Architecture at the Edge Design Lab Bursaries
Project Name
Architecture at the Edge Design Lab Bursaries
Project Partners
Architecture at the Edge and Galway Culture Company
Role of Galway Culture Company
Funder and Partner
Strategic Aim
This project falls under our third strategic aim;
Provide Supports to the Cultural and Creative Sector
Project Description
Galway Culture Company and Architecture at the Edge through its Design Lab programme offered three bursary awards of €3,000 each to support creative practitioners with an interest in championing young people and their ideas and help them realise the potential for a better designed built environment. This opportunity was designed to support practitioners with an interest in co-designing projects with young people and consider the consequential aspects of making across craft, construction, architecture and design.
Since Design Lab began in 2021, it has sought to train and skill up others with the knowledge, experience and confidence to develop their own build projects with young people related to play, architecture and young people’s/children’s use of space. Design Lab invites young people to be part of a creative design process that results in a real design for a space or place to build. Design Lab aims to bring together disciplines that perhaps do not always intersect: artists, architects, and other makers to enable more young people to be confident about influencing and shaping their built environment.
Over the course of the programme, learnt about, took part in and managed the design and build process from start to finish. With the guidance of our Design Lab ambassadors, students channeled their ideas and inspiration into creating a real, tangible, design for a large-scale build.
The bursary supported individuals to work with young people aged between 14 – 22 years old to develop projects which are tangible demonstrations of how our young people can make a positive contribution to shaping better places in Galway City and County, and to demonstrate first-hand how young people can directly shape their world.
An open call for the three bursary awards took place in May 2024. Applications were open to individual practitioners and/or collectives, including but were not limited to artists, architects, makers, designers, film producers and creatives from all disciplines.
Project Outcomes – what we expect from this project
Three project teams were selected for the Design Lab bursaries programme 2024: Cormac Adams and Sean Connolly, Brian O’Curnain and Eduard Valenzuela, and Brian Kelly and Grace Gacquin x Dérive.
Following the project, Eduard Valenzuela and Brian O’Curnain won in the Youth One-Off Activity category for their project ‘Bayanihan: Building A Community’ at the 2024 Inspire Future Generation Awards from Thornton Education Trust.
Read more about the selected projects teams here.
Read more about the project here.
Read about the call out to Galway schools here.
How this project is funded
This project is funded by Galway Culture Company, which is supported by the Government of Ireland under the National Development Plan through the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.
Duration
April 2024 through October 2024.
Image:‘Forth Bridge Construction’, possibly Evelyn George Carey, 1885, Crown copyright. National Records of Scotland, BR/FOR/4/34/161
