The Scale of Distance with Donn Holohan and Elspeth Lee
Wednesday 23 September, 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 Donn Holohan and Elpeth Lee (Superposition) is the second in a series of webinars presented by the IAF and hosted by Peter O'Grady this autumn.
Register for this webinar.
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.
The Scale of Distance
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.
Photos:
Backpack Housing by Superposition in collaboration with Urban Ecologies Design Lab, Hong Kong.
Superposition portrait by Urban Cerjak. Portrait of Elspeth Lee by Raffaella Endrizzi.
Speakers
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 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).
