The Scale of Distance with Déirdre McKenna
Wednesday 21 October, 13:00–14:00 Irish time
Online
Free
Registration required
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.
The Scale of Distance with Déirdre McKenna (Ville de Renens) is the third in a series of webinars presented by the IAF and hosted by Peter O'Grady this autumn.
Register for this webinar.
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.
Explore the full series.
Speakers
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 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).
