In 2017, the practice was invited to exhibit work in Porto, in the Sao Bento Metro station by Alvaro Siza. The exhibition illustrates McCullough Mulvin’s architecture in Ireland and in India through seven current projects, buildings exploring the fertile relationship of architecture, nature and time - architecture like natural form in tense or loose geometries, or new adhering to old like moss to stones.
Two projects are of urban scale - Thapar University in the Indian Punjab and Trinity College in Dublin. Another two projects are palimpsests, partly new and partly old - St Mary’s Medieval Mile Museum in Kilkenny and the Military Archives project in Dublin, where new elements are like accretions on older ones. Three relate specifically to ideas of ‘constructed’ geographies - Kishoge School in west Dublin, the Beaufort Laboratory in Cork and Waterford Fire Station in Waterford City.
All seen from one point, the films present the projects simultaneously but from different angles. They are about different architectural perceptions - as ideas, as realities, and somewhere between - perception enhanced by the monstrous capacity of drones. Some of the buildings cannot be fully understood without their ‘place’, others construct one, all are influenced by the template of nature at the largest and the smallest scale of rocks, fissures, moss.
In 2018, Displaced Longitude opened at the Chapel Royal Dublin Castle on March 8th for a week in association with a significant Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht conference on 9th March called “Shaping the Future - Urban Regeneration and Adaptive Re-use. Towards Developing a Culture of Innovation and Design”.
Here the implication of the coloured light was quite different; it had the awkward presence of asymmetric things in symmetric rooms. More particularly, it allowed an exploration of aged surfaces and Gothic form - the opposite of the Sao Bento metro station; completely contemporary space was seen across old materials. One film on the floor exposed the sectional difference between stones wearing away at different rates; a second was positioned between two windows like a painting; the third was cut and shaped by the intricate weaving of the vault above.
The practice was also invited to exhibit in the annual RHA exhibition in central Dublin in June/July 2018. In this case, three films were displayed in an enigmatic rectangular plywood box with a small viewing slot (a smaller one for children was provided in one side); the box contained an inner pyramidical shape mirrored on the inside reflecting the films set on a flat screen below - the images moved, broke and reconnected like a kaleidoscope.
The Cork Centre for Architectural Education (CCAE) exhibited Displaced Longitude in March 2019.
Displaced Longitude was also exhibited at the Lilavati Lalbhai Library in CEPT University, Ahmedabad from 3rd April to 3rd May 2019. It was launched by the Irish Ambassador to India, Mr Brian McElduff at 6.30pm and was accompanied by a series of talks and lectures on the work of the practice.
In Ahmedabad, the films combined to explore the exhibition context, bending coloured light around form. Three films were projected within the central chamber of the Library, one in the peripheral void, one outside the envelope, and a sixth presented Thapar University students discussing their new environment.
For the Open House Dublin festival 2019, Displaced Longitude was exhibited again in Dublin. This time, McCullough Mulvin Architects, with the Molesworth Gallery, opened 16 Molesworth Street - an invitation into a working space of Georgian Dublin.
