Níall McLaughlin is this year's recipient of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal—awarded for more than three decades of work ranging from a seaside bandstand at Bexhill to the Stirling Prize-winning library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. To mark the occasion, his practice has released a new book, published by Objectif Edition and co-edited with Bryony Jones. And it's far from your typical architecture monograph.Uncle Toby's Garden, and it takes its title from Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne's mid-eighteenth-century novel—a book that seems to have arrived from the future, treating the conventions of the still-young English novel as toys to be dismantled, and anticipating experimental fiction by roughly two centuries. It tries to capture real experience, and the movement of consciousness, in a way that tidy, linear narrative can't.
Níall's book is similarly non-linear, organised around digressions rather than buildings. Its title character, Uncle Toby, is a wounded veteran who spends his days re-enacting old battles on his bowling green, in a pastime both trivial and profound. In that spirit, the book reframes architecture as a performance of ritual, collaboration, speculation and play.
Fittingly, our conversation took place at 10 Bowling Green Lane, home of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, and the temporary site of the Architecture Foundation's summer programme, POST PRESS. It was recorded on Tuesday 21 July 2026.
Link to Níall's lecture Circling a Star - a Daylight Talk: https://www.niallmclaughlin.com/media/circling-a-star-a-daylight-talk/
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