Meet the Speakers

Pooja Agrawal will discuss #Collaboration in the context of the public and private sectors. She is an architect and planner who worked as a public servant at Homes England and the Greater London Authority as well as in private practice before setting up Public Practice and the social equality platform Sound Advice. Pooja co-published Now You Know, a compendium of fifty essays exploring spatial and racial inequality. She is a Trustee at Open City, a Fellow at the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose and a Fellow at the RSA.  In 2023, she received both the renowned accolade of the “AJ100 Contribution to the Architecture Profession Award” and the “People and Skills Torchbearer of the year

Níall McLaughlin, Winner of the 2022 RIBA Stirling Prize for the New Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, will present award-winning work including the International Rugby Experience in Limerick, for which he received the prestigious RIAI Public Choice Award and an RIAI Award for Cultural and Public Buildings. Born in Geneva, Níall was educated in Dublin and studied architecture at University College Dublin. Before establishing his practice in London in 1990, he worked for Scott Tallon Walker for four years. Níall designs buildings for education, culture, health, religious worship and housing. He won Young British Architect of the Year in 1998 and received the RIBA Charles Jencks Award for Simultaneous Contribution to Theory and Practice in 2016. He was elected an Aosdána Member for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts in Ireland and as a Royal Academician in the Category of Architecture in 2019. In 2020 he was awarded an Honorary MBE for Services to Architecture. Níall exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 2016 and 2018, co-curated the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition Architecture Rooms in 2022 with Rana Begum and has been shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2013, 2015 and 2018. Níall is Professor of Architectural Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He was a visiting professor at the University of California Los Angeles from 2012-2013, and was appointed Lord Norman Foster Visiting Professor of Architecture at Yale for 2014-2015. 

Marie Donnelly spent thirty years with the European Commission, ultimately as Director for Renewables, Energy Efficiency and Innovation, and was a leading advocate of future oriented policies and strategies: providing a fair deal for consumers; putting energy efficiency first; and achieving global leadership in renewable energies. She is a member of the Governance Committee of MaREI, and an Advisory board member of UCD Energy Institute. 

Marie was the first Chairperson of Renewable Energy Ireland - an open partnership of sustainable energy associations working collectively to support the energy transition in Ireland.

She was also a non-executive director of Tipperary Energy Agency – a social enterprise for energy efficiency; and E3G, a European climate change think tank operating to accelerate the global transition to a low carbon economy.

Before joining the Commission, Marie was a Director of the Federation of Irish Chemical Industries, prior to which she was an executive with the Kerry Group. Marie is a Senior Advisor in Brussels to Penta, a global Communications Agency.

John has over 30 years’ experience developing innovative and creative structural engineering solutions for clients across all market sectors. John’s approach is to work closely with Architects, Clients and Industry Partners to seek continuous improvement in designs that add real value at the earliest stage of any project. He has spearheaded CORA’s many award winning projects and built an organisation that works at the highest level of engineering excellence and in recent years, is particularly interested in Low Embodied Carbon design.

Tonje Værdal Frydenlund, Director of Operations at the renowend Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta.

For more than 30 years, Snøhetta has designed some of the world’s most notable public and cultural projects. The collaborative nature between Snøhetta's different disciplines is an essential driving force of the practice. At the heart of all Snøhetta’s work lies a commitment to social and environmental sustainability, shaping the built environment and design in the service of humanism. Snøhetta believes well-conceived design can help things run more efficiently, improve people’s well-being and make life more enjoyable.

Tonje Frydenlund joined SNØHETTA in 2001 and has spanned different roles from Managing Director for Snøhetta Oslo to Business Development in the Nordic region. With over 25 years of experience in the architectural industry, she has been part of multiple projects nationally and internationally. Tonje is passionately pushing the sustainability agenda within the building industry and is currently the Chair of the Research Center on Zero Emission Neighborhoods in Smart Cities and the Chair of Norwegian Green Building Council.

MEP Ciarán Cuffe, is a member of the Greens/EFA political group. Ciarán has degrees in architecture and urban planning and is currently the Rapporteur for the revision of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). Ciarán sits on the ITRE (energy) and TRAN (transport) Committees of the Parliament as a full member, and on the REGI (regional development) Committee as a substitute member. He serves as President of EUFORES, a European cross-party network that promotes the deployment of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency. Prior to his election to the European Parliament in 2019, he served as a Dublin City Councillor, Teachta Dála (TD) for Dún Laoghaire, and Minister of State with responsibility for sustainable transport and climate change. 

Ciarán is also one of the lead MEPs working on the New European Bauhaus, an initiative from the European Commission looking to incorporate design, creativity and community into the green transition. The New European Bauhaus, or NEB, revolves around the core principles of aesthetics, inclusion and sustainability, and speaks to a desire for bottom-up change – how can we involve people in the changes that will take place all around them as we move to a sustainable future?

Annalie Riches co-founded Mikhail Riches in 2015 to focus on providing housing and neighbourhoods that are inherently sustainable and joyful places to live.

Prior to establishing Mikhail Riches was founding director of Riches Hawley Mikhail, a practice that set the bar for low-carbon social housing with Clay Field and Goldsmith Street. Annalie has worked for a number of practices including the celebrated engineer Peter Rice, in Paris. Annalie went ‘on the tools’ in 2002, building her own house, Whatcotts Yard.

Annalie contributes across all the scales of architectural practice; she is recognised for her masterplanning and strategic abilities, as well as her ‘hands on’ expertise in architectural design and detailing. Her projects include Park Hill Phase 2 for Urban Splash and Velocity; the winning entry to the 2018 NIC Competition for providing 400,000 new homes between Oxford and Cambridge. She is also leading on Park Hill Phase 4, and the Bridgewater masterplan in the Olympic Park.

Park Hill

Park Hill is a grade 11* listed brutalist housing scheme in Sheffield, containing 1000 homes, it is Europe’s largest listed building. Urban Splash took on its regeneration in 2004. It’s exposed concrete frame: a significant aspect of its listing; is also a cold bridge. Low floor-to-ceiling heights present another challenge to its retrofit. A thermal model created by our consultant Greengauge informed us where to add insulation most effectively. Each room has an insulated floor and ceiling to achieve the best thermal performance. Externally coloured, insulated render panels cover concrete elements. Our approach was to retain as much of the existing fabric as possible and upgrade it to the highest achievable standards. Bricks have been cleaned, mortar retained, and party walls upgraded acoustically.

Carole Pollard is a Past President of the RIAI (2016-17) and during her presidency was committed to supporting sustainable careers in architecture, to raising the profile of architecture in Ireland, and to promoting the relevance of architects in the creation of a quality built environment. She devised the annual Women in Architecture Networking Evening, which has gone from strength to strength since the first event took place in 2017. 

Her architectural practice includes research, writing and lecturing on architectural history with a particular focus on the twentieth century.  Earlier this year, she received her PhD from UCD School of Architecture for her work on Andy Devane. Carole is a graduate of Dublin School of Architecture, DIT with a MA (Hons) in History of Design from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

Orms are a leading London architecture practice with extensive experience working with existing buildings. Rachel co-leads the practice’s sustainability consultancy work, having originally joined Orms as an architect in 2017. Rachel will discuss her research into material passports, which was initiated as part of a wider Grosvenor Estate Innovation Project into material reuse. The outcome of this work is a methodology for encouraging more meaningful material reuse, by creating a material database for the project. She currently leads a UK material passport working group, a cross industry collaboration, with the aim of turning the research into a clear project deliverable.

Dr Dervla MacManus is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in UCD School of Philosophy working on gender equity in the Irish architecture profession. This project is co-funded by the Irish Research Council and the RIAI and is looking at why women leave architecture, the gender breakdown in the profession, and attitudes towards gender equity in architecture. Dervla is a former architect and in recent years, her research interests have focussed on dark heritage, architectural pedagogy, gender and feminism. She is a member of the Open Heart City collective of academics concerned with the built legacy of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.

Nick Taaffe is a member of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland and a Chartered Quantity Surveyor by background. He is a co-author of the recent SCSI report on the Real Cost of Renovating Derelict and Vacant Properties for Residential use. The report was seen as a milestone in tackling the dereliction and vacancy issues that currently exist within Ireland. It provided real life case studies and a thorough investigation into the financial and technical challenges we face in repurposing these buildings as homes.

The report was instrumental in providing advice to the government on the viability issues that are endemic to these projects while also highlighting the opportunity that exists within these buildings. The report served as a reminder that only from true collaboration within our industry can we unlock the potential to create homes from these vacant and derelict buildings.

Nick worked in Christchurch, New Zealand as part of the Earthquake rebuild. Following his return home, he purchased his own vacant building located on the main street of Dun Laoghaire and has been painstakingly transforming it from an old vacant Barbershop into a home. He is a true advocate for the repurposing of old buildings and believes strongly in the important role the built environment plays within the community.

Simon Bayliss is an architect and urban designer passionate about the design of healthier and more sustainable housing. As Co-Founder and Managing Partner of HTA Design, he leads an interdisciplinary and instinctively collaborative team of architects, landscape architects, planners and sustainability analysts, all working together to create great places to live.  

HTA is known for innovation in housing design and delivery, and for a commitment to shaping projects through community and customer engagement. The practice has set the standard in low carbon housing design, modular volumetric construction, and perhaps most challenging of all, renovation and retrofit for estate regeneration. HTA is also known for being a great place to work, having been recognized as the AJ100 Employer of the Year for the past two years. 

Alongside his leadership of HTA, Simon takes an active role in the practice’s project work and design philosophy. He is an active member of various industry expert and design review panels and is always keen to share his views on housing. In 2020 Simon co-authored the RIBA-published Modular Housing Handbook.

Peter Duffy is an Associate Director at MCA Architects. As Healthcare Team Lead, he has worked with both public and private healthcare providers for over 24 years covering the healthcare spectrum from primary and residential care to tertiary care projects of national importance.

The National Development Plan and Climate Action Plan have set minimum targets for public sector energy efficiency and the renovation of public buildings by 2030 which must achieve carbon zero by 2050. As Technical Advisor lead on behalf of the HSE and SEAI, Peter will provide an overview of the decarbonisation programme for ten pilot sites which will inform the development of a strategy to progress and deliver a large scale renovation programme to address the HSE’s top 170 energy users.  

Neil Menzies is Director of Sustainability with the real estate company Hibernia Real Estate Group (“Hibernia”). With almost 15 years’ experience working in the area of sustainability, he now has responsibility for managing the sustainability efforts across Hibernia’s €1.2bn property portfolio, all of which is in Dublin. This includes ownership of the Sustainability Strategy and ensuring its delivery, managing the Environmental, Social & Governance (“ESG”) reporting against globally recognised ESG standards and benchmarks, developing all ESG related communications and stakeholder engagement and researching and planning for future ESG trends and regulations.

Before joining Hibernia, Neil worked as Environment and Sustainability Manager with Luas operator Transdev. He has also worked extensively in consultancy and in the waste industry. He has experience of working internationally having managed large-scale projects in the UK and the Middle East and has a wealth of knowledge across sustainability, infrastructure and facilities management/operations, QEHS Management Systems, energy management and business development.

Ali Grehan has been the Dublin City Architect since 2008. In this role she leads a multi-disciplinary team responsible for developing a broad urban design agenda including delivery of projects in relation to housing, public realm, community and cultural infrastructure. Her career has spanned private practice in Dublin, London and Bilbao, and in the Public Sector; where her particular focus has been on large-scale urban regeneration. Prior to becoming City Architect, Ali worked with Ballymun Regeneration Ltd, Fingal County Council and with the RPA (now TII) delivering Dublin’s first LUAS Light Rail system. She has an MSc in Climate Change: Policy, Media and Society from Dublin City University.

Emma Geoghegan is Head of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Building and Environment TU Dublin and has over 20 years of experience in architectural practice in the UK and Ireland. She was previously an RIAI Vice President and Council Member and sits on the RIAI Board of Architectural Education. Emma is currently the Irish project lead for ARCH4Change, an Erasmus+ co-funded project, and TU Dublin school lead for the national HEA funded Building Change project - both projects are focussed on the why and how of implementing critical curricular change in architectural education. Emma is also a researcher with the TU Dublin Centre for Socially Engaged Practice & Research, completing a PhD on care ethics, disability and the built environment. 

Sabrina Dekker is Dublin City Council’s Climate Action Coordinator.  She has over 10 years of experience specialising in climate policy with a focus on resilience in urban areas.  She is the author of the book “Cities Leading Climate Action: Urban Planning and Policy”.  She holds a PhD in Environmental Policy, an MPA in Human Security, and an MPP in Urban Development and Public Health.

Paddy Phelan is CEO of South East Energy Agency, a not for profit local acting regional energy agency. He is also current President of the Irish BioEnergy Association, Irish Energy Storage Association and Executive Committee of the Irish Wind Farmers Association, Member of the Chambers of Ireland Low Carbon Taskforce, Advisory Board Member of European Biogas Association. He was a Board Member of SEAI between 2015-2018, with expertise on energy communities, technical and entrepreneurship. He is a part-time lecturer in WIT in Sustainable Energy Engineering.

Paddy has 25 years post-graduate engineering experience across broad areas of energy, ranging from energy efficiency, energy management and land-based renewable/clean technologies. He is an industry expert in the built environment retrofit process with an emphasis on social housing retrofit since 2012 with Carlow, Kilkenny and Wexford social housing providers in Local Authority and Housing Association sites.  

We are delighted that Architect, artist, broadcaster and writer Róisín Murphy will once again moderate the RIAI Conference 2023. 

Róisín is the Presenter of Home Rescue on RTE1 and the resident Architect on Newstalk’s Home Show, which features her iconic object of design series. Qualifying with a first class honours degree in Architecture, Róisín had already established a reputation in the Irish design world, whilst still in college. She had won private commissions in London and had started a student movement ‘SADD’ campaigning for the conservation of Georgian Dublin. She was one of a new breed of ‘designer Irish’ awake citizens. Exhibiting student architectural work in Trinity College’s Atrium, she caught the attention of RTE and was interviewed on television. Once qualified, she began working in Douglas Wallace architects and rose to be a Director. Róisín subsequently set up her own practice.