Stories for Change: Reflections on 2025
As 2025 draws to a close, IAF Director Emmett Scanlon reflects on the IAF's story this year.
Sometimes, we need to step back and examine things as they are before we attempt to explain them. This is certainly true in the work we do in the IAF and at this time of year, at the end of each year, we reflect. If you have attended one or more of our many events held across the island in 2025, you might already know that we are in the business of storytelling. We seek to build the events and programmes at which all of us — all of you — can both tell and listen to the stories of lives lived in the company of architecture. And, after twenty years in the business, we know that while telling stories is essential to understanding our lived experience and to sustaining architecture culture, reflection for its own sake is equally, even occasionally more, important in order to keep those stories alive.
The thing about stories in architecture though, is that, like architecture itself, they do not always unfold one after the other.
Architecture is something in which the past, present and future of our society and the world we build for it, seem to exist all at the same time. So this year, on reflection, the IAF’s annual story seems to have begun not at the start of 2025, but right in the middle, on the evening of June 6th in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. That evening in an old market building, now repurposed as a cultural space, overlooking the River Clyde, our exhibition The Reason of Towns, an exhibition with architect Valerie Mulvin was launched with a brass band and a cool crowd. In gorgeous, gritty Glasgow, as part of the Architecture Fringe, The Reason of Towns, was but one of a number of events and exhibitions about architecture and ideas of reciprocity that took place all June, across Scotland. The act of taking the work and programme of the IAF on tour, combined with ideas of reciprocity and social and cultural exchange, were the clear foundations of all of our work this year.
In the first half of the year, The Reason of Towns stopped in a snowy Thurles and then toured to Skibbereen before sailing to Glasgow. While on tour, we gathered new and untold stories of the past, present and future of the Irish town.
With a strong track record working in the Irish town, in 2025 we also turned our attention to Ireland’s cities, specifically Dublin, Limerick, Galway and Belfast. Our New Life, Old Buildings programme had its third year in Limerick, a public-facing series of events and talks about the future of buildings that are already built. We delivered public talks in Galway and Belfast, inviting Joar Nango and Ben Campkin to Ireland for the first time to meet specific communities in both cities, working with new festival partners.
In Dublin, we partnered with Irish Design Week to host Jayden Ali and Resolve Collective in a memorable conversation on collaboration and critical, political architecture practice.
Dublin City and County came into sharp and strong focus as we worked with photographer Rich Gilligan to document our national street, O’Connell Street, for our ambitious visual campaign for IAF’s flagship festival Open House Dublin. As an organisation we were so empowered this year by the people and communities we met around Ireland, their care and commitment to their places and their futures apparent and sincere. And, of course, wherever we went, we were met with a desire for change.
Photos by Rich Gilligan for Open House Dublin 2025.
But change of what, and to what? Social crises are deepening, not easing. Our conversations with our colleagues across Europe, in 2025, most recently in Copenhagen, show that the value placed on architecture and design appears to be waning, the power of communities to build and sustain themselves is being overlooked, and the demolition of a building is too often treated as inconsequential, when in truth it erases part of our shared identity.
With our colleagues in the Open House network and with HouseEurope! Future Heritage was a timely and powerful theme we elected to use to focus our efforts. Future Heritage became a shared, loud, collective call to rethink how we value our heritage, our future and our role within it. Future Heritage felt like the beginning of something, and as we reach the end of the year, it now feels less an act but more a movement of resistance - resisting the neglect of our streets, our housing and our shared, public spaces. Future Heritage was our theme for Open House Dublin, guiding our work across 9 days of exciting tours, exhibitions and workshops. But Future Heritage also became a focus for our national programme for transition year students, Architects in Schools, with students across 50 secondary schools this year using their imagination and their voice to consider the future of their places.
The first phase of our Bog Bothy project, with our partners 12th Field, came to an exciting and engaging end, touring to two bogs in Offaly and Meath this summer. Across the last three years, Bog Bothy has helped evolve a new understanding of the role and value of architecture in the peatlands landscape for just transition communities undergoing slow but significant change.
In 2025 the IAF proudly launched our second strategy, Shaping Our Future, Building Our Knowledge, 2026-33. With it as our map and our new website under construction, and with communities, policymakers, individuals, architects and more across this island, IAF is now working with renewed commitment to champion architecture, advocate for public participation in design, and reset the value placed on our built environment. We do this with you: our friends, supporters, funders, champions and colleagues. We collaborate with and commission architects and artists, supporting them to take creative risk and bring their best work in architecture to public conversations. We do it with a fantastic and dedicated team of people who turn up and out each day to put on great architecture exhibitions and events. We do it with the support and guidance of a Board of Directors, not least of whom has been our outgoing Chair, the very brilliant Brian Moran, who stepped down in November after six years in the role. Next, new Chair Parag Joglekar, will offer another kind of leadership for IAF, not least of which will be driving our key role to find a new house and home for architecture in Ireland. After four years of seasonal venues, we have shown without doubt that having a house for architecture in Dublin is desired by public and professional audiences, but is also no impediment to IAF continuing to work across this island. We are ready to put down some roots, to have a place for architecture to grow and thrive for those of us living here right now and for our diaspora to have a place to go, to be part of the urgent conversation of how we next design and build Ireland.
It has been said that stories are the secret reservoir of our values, and changing the stories we tell ourselves can and will change these values. As the IAF closes out its 20th year, we know that core to so much of our work in the future will be about changing the value system that has evolved in the late 20th century and continues to inform how we commission, construct and care for the built environment. Architecture is crucial to a shared, sustainable future on this island. We are what we build, which is another kind of reflection altogether, less about looking back, but more about confronting who we are as a nation and what we wish to become. As we enter the new year, we hope to see you often in 2026 as we face our built future and together write the new stories we need for change.
