Engineering as a creative art.
Peter Rice’s engineering helped make some of the twentieth century’s most ambitious architecture possible. Arup’s record places him among the team behind the Centre Pompidou in Paris, designed with Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Its exposed structure and services freed the interior for flexible use.
That collaboration gives the Dundalk portraits another layer: engineering can involve imagination, material knowledge and visual daring as much as calculation. Omin’s founding-year tribute and MonkeyBird’s later interpretation approach the same figure through very different artistic languages.
The full story of Peter Rice IN PUBLISHED WORDS / June 1973Centre Beaubourg: introductory articleTed Happold and Peter Rice · The Arup JournalPublished engineering writing from the project’s own team, rather than a retrospective quotation.
Learn moreLearn more about the subject 1
Historical context and editorial interpretation are distinguished above. Sources researched October 2026.
The story across the years.
Other artists’ interpretations of this subject in the festival collection.
2024Peter RiceMonkeyBird · On the streetsThe story behind the wall.
Omin’s 2019 mural was an early festival tribute to Peter Rice. Located on Rampart Road, it forms part of the original SEEK collection, bringing the work of a Dundalk graffiti artist together with the story of a figure honoured by the town.
Meet Omin.
View artist profile & all their workOmin is a graphic artist with a 20 year history rooted in Graffiti. Hailing from Dundalk, Omin has been painting and traveling extensively becoming established on the international graffiti art scene. Painting in cities across the globe from New York, London, Barcelona, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
Omin works across a variety of mediums and surfaces ranging from large-scale murals, canvas works and explorations in print.
Omin’s graffiti pieces encapsulate traditional graffiti elements where letterforms can become deconstructed or in some cases verge on the abstract. Not one to stick to a routine Omin's style is ever evolving. His work also explores the human figure, painting characters with photorealistic and illustrative qualities mixing graphic elements influenced by glitches in everyday use of digital technology.
