I’m just here to introduce the film, but I just want to say that, I first met Niall about twenty years ago when I was director of the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny. We met in Tynan’s pub and I remember it because it was a Fergus Martin exhibition, “Pipe Dreams”, that I had organised and it just was a wonderful evening - Valerie, you were there as well. And I remember thinking, this guy, he’s so open and generous. And he’s probably responsible for the reason why five years later I became Director of the Irish Architecture Foundation, and I shifted from art over into architecture – or, actually, just added architecture on to my love of creativity. And so then, very quickly, when I started in the Architecture Foundation, myself and Hugh Campbell - who’s here – we were curators of the Irish Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, and of course, McCullough Mulvin were part of that, and that was a whole exploration of film and architecture – and it was just wonderful to talk to Niall specifically about film and architecture.

So, then over the fifteen years that I’ve been in the IAF, we’ve worked with McCullough Mulvin in various different projects, not just Venice, but also New York and in our home, Dublin - especially through the wonderful generosity of McCullough Mulvin at Open House Dublin each and every year. But we grew a very important friendship, Niall and I, from the moment that friendship was forged in Tynan’s pub. And we would meet, in the summertime for a drink in the Horseshoe Bar in The Shelbourne, in the wintertime it was always the Library Bar in the Central Hotel. And I would just get a text message, “D-R-I-N-K?!?” - he was the only person who would send me that text message. And I would often send it back to him and then we would meet in on one of those two locations depending on the season.

I would say that Niall completely and absolutely mentored me, originally an outsider, I suppose, to the architecture establishment. And he always said that was the best place to be. And he told me to make the IAF brave, and I hope I did.

So, I want to share with you this film that we made with Niall, all about the fifth façade, called “Aerial” – the title of this evening’s symposium. A film that we made when we couldn’t do Open House because of lockdown, so we made films instead. And of course, I was going to ask Niall to make a film. And what’s really interesting about this - I wasn’t aware he was ill at the time - is the last two minutes where he leaves a message for the next generation. 

—Nathalie Weadick, former Director of the Irish Architecture Foundation