November 26th, Science Gallery Dublin

2pm – 5pm

Book your spot here.

What is an estate? What could an estate be? Within housing developments that often exist at the edge of the city, how much ownership can residents and tenants have? Where is the space for the individual through customisation, physical change, external decoration?

Artist Verity-Jane Keefe and architect Dominic Stevens will run a workshop exploring the potential for a utopian alternative, looking at ideas around the DIY, ad hoc, and architecture by non-architects and how these can and might exist within the existing physical urban or suburban contexts.

This workshop is an exploration of the housing estate, open to everyone including architects, urbanists, artists, community groups and – most importantly – residents.

Biographies:

Verity-Jane Keefe is a visual artist working predominantly in the public realm to explore the complex relationship between people and place.

She is interested in the role of the artist within urban regeneration and how experiential practice can touch upon and raise ambitions of existing and invisible communities. Verity-Jane works with moving image, text, object and installation to explore possible taxonomies of everyday life. She has a long-term relationship with Outer London, making work for, about and with various London boroughs as well as across the UK and internationally.

Verity-Jane is an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins where she teaches on the BA Fine Art XD pathway. She is also a Unit Leader with Dr Julia King at the Architectural Association, teaching an Intermediate Studio called Demonstration Neighbourhood.

www.verityjanekeefe.co.uk

Dominic Stevens is an architect who has worked in housing for 30 years. An apartment building for single mothers and elderly ladies in Berlin was his first and favourite building. Now he is director at JFOC Architects in Dublin, working with developers, community housing groups and charities on numerous housing projects. He also lectures in architecture at TU Dublin.

Writing in “The Full Irish – New Architecture in Ireland”, published by Princeton Architectural Press, Dr Sarah Lappin stated, “Stevens works outside the mainstream of both Irish architecture and architectural culture in general. His thinking about his practice is careful, but simultaneously rational and unusual. This alternative take on both formal decisions and his practice of architecture results in ideas that may very well have some of the strongest resonance for a new, reconfigured Ireland.”