Irish Architectural Archive

27/05/2026

Merrion Square sunset.

05/05/2026

First day of installation of our new exhibition.

Coinciding with the IAA’s 50th anniversary and tracing the development of Ireland’s built environment from the 1690s to the 2000s, Pivot Points presents a selection of key objects from the IAA collections each of which stands as exemplars of directional shifts in the history of planning, development, design, urbanism, and the construction of the built environment across the island of Ireland.

For more tune in to tomorrow, Wednesday 6 May.

On view in person and online from 18 May 2205. More details to follow.

22/04/2026

Paddy Healy’s Dublin

Now on in the First Floor Rooms of the Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, is a new exhibition of historic photographs of Dublin taken by archaeologist Paddy Healy in the early 1960s.

Paddy Healy worked on some of the most important archaeological digs in Dublin from the late 1960s onwards, including the Wood Quay excavations on the site now occupied by Dublin City Council’s headquarters. He died in 2000, and bequeathed his photographs to the IAA, There are over 3,000 images in the collection, and a select sample of just fifty-four images are included in this exhibition.

Healy's photographs preserve a record of buildings, and indeed whole streets, that are no longer there. They record the texture and grain of the city but also its poverty and its material exhaustion, the neglect and dilapidation into which many of the soon-to-vanish buildings had already fallen. The images highlight how the city’s architectural heritage is to be found in the quotidian as well as its monumental edifices, in its density and in the legibility of its streets with their rows of apparently ordinary buildings.

Images

1, Blackhall Street, 1964 (IAA PH 27/6)
None of these houses survived the street’s redevelopment.

2. Christ Church Cathedral and Synod House, 1965 (IAA PH 66/4)
Christ Church Cathedral and the Synod House stand in isolation caused by the demolition of most of Winetavern Street for road widening.

3. Eden Quay, 1965 (IAA PH 100/1)
The arcaded ground floor typical of the Wide Streets Commissioners can be seen here in the still extant Mercantile Steam Packet Company building of 1829.

4. Dunne Row, 1963 (IAA PH 98/1)
Known originally as Quinn’s Cottages, this group of tiny houses stood on the north side of Dunne Street, off Portland Row.

20/01/2026

The trackmaker was a sluggish mover
Bryony Dunne

Irish Architectural Archive
45 Merrion Square, Dublin
16 January – 27 March 2026, Tuesday to Friday, 10am – 5pm

The Irish Architectural Archive and Askeaton Contemporary Arts are pleased to announce The trackmaker was a sluggish mover, a solo exhibition by Bryony Dunne. Spread throughout the ground floor galleries and inside the reading room of the IAA’s Merrion Square building, the exhibition is the culmination of the artist’s year-long research and production residency at the site.

The presentation centres on a series of footprints, still seen on Valentia Island in Kerry, of the first creature recorded to have walked on land. Dunne writes, “Impressed into soft silt at the edge of a swampy river almost 360 million years ago, they belong to a tetrapod - an amphibian ancestor that hauled itself from water onto land during the Devonian era. Described as a sluggish mover, this creature left behind what are now understood as the earliest traces of animal life crossing a threshold: a body learning how to inhabit and adapt to a different world on land.”

The trackmaker was a sluggish mover is additionally made possible by the support of the Arts Council and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University College Cork.

Working in film, sculpture and photography, Bryony Dunne has exhibited in museums, biennales and galleries globally, along with participation in numerous film festivals. She was previously resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and in the European
Ceramics Work Centre in the Netherlands. In 2026 her work is additionally presented at Paleis Het Loo in the Netherlands.

Image: In 1975, architectural student Helen Lane records on paper the medieval structures of Wood Quay, Dublin. Behind her, a construction excavator is clearing the land. Photo: Tom Lawlor / The Irish Times

27/11/2025

13/11/2025

New in the IAA Architecture Gallery: Artists and Pirates, Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin

Single sheet satire – caricature – was the most distinctive and original art form to emerge from England in the eighteenth century. It is less well known that printsellers in Dublin also produced caricatures, both copies of London models and original satires.

This exhibition, curated by Silvia Beltrametti and William Laffan, features over ninety prints including London originals and Dublin pirated copies, as well as Dublin originals, with the objects of their satire ranging from politics – the French Revolution, the 1798 Rebellion or Catholic Emancipation for example – to the vanities and pretentions of the emerging professions, and everyday manners and mores.

IAA Archtecture Gallery, 45 Merrion Sqaure, 10am to 5pm Monday to Friday from 13 November - 19 December 2025

18/10/2025

The IAA is delighted to be participating once again in . Looking forward to welcoming the architecturally curious to 45 Merrion Square from 10am to 5pm today, Saturday 18 October 2025.

18/09/2025

Join us in the IAA for Culture Night, Friday 19 September 2025, from 5pm to 9pm.

There will be regular tours of 45 Merrion Square from 5pm to 8pm. Otherwise, just pop in, explore the building and visit the exhibitions Studio by Harry Moore and A Form of Justice, an exploration by Hassett Ducatez Architects of a lost Dublin building complex, the Four Courts Marshalsea.

09/09/2025

Now on in the Architecture Gallery, 45 Merrion Square, Studio by Harry Moore, a series of pinhole photographs of artists’ studios in the Beara peninsula, Co. Cork, which forms part of ongoing exploration into the liminal spaces of artistic creation.
Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm
Access is free