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About Spirit of Place

Spirit of Place is a project conceived and developed by Travis Price, an architecture professor from Washington DC. The project has seen the building of ‘mythological portals in remote areas around the world,’ including ‘a star-gazing temple at Machu Picchu, a Snake Shrine in Nepal and a floating oratory on the Amazon, as well as some amazing shrines and sacred portals along the coastline of County Mayo’.

The projects in Mayo have been built with the help of architectural students from the Catholic University of America, Washington DC and local craftsmen. These otherworldly art projects celebrate Irish stories and mythological understandings in a modern idiom.  They have won prestigious awards from the American Institute of Architects and have featured in the Washington Post, New York Times and National Geographic. Founded in 1993, Spirit of Place-Spirit of Design is an international design-build education programme with a cultural exchange curriculum. The design brief is a response to the poetic specificity of the culture, mythology, and the ecology of place. For over 20 years, Spirit of Place has been invited by project patrons in a host country to create a ‘legacy marker’ that revitalizes a unique aspect of historic culture celebrating the spirit of place.