The Irish Architectural Archive is pleased to present Remaking the Crust of the Earth by artist and curator Gavin Murphy. The project – the result of several years of research by the artist into the history and cultural impact of glass and its use in the built environment – draws extensively on the Raymond McGrath Collection housed at the Irish Architectural Archive, producing an exhibition comprising of a film, installed and photographic works, and an accompanying publication.

Remaking the Crust of the Earth presents a layered, cultural history which examines the ways in which glass has transformed society, how humans situate themselves within the environment, and how we view the world. Through the unlikely accident of its discovery to its present day ubiquity, it considers glass in its myriad guises: from the modular prefabrication of Joseph Paxton’s ‘Crystal Palace’ to the optimism of Paul Scheerbart’s Glasarchitektur, both of which in their own way lay a path for modernism, the curtain wall, and the 20th century ‘glass house’. Traversing time and space, the exhibition explores previous and unfulfilled stages of the material’s history, revealing alternatives which belie an ‘inevitable’ contemporary (and its futures).