Highly Commended – Patrick Kelly
Patrick Kelly, from the Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington School of Architecture , has been highly commended at the 2019 NZIA Resene Student Design Awards with his project ‘Translating Ulysses: The House That James Built’.
Project description
This thesis explores the relationship between written words and architecture by translating the novel Ulysses from English into an architectural language. It examines how architecture, like James Joyce’s novel, can be used as a tool to uncover the nuanced beauty of everyday life.
Citation
This proposal has no shortage of ambition: it is an architectural response to, or rather, translation of, a canonical work of modern literature – James Joyce’s Ulysses. The project was impressively presented, with beguiling fluency and discursive wit. The presentation convincingly made the point that architecture can be a very effective communications tool. The project explored the notions of the variousness of points of reference and the subjectivity of response – concepts which are explored in Ulysses and which attach themselves to architecture as well. Patrick, our translator, demonstrated his comfort with the ambivalences of translation, reminding us that the hero after whom Joyce’s masterpiece was named was renowned as “a man of tricks and turns”.
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