Andrew Devane

Clongowes 1929-1936 I Andrew Devane

Andrew Devane (1917-2000), architect, was a native of Limerick, who attended Clongowes in 1929-36. Having graduated in architecture from UCD, he was awarded a Taliesin Fellowship to work in Wisconsin with the leading American modernist, Frank Lloyd Wright. A deeply spiritual person, he empathised with Wright’s philosophy of harmonising synthesis and creation in buildings that were human in scale and sympathetic to their environment. On his return to Ireland, he became a partner of Joseph Robinson and Cyril Keefe, both Clongownians and already a successful team, to form one of the country’s leading architectural firms. Devane’s designs echoed the horizontal and curved lines of Wright’s most iconic buildings and owed much less to the influence of Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. His buildings were generally low-rise, and he preferred to locate them back from the urban environment in landscaped and tranquil settings. Other characteristics included water features, shaded porches, vegetation and sculpture. He was partly or wholly responsible for the design of numerous distinguished buildings, that included the Carroll’s Building on the Grand Canal, the church at Dublin Airport, Gonzaga College, Mount Carmel Hospital, the Irish Pavilion at the 1967 New York World Fair, St Patrick’s College Drumcondra, St Fintan’s Church in Sutton, Inchicore Vocational School, the Irish Life Centre in Abbey Street, the AIB Headquarters in Ballsbridge, St Vincent’s Private Hospital, the 1960s extensions in Clongowes and his own home in Howth, together with many other hospitals, schools, churches and office buildings. In the early 1980s he retired to India to assist in the alleviation of poverty in Calcutta, where his last work in 1999 was the design of a home for orphaned boys.