect. He graduated with First Class Honours from University College Dublin in 2012, then worked in New York. In 2014, he moved to Melbourne and began working at Austin Maynard Architects on a wide range of award-winning residential projects, including the 2019 winner of the prestigious Canberra Medallion.
After 11 years as an Associate and Project Architect at Austin Maynard Architects, 2026 marks the launch of Ray Dinh Architecture full-time.
Ray has contributed to the wider profession through the Australian Institute of Architects’ Mentoring Program and Emerging Architects and Graduate Network Committee, and he currently tutors Architectural Practice at the University of Melbourne.
Webinar host
Peter O’Grady has worked with Rachel Carmody Design in Dublin, Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects in Paris and studied at ÉNSA Paris-Belleville. His M.Arch. thesis was nominated for both the UCD Thesis Prize and the DTA Housing Prize. Working across architecture, curation and writing, he explores housing and architecture’s social capacity. He has written articles for Type.ie and, in 2024, co-curated the exhibition Squashed Living with Laura Ferry, supported by the Irish Architecture Foundation. He has also hosted events featuring architects including Niall McLaughlin, TAKA and Valerie Mulvin. His work has appeared in Sel d’Argent (MEP, Paris, 2025), To Not Design Is to Cost the Earth (IAF House, Dublin, 2025; London, 2026), and the RIAI’s Constructive Interference exhibition (RDS, Dublin, 2024).
