SubUrban to SuperRural, Ireland’s entry to the 10th International Architecture Exhibition, is presented by the Irish Architecture Foundation under the auspices of Culture Ireland, grant-aided by The Arts Council and sponsored by The Devey Group, with additional support from the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland and Tegral and with the co-operation in Venice of Nuova Icona. The sprawl surrounding Ireland’s urban centres is driven by an obsession with the car and an innate desire to live on the land. A mono-functional organism, sub-urban sprawl has become a universal solution to housing throughout the island. Ireland’s population is projected to increase by 38% in the next 25 years, creating an obligation to propose new models for development that will be environmentally, socially and culturally sustainable. Accepting our current reality of road-based infrastructure and the widespread desire to live in low density housing, the challenge facing Ireland is how to evolve new living conditions that are an inversion of the fundamentally negative paradigm of less-than-urban to an essentially positive one of more-than-rural. In curating Ireland’s participation in the Venice Biennale 2006, we sought to take on this challenge by asking nine of our generation of Irish architects to test this paradigm shift through the formulation of specific projects that would illuminate a vision of how the SubUrban might evolve into the SuperRural between now and 2030. [FKL architects]   Commissioners’ Introduction (PDF) Shane O’Toole Commissioner Ciarán ÓGaora Deputy Commissioner (Biogs PDF)     Curators’ Essay by FKL architects  (PDF) Michelle Fagan, Paul Kelly, Gary Lysaght, Curators (Biog PDF)