of de Blacam and Meagher was Ireland’s exhibition at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition held in Autumn 2010 in Venice. The exhibition addressed de Blacam and Meagher Architects’ built and unbuilt portfolio of the last 33 years and sought to communicate the cultural landscape of Ireland through their seminal work. The exhibition concept took the form of a book unbound, containing volumes of drawing and photographic reproductions from the archives, contemporary photography and readings of the work with commentaries.

Ireland’s presentation at the 53rd Exhibition sought to foreground two artists (but three practices) Sarah Browne, Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne, who operated without commercial gallery representation. The engagement of / with people formed a central element of their practice, and art is at the core. The technically accomplished and visually engaging artworks they produced existed as the gravitational centre for explorations around identity, labour, craft, design, globalisation, economics, language, architecture, beauty, money, value and being human.

This exhibition’s title, The Lives of Spaces, deliberately invited multiple interpretations, suggesting that, while spaces can contain many lives, they can equally live many lives themselves. The story of a space can be traced through its emergent life in design, its life in construction, its life in use and reuse, its life in individual and collective memory and its life within a culture. For each of the nine spaces explored in the exhibition, life is at a different stage.