Dublin Airport Authority’s Capital Investment Program

Airports today serve as important hubs for a region around which business and innovation often thrive. Heathrow airport does serve that function in the London area. A lot of facilities locate themselves near Heathrow to take advantage of its status as an international hub airport. The famous architectural critic, Reyner Banham, once described airports as being continually redundant.

The Capital Investment Program at Dublin Airport is one of the largest infrastructural programs in the State. It is a response to huge growth in both passenger numbers and freight transport. Dublin Airport is projected to continue growing into the future necessitating the development of further new facilities.

In 2002, 15 million passengers were processed at Dublin Airport. By 2007, that number had risen to 23 million passengers. By the time, the brand new Terminal 2 is complete Dublin airport will have the capacity for 35 million passengers and an extra 20 aircraft boarding gates. This affords a lot more capacity for long haul flights.

Airports are the last major unskilled worker employer in western economies. Dublin Airport Authority has 3300 employees. Until recently, Dell, the computer manufacturing was the biggest private employer in Ireland with over 3,000 employees. Manual to white collar worker ratio was about 1:1.

Dublin Airport Authority is 100% owned by the Irish State. Other major airports around the world such as Heathrow are owned and by private companies. DAA receives no government funding, but still has €600 million in annual turnover from airport charges and commercial revenues.

The initial master plan for Dublin Airport was done by Irish firm ‘Project Management’ in 2002. The airport study began with the analysis of baseline capacities and service capabilities. What its existing facilities and infrastructure was able to handle. The next phase was to develop various approaches to land use. A study which generated 31 ‘high-level’ options.

Following an extensive evaluation process, four options were short-listed and ranked in terms of functionality, deliverability and cost. From that range of options, it was narrowed down to the final option, which is the current master plan. All stages of the process involved inclusive and transparent consultation with a wide range of stakeholders.

The planning application procedure consisted of two different streams. All 130 projects would go initially to An Bord Pleannala to be assessed. An Bord Pleannala is Ireland’s higher council for planning permission approval. If not deemed to be ‘strategic infrastructure’ by the Bord, the planning application would go to Fingal County Council for normal processing. An Bord Pleannala would assess projects based on a four week cycle.

Spending €2 billion required stepping up to the next level in management consulting. Program management was deemed necessary in this multi-project environment. The goal was to enable a consistent and common reporting methodology across all projects. Dublin Airport Authority needed to fully integrate UK program management consultants Turner & Townsend into their team. T&T set themselves up as the central information control for all projects. They handled all project management, document control and change management.

T&T have a background in aviation and were involved in the Terminal 5 project at Heathrow. Their Irish branch office, Healy Kelly Turner and Townsend became the ‘programme office’ for the client DAA. They were responsible for presenting and managing the integrated master program and cost schedules (including cash flow).

Also involved at T5 in Heathrow were the Arup team from London. Arup handled engineering, construction management and architectural design. So Turner and Townsend and Arup joined forces again in Dublin. Many of the contractors at T5 in Heathrow were the same at T2 in Dublin.

Dublin Airport Authority being a state owned institution was required to provide clear visibility and reporting. DAA’s job to demonstrate the value delivered to the wider stakeholders at the airport. It was also hoped that efficient reporting, would provide the information needed to drive ‘action’ in all projects. Information quickly becomes outdated in a multi-project environment. Reporting had to be provided in a timely manner from accurate data sources. This involved a document management system applied to all levels of the organisation.



Major stakeholders included Aer Lingus as tenant in the new Terminal 2 building. The landside and airside upgrade works program affected many more stakeholders. Landside projects amounted to €120 million in investment. The CEO of Ryanair was vocal in his opinions about progress being made. DAA’s job was to identify and proactively manage all stakeholders to minimise risk whilst maximising opportunities.
Forecasted costs were input into DAA’s own cost database. Prima Vera P6 was then linked to this database. The system allowed viewing of the cost scheduling, both past & future. It was used for the processing of payments and it left an audit trail. Inputs into Prima Vera P6 were items such as ‘start and finishes’, major milestones etc. Outputs from Prima Vera included Excel work stream reports, interface registers, change control and information to DAA finance, an Oracle database.

The plan was to deliver priority work first. The phasing of projects is important, to find a logical path through the entire investment programme. To smooth resources, both internal and external across the program. To help the contractors on site, and also offer best value to the client, Dublin Airport Authority. Major Milestones are targets, which have to be achieved. Failure to do so will have repercussions throughout the entire program. The main ones are listed below.

2006, New Coach Park
2006/09, Aircraft Parking Stands
2006 Temporary Forward Lounge
2006 Ground Floor Check-In (Area 14)
2007 Pier D
2007/08 Terminal 1 North Extension
2009 Terminal 2
2009 Pier E
2009 New Kerbs and Access Ramps
2010/11 Pier B Extension
2010/11 Internal Road Network

Turner and Townsend developed a project review structure with DAA called the gateway procedure. The gateway procedure enabled projects to align themselves with the program. Peer review of all project proposals could happen in an orderly fashion. The approval process worked on a 4-week cycle. If you did not submit details of your project at the beginning of a cycle, you had to wait for the next cycle.

The system of ‘gateways’ would designate the level of completion of individual projects. The range is from ‘G1’ to ‘G5’. At the gateway one, the consultants needed for a project were approached. Financial approval would begin at this stage. The Gateway Committee could approve anything up to half a million euro. The CAC, Capital Approval Committee could approve projects costing up to €3 million. Any projects over €3 million in cost would require DAA board approval meetings. By gateway four, financial approval had been settled and construction could begin. By gateway four, the key stakeholders also had to be identified. Gateway five signified the post-construction stage.



€40 million per month’s worth of construction cannot be delivered without a coherent cost and schedule plan. Decisions need to be made based on the most current information. Dashboard reporting was found to be an excellent tool for high-level management. To see immediately where the red areas were.



DAA found that ‘expenditure’ was a good indicator of the progress a contractor was making. A good question to ask: Is the contractor spending his projected budget for this month? Reporting methods have to be defined for each organisational level. Reporting ‘calendars’ were produced by Prima Vera. The calendars turned out to be an effective presentation method.



DAA wanted to operate the safest construction site in Ireland. An Accident Frequency Ration of less than half the national standard was the target. A safety ‘league table’ proved useful for the contractors on site. The method, borrowed heavily from the Soccer League Manager computer game. ‘Rogue reporting’ by contracts managers who are under pressure is always a risk. Quality of input needs careful scrutiny. Compliance with Quality Assurance and safety management needs to be consistent across all projects in the capital investment program.



Interface management is needed for the 20 or so, different third party stakeholders on the airport campus. An interface might be a neighbouring project. It was important to have consistent reporting to all stakeholders. Specific individuals known as ‘Interface coordinators’ were appointed by Turner & Townsend.

In one instance, six companies on the car rental campus had to be moved to new facilities across the road. Car parking for company employees had to be managed. It was necessary to keep stakeholders informed in advance, to allow time to make such adjustments.

Interface management, was handled in the following way: Identify the interface, assess the interface and control it. Interface registers were developed and linked to Prima Vera. The registers could identify ‘at risk’ interfaces. Simple colour codes were used: Green, Amber and Red. The risk register was found to be an extremely useful tool. The measuring or ‘scoring’ of risk could be standardized for all 130 projects.



This would help to alleviate a problem: Individual project managers had their own personal ways of scoring or measuring risk. A common method for assessment of risk and contingency management had to be found. Turner and Townsend provided plenty of ‘risk and value engineering’ workshops. This in turn, helped to coordinate the publishing of reports.

Risk is measured in terms of a hierarchical structure. The strategic level being at the top. Followed by programmatic, work stream and individual project level. While Prima Vera technology does help to identify risk and manage it – it does not remove the need for individual project managers to speak to each other. T&T consultants made it their goal to embed a ‘risk management culture’ in Dublin Airport Authority.



Risk and opportunity management needs to be tackled at both the program and at the project level. A good example of ‘opportunity’ management is as follows: The months of June, July and August need long-term car parking. But for the remaining months of the year, that area of car parking space could be used to store building materials. This is the kind of strategic thinking that Turner and Townsend wanted to embed in the client organisation, Dublin Airport Authority.

At Dublin Airport, there was €1.2 billion to be spent over the 130 projects, in a period of a few years. With so many discrete projects within the airport campus created a huge number of interfaces between different projects and stakeholders. The need to identify interfaces, manage risk and control information is evident in this final example.

The power supply network within Dublin Airport campus was inadequate to cope with all the new projects. As part of the overall works program, a new MV Campus distribution network and switchgear upgrade was required. The Terminal 2 site was off limits to Dublin Airport Authority. The appointed main contractor for Terminal 2 had to supervise 900 people on site and therefore required independent control of the site for the duration of the contract. 20% of all MV ductwork had to be completed was within the Terminal 2 site area.

The remaining 80% of MV ductwork was within DAA controlled area. The interface between the 80% and 20% of MV ducting was very important. Permanent power supply had to be delivered to Terminal 2 by May 2009 for final commissioning. The ‘hand-over’ of an airport terminal involves the full training of airport staff in managing the building systems. The more time you leave for this activity in your program the better. As the team at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 learned in the past. More detailed information about Terminal 2 at Dublin airport can be found in the second half of this report.


Brian O' Hanlon

Architectural Heritage

To develop from my blog entry about Sally Lewis and her book, Front to Back, I have to add a note about the architectural heritage charters. It is worth taking a look at the charters and studying what they have to say. I know that sustainability and architectural heritage are supposed to be different disciplines. But it is worthwhile comparing one with the other, to see what lessons can be shared.

When I was listening to the presentation, I was reminded of a lecture I attended last year by professor of architecture at UCD, Loughlin Kealy. On that evening, Loughlin went through the various charters with us, dealing with architectural conservation. Starting with the Venice charter in 1964. Next was the Washington Charter in 1987. Then there was the Burra charter, Australia in 79, 81 and 88. Finally the Nara Document on Authencity, in 1994.

There was quite a clear progression through the charters, in terms of expanding the definition of architectural conservation. In the earliest history of architectural conservation, the interest came about, because of war time destruction of historic monuments. Suddenly, after the war, monuments which had existed for centuries were gone. People began to realize how brittle these things we value actually are. So in 1964, the emphasis was on awareness of historic monuments.

Later in 1987, the definition was expanded beyond buildings themselves to include the towns. In 1988, in Australia, the definition expanded yet again to include an idea of places. Places that may be created using skills and materials that are not resistant to erosion, or influence from the outside, like African mud hut settlements. Finally with the Nara charter, the definition includes things like Japanese temples which are re-built constantly over a period of 1,000 years. The whole system of practices and culture in which the architectural heritage is wrapped needs to survive, or be sustained in some way.

Brian O' Hanlon

Multi-Layered Definition of Sustainability

Sally Lewis has written a very nice (slim) volume called 'Front to Back'. It is a book about urban design and creating good residential environments. In the book, she gives lots of nice diagrams, nice pictures and a quite decent definition of sustainability. This is not easy to do.

Sustainability is one of those concepts that signifies so much, but defines so little. The concept should offer so much opportunity for designers to exploit. But designers struggle to get their brains around it, and harness it for something useful. I constantly do myself.

The best way I can think about sustainable development now, is using a multi-layered model. By a multi-layered model, I mean the following. Take a simple product one is trying to bring to market, for instance, a candy bar. I would identify four main stages in brining the candy bar product to market.

The first stage begins with market evaluation, where one tries to identify one's potential consumer and how we wish to serve them. (Clayton Christensen's book provide ideal guidance here) A lot of assumptions and even decisions are made at this stage, which have impacts on the remainder of the four stage model. I believe that Paul Keogh's essay is dealing mostly with the early stage. What do we want to make, where to do we make it and who will need it?

There are opportunities for 'sustainable' strategies at this early stage, and as usual with sustainability, there are opportunities for cost savings as well. We can further associate cost savings with the competitiveness of our economy. Even the speculative property developer does find a place somewhere in my analysis. Sometimes their actions turn out to be financially successful. Sometimes not. That is when society as a whole pays the price.

The second stage I see is the funding stage. I would also insert here the idea of program management. The need to carefully manage one's investment cash flow to work in concert with stages of the project development. Rather than un-sustainable financing of development and urban renewal, such as we saw in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger.

I worked for the largest speculative developer in the country. While that developer engaged in aggressive cost cutting strategies in the other stages of the pipeline, this is one area where they fell down badly. All Irish developers did to some extent, their finances were un-sustainable. I tried to describe an alternative approach in my Dublin Airport Authority piece.

The third stage I see is the design development stage. Are you the client for your own project? Are you developing it for someone else? Who is going to handle the manufacture of the project? Has that person been involved up front, to gain benefit from their insights? Is the designer in touch with the manufacturer? Does the designer simply ignore the manufacturing process, as so often is the case?

Is the designer dealing with the client at arm's length. Is the client one of many other clients, who are all depending on one designer for ideas? Should the client become their own designer instead? There are key strategies which can be developed here. One can lose a great deal of money at the design development stage. Failure to turn around designs which are feasible in rapid time, can add enormous costs to the whole process.

The fourth stage, is how the end user will consume the product. Is it a rental model? Is it a purchase model. Does the developer walk away from the project when it is sold? Does the developer retain an involvement with the project? I tried to wrestle with some of those questions in any earlier blog entry about commercial office developments. What are the best channels to sell the product through? What are the channels you don't want to push the product through?

Is post occupancy evaluation going to be considered? Will the information garnered from POE feed into the next design process? If you present your POE findings to a designer, will that designer simply reject the findings and proceed to re-invent the wheel again? Then taking credit for being original and pushing the envelope further. Is that sustainable?

There is an opportunity in the waiting for designers to generate added income from selling their own post-occupancy evaulations to other designers. I am sure that other designers would pay good money to study the mistakes and trials others have dealt with in the past. How can we develop this as a business model? Maybe designers could arrange to cross-share each others POE studies. Funding to carry out these studies could be generated by selling membership subscriptions to a central source of information. This would be a very sustainable activity to engage in.

The above paragraphs have been hurriedly scribbled down by myself. To try to establish my own working model of sustainability. I hope to take sustainable ideas beyond aspirational and move them towards full implementation. I think the kernel of my strategy has been captured above.

If one really wants to think about sustainable development, one has to be aware that there are several layers. The easiest model I can suggest at the moment, is something like the four stage process I have written about above.

In my experience, I have encountered a bewildering array of experts, reading material, publications and authorities. All of them are pursuing some kind of sustainable path leading somewhere. But until recently, I could not figure out how to make sense of it. That is why I had to build my own model of the process, in order to understand it.


Brian O' Hanlon

13 Megawatts

I noticed a group of posters at Dundrum shopping centre recently, which detailed the construction of the centre over a number of years. One figure caught my eye, the 13 megawatts required to power the centre. To give some example of what that is equivalent to in renewable generation terms, take a very sunny climate and throw acres of solar PV panels on the roof. The attached photograph is a 1 megawatt installation on a cold store in California.

Brian O' Hanlon

Bare Metal Recovery

I agree with the point about long term stability of data stored on hard disk drives. I imagine that is what Brewster Kahle at the Internet archive project is doing. That is what the guys at google who guarantee your Gmail and Blogspot work are doing too I would imagine. The point about hard disk drives from a point of view of a larger operation such as Google or the Internet archive project, is that they can get enormous economy of scale when they buy hard disk drives in such bulk.

I cannot do that as an individual, but the price per gigabyte storage with HDD is still very good, and getting better. If you work out the cost per gigabyte of storage of optical it works out better for the individual I think. But as someone pointed out to me, you have to include for the labour to transfer everything from the optical media to hard disk drive, while you still have a system/optical drive combination that is backwardly compatible. Some people than I realised are looking at boxes of floppy disks with job files on them, which they haven't bothered to transfer, and have no floppy disk drive anymore. It is a bit like the currency switch to the Euro here in Europe, there is still loads of old currency out there somewhere, despite all best efforts.

The biggest worry for me with Blogspot, typepad or Gmail is the fact that your 'data' has been wrapped in a proprietary system, the architecture of which is not accessible to you. Hotmail and Gmail is the new data 'lock in'. I know guys with multiple full up 1GB gmail accounts. They are self employed digital artists, and they start up companies on almost a per project basis. Often times, there isn't even real currency exchanged between workers. They trade in liquidity units, have established a limited liability partnership. These guys never delete. They are too afraid to delete something. But it is difficult now to take stuff off of Gmail and onto some other storage system such as hard disk drive.

Backing up data to a hard drive, removeable or otherwise, and then simply putting in on the shelf in a secure location and protecting it from the elements is the best and most affordable storage option available. A terabyte drive can be had in the US for less than $150. The concern about online storage is accessibility and the security and stability of the company who controls the storage, not the stability of the storage itself. Considering the loving care that some students give to their 'hardware', I would suggest that an online storage system is much safer than a physical hard drive on the shelf. I think that is the market that Google etc are aiming at. Except that real businesses such as friends of mine in the digital content creation industry jumped on the bandwagon too.

There is the idea of a 'storage system' in which the hard drive on its own contains everything required to boot up a living, operational, functioning computer system to provide the environment around your files. Everything is provided in order to access the files properly and use the files as one normally would. It reminds me of Jim Gray's idea to ship a whole computer and hard drive together by Fed-Ex courier. Hopefully at some stage someone will return the computer to you, when they have finished with it. All the computer has to do on the other end, is plug into a network and is then accessible to the person on the other end. For very large quantities of data this makes more sense than internet connections.

Students are 'annoying' kinds of people to provide storage for in that sense. There is no way they will ever invest in something long term, heavy in weight or durable. Yet, if they hadn't Gmail or something like that, they would be the pain in the ass of every college system administrators in the world. I recall back in the days, when we had Pentium Pro wangs. I didn't use computers at that time alot, it was several years later before I even switched one on. But I recall that each student was alloted about one floppy disks worth of storage space on a central university system. That was around 1993. That space was wiped clean periodically, and you were advised 'not to depend on it too much'. I guess, if the system administration was running out of server space, he would simply start to wipe off student storage space! The advent of Gmail, must have made university system admin life much simpler.

As far as storage systems go, I don't think you have to focus on 'disaster recovery' in today's context. Although diaster recovery should be the primary goal, other dimensions are being compromised too much. You need to put all of this in the context of the business cycle. The boom and bust cycle, the paradigm shift or whatever awful phrase you can think of. The way that technology needs to fit around what we do (collectively as well as individuals) is clearly not being addressed properly. The typical computer 'system' pre-supposes fixed needs, that the company is the size it is, it is never going to change. That the business will never get into a new area, be taken over, down-sized, up-sized or anything else. Yet business is more like the climate, some summers are roasting hot and others are quite mild. I had this in mind when I wrote here about the Smart Economy.

I think the idea of bare metal disaster recovery, and drives which can create the entire environment around them is an important point and I am glad that somebody brought it to my attention. I do not possess the really long view on this whole debate. What the personal computer is really lacking from my point of view, is the capability to insert a hard disk, say from 2003, boot it up and to include the entire computing environment I had been using in 2003. It is a bit like that movie 'Planet of the Apes' where the hero finds his space ship stranded and broken to pieces in the middle of the sand dunes. Yet he is able to re-boot and access the last video diary entries. He concluded that the apes had broken free of their cages and thus was able to form his strategy working with the knowledge. A more likely scenario today, is one would find a floppy disk and have nothing to read it with.

I know that businesses like architects and engineers, but also professionals like accountants etc, would buy into an improved information storage service big time. It would simplify administration overheads enormously. Especially in this time of the 'flexible workplace'. What I mean by that is a member of staff might leave (having wrapped a project with a client) and a couple of years later, one of the clients returns and wants an extra bit added onto the previous solution or service. It would make sense to rewind the clock and boot up a system, with exactly the same environment and files, which the staff member had originally used. If we are going to have a smarter economy, this is the problem we need to address now.

Say a business had been a 12 person firm for a long time. But then the economy boomed or whatever, and they had 100 staff and moved to a new building with all kinds of new systems and equipment. They even had new clients and new areas to work in. But then the recession came back, and they wanted to start looking for some of their old clients and old kinds of work. Of course, the recession will not continue for ever. The 'boom time' clients might be back and that type of work may return. Or the business may have an opportunity to 'sell off' that part of the their opertions, as often happens before the crash finally hit you, instead of after. It would be nice to package it some way and hand it over to its new owner. These are large, complex and very interesting problems. The whole notion of a smarter economy and what is described by the 'bare metal recovery' concept are inter-related.

When we have powerful multi-core computers at our disposal, I see no reason why we shouldn't employ virtualisation more to our advantage. Maybe not mainframe in sophistication, but certainly the desktop could make some strides away from the old paradigm it has been stuck in. A person from an old online community I frequented wrote this after the 2000 dot com bust.


Brian O' Hanlon

Re-Building a Lost Tradition

For all I have said about the profession of Architecture, I have managed to miss one aspect. I have gone to lengths to draw attention to things the RIAI hasn't done. Duties it has not performed. But there is a side to this discussion I haven't been able to articulate properly. I am going to attempt to rectify that. There is something the profession of architecture in Ireland could do nothing about. Something terrible which the profession of architecture in Ireland, is struggling in the early 21st century to come to terms with still. I was watching some old footage on BBC4 of the final days of WWII this evening. Well worth catching if you ever have the chance. Here is the wiki page of the American film maker responsible.

In the 1930s, Europe had been a world leader in many ways. Yes there was economic depression on a global scale in the 1930s. But there also would have been optimism in the early 20th century. The architectural profession across Europe, including that in Ireland, would have fed on that optimism. Ireland had gained a new autonomy and began to build its own state. But watching the documentary film about the end of WWII, I noticed that Europe in the mid 1940s was a medieval kind of place. Within a short space of time, much of the optimism in Europe had been reversed.

I got a sense watching the film footage by George Stevens, of the attitudes of both east and west towards, the broken down and suddenly 'backward' European situation in the mid 1940s. Europe posed no competition in any sense anymore. It was literally in bits, and would not be a major player in the game for decades after. Not only was physical infrastructure in ruins, you could repair that with steel and concrete. But relationships between the member states were badly damaged and could not be as easily repaired. The two armies met for the first time on the Elbe river in Germany. Both the Russian and American armies were thousands of miles away from their homelands. All that had been left in their wake was a path of destruction and war torn landscape.

It is important to put the architectural profession in Ireland in that context. It was remote and marginal. It was unable to draw on much inspiration from Europe. When I attended architecture school in Bolton Street in the early 1990s, they were still trying to model themselves on the Bauhaus! Something that had been discontinued in the 1930s, sixty years earlier. I look at buildings built in Ireland prior to WWII and you can see the skill and connected-ness they have with some grand, intact European tradition. But having left such a wonderful legacy, the architectural profession in the post WWII years, across Europe was simply marginal to the discussion. You had a broken down and backward European mainland, which could only look for the cheapest and fastest solutions.

Solutions that were probably driven by people in the construction industry and the engineering or cost control professions. How else would the likes of Ballymun be tolerated? I worked for a number of years as an engineering draughtsman for an elderly structural engineer. He told me that his first assignment as a young graduate was to assemble together a gigantic pre-fab kit, to make an aircraft hanger in Northern Ireland as part of a US base there. When Ballymun and precast construction was happening much later in Dublin, there was still a sense of post WWII desperation about it. The fastest, most scientific and logistically efficient construction. The point was discussed in a radio interview with Pat Kenny this year. Boston based property developers, Corcoran Jenninson observed the idea of building something quickly and leaving site as fast as possible, was still the model here in Ireland today.

The engineers and cost control professions in the post war years, would have seen their positions grow in importance. While the architects saw their position minimized in that time of crisis. Given that context, we cannot have expected for any kind of fruitful relationship to exist between engineers, architects and those involved in cost control. Architects to this day are highly defensive and prickly about their status. It doesn't help the cause of better integration of the construction professions. We are still trying to overcome this problem of relations within the construction industry. This makes sense when you place it in the context of WWII.

The engineering and cost control professions will be reluctant as we go forward to relinquish any of their dominance. On the other hand, architects are ill-equipped to take up 'leadership positions' within the construction industry. The accountancy profession had died out completely in Russia, by the time the Berlin wall collapsed in 1989. In architecture in Ireland today, there is nobody left who remembers when architects were leaders. Architects simply don't know how to behave in that role, for all the lip service the young ones dish out on the subject.

In the post WWII years, Irish architects had the option to journey westward across the Atlantic. Some never returned again. In the wake of WWII, there was nothing left intact, no tradition in Europe to which one could aspire. All there was left, that was intact was in the United States. You can see the impact of the United States on the careers of people like Sam Stephenson. The people at Scott Tallon Walker gathered whatever they could on trips to the United States and brought it home. But it is difficult to form a relationship with a country on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. The lessons that Irish Architects could gather and bring home from America must have been limited. Limited in some case to the aesthetic appearance. But not the entire business and leadership side of architecture.

Brian O' Hanlon

Some Photographs

You might like to look at Stephen Tierney's images. I was at an exhibition at the architecture department of university college dublin this evening, and was checking out the architectural students blog site. It is funny now how student are taking it upon themselves, to set up 'independent blogsites' for their faculties. I think it is a recent phenomenon here in Ireland. Anyhow, I never heard of Stephen Tierney before, and amongst all of the other stuff, I noticed an ad for a workshop he is giving, and I clicked on the link to his website.

I was always into photography myself. I like to look at photographers work. Isn't it interesting though how this composite of the physical exhibition and the virtual realm, can lead you to something quite unexpected? I tried to hint at that idea in an earlier blog post of mine. I have a million better things to do, but I found myself downloading some of Stephen photos for later reference. As if I intend to use them later in some presentation, to explain an idea, with his permission. An image that might help to tell some story. I don't know what story yet, but that is what I have to find out.

Brian O' Hanlon