Eleanor Flegg recalls the foundation of the furniture college in this their 25th year, as examples of current thinking in design from both staff and alumni goes on display at Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin in November.
As Connemara’s redoubtable furniture college, GMIT Letterfrack, celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, the existence of a furniture training college in a part of Ireland with neither trees nor industrial tradition deserves a little explanation. Ironically, its establishment was driven not by ambitions for the craft of furniture-making but as part of a plan to stem the flow of emigration from the West of Ireland.
John McLaughlin assesses heneghan peng’s dramatically sited but elegantly unobtrusive visitor centre for the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim
Peter Pearson makes a plea for re-roofing Kilmacurragh, the Queen Anne house set in an arcadian parkland in County Wicklow
Peter Murray finds similarities between the fictional character Kim and 19th-century photographer John Burke, whose path in Afghanistan, has been retraced by Simon Norfolk