Áine Ryan: Material Tells: Revealing spatial patterns of everyday landscape with a vernacular building type. (EN)

The talk outlines a socio-collectively experienced landscape that was perceptible to Gaelic-Irish society in certain landscape features. Among these features was a type of outdoor social space widely built during colonial English rule in the manner of a non-conscious heritage practice. An interpretative examination of the material evidence of all known examples of this vernacularly built space (570 at the time) revealed key spatial characteristics of this lived landscape.

The theoretical ideas underpinning the examination connect phenomenological thinking on ordinary landscape to the material turn in archaeology and heritage studies. They explain how recognisable patterns in the material form and spatial distribution of landscape features operate as physical tells, marking places where the real and collectively experienced landscapes overlap. Additionally, as applied to the material evidence of the ballcourts and oral secondary sources, the theory explains how habitual socio-spatial practices triggered the recollection and revision of societal knowledge in shared stories and individual memories. After illustrating these findings, the talk will discuss the notion of affective material-spatiality proposed by the researcher, to capture both the double mode of material telling and the spatial characteristics of the experienced landscape that momentarily occurs with the telling.

Áine Ryan is an architect and spatial planner. She undertook her doctoral research in the second cohort of the DFG interdisciplinary research training group ‘Identity and Heritage’ at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2019-2023). She has worked for over twenty years across professional practice, discourse and teaching in architecture, urban design and spatial planning. Currently, she is working at the Berlin Mitte local planning authority on projects within the Karl-Marx-Alle preservation area.

TU Berlin
Str. des 17. Juni 152
Raum 815, Architekturgebäude
Beginn: 18.30