Home > Journal > Issue Nine > Deepened and extended practices. The particular scopes of the Kevin Kieran Award.

Deepened and extended practices. The particular scopes of the Kevin Kieran Award. - Elizabeth Hatz
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The subject of architecture is greater than its practice. The continuing challenge is to fuel practice with architectural investigation and creation. It is to do not so much with finding answers as with formulating relevant questions so we may extend architecture into our condition as searching beings. This is why architectural education and research, if accorded this inventive freedom, may create new fields of operation in close encounter with architectural practice.

In times when architectural offices throughout Europe struggle with increasingly pressed budgets, stressed time schedules and restricting briefs, the Kevin Kieran Award has landed on our lap as a huge and unexpected gift to ARCHITECTURE itself.

For sure we would wish practice also to be research, a form of search and exploration in the deepest, most committed sense of the word.

One cannot but feel profound thankfulness towards the architect behind this prize, Kevin Kieran, and the Arts Council's exemplary way of handling this unique possibility. Ireland is worth admiration for this.

This Award also comes in a time when most architectural schools in Europe are busy developing architectural research based, not as previously on auxiliary subjects, but on architecture itself, ie. research based on architectural methods, on the project and on its varying practices. In Sweden a program for State funded "artistic research" offers a new possibility for an architectural research founded in its own material, which is at many instances non-discursive in its operation, and based on silent knowledge. There is a point in this connection with art shared with the Kevin Kieran Award and its connection to the Arts Council. It means precisely the possibility to raise other, unexpected questions, which are not even raised by culture, society or technology. Art constitutes an enclave of possibility greatly needed in our contemporary condition and architecture is largely founded in art.