Constructive Interference Fig. 2

Today’s young architects and designers (as well as ethical designers of all generations) exist at a complex front between the hope and innovation embodied in their work, and the realities of the wider architectural profession and construction industry. While the looming, existential issues of climate emergency, increasing social isolation and the impact of commercialisation on our cities and towns pervade conversations and provoke new methodologies, value systems and aesthetics within schools, these ripples are slow to push out to the established ways of working.

Even as positive changes are taking place in thought, the same systems trudge on, at scales of power and capital that can feel oppressively insurmountable. Constructive Interference is a natural phenomenon occurring when waves overlap in such a way that they combine to form a larger wave. Disturbances in wave patterns can either enhance both waves, or cause the overlapping waves to cancel each other out.

This exhibition places student work in conversation with the architectural profession and the construction industry through proximity to the building expo and RIAI conference taking place directly below it. This is both a protest and an invitation, an invitation to consider how we might positively influence each other and our wider

network within this ecosystem of construction and spatial production which we each below to. Waves contain the inevitability of nature, the low shout of the seashore, undercurrents of unease. What does it mean to be nearby one another, to occupy the same ecosystem, to allow ourselves to be influenced?