Irlanda – of de Blacam and Meagher

Writings

Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher _________________________ Archive: Drawings Construction Photography Essay: Photography Writings _________________________

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Intersections in Dublin

Roy Foster

‘People meet in architecture’. In Dublin they also meet on the street, at corners, in squares. Time slips away; Yeats said that when you walked through Dublin, Jonathan Swift was ‘around every corner’.

The architecture of much of the central city is formally Georgian, but that’s not the whole story. The city has a hidden plan, evolving through medieval landholding, eighteenth-century estates, and nineteenth-century commercial development. As you walk away from Trinity College’s great classical west front, facing westwards up Dame Street, you are heading towards the medieval centre, passing through a historical palimpsest.

Temple Bar is on your right, to the north: now the epicentre of youth culture, restaurants, small galleries, theatres, a Saturday food market. The buildings overlap each other, little streets wind down to the river, the urban archaeology suggests layers of development, carrying layers of meaning. You pass, along the south side of Dame street, the vigorous late-nineteenth-century Ruskinian decoration of solid commercial palaces, and then encounter a space. Beyond it, is Thomas Cooley’s powerful Royal Exchange, now the City Hall, which ushered in neo-classicism in 1769. But in the intervening space is a numbing block of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century international-style office building, distinguished only by a weird structure on the roof suggesting an abandoned crane.

(Maybe it is?) Faced with the challenge of linking neo-classical and VictorianVenetian, someone has turned tail and run.

There are too many missed chances in Dublin, and too many of them were flunked over the last twenty years, when there was briefly money to build and talent to use it. But continue on this walk and there is a sign of hope. Pass the Cooley’s domed masterpiece, turn left into Werburgh Street, and pause on the corner of Castle Street. Here a similar challenge has been faced, and taken up.

On one side the striking if incomplete Roman front of the early-eighteenth-century St. Werburgh’s Church; around the corner on Castle Street a four-story brown brick late-Georgian shop-front façade; in between, making the corner, is an apartment block and art gallery.

Small as the scale is, spacious proportions and finely-detailed finish make the transition from neighbour to neighbour; the placing of the windows, the modest but decisive scale, the facings of silverygrey iroko, the stepped-back façade restores the unity of an urban connection.

This is a corner where more than one kind of meeting is taking place.

That is one restorative intervention by de Blacam and Meagher in the Dublin streetscape. Following a diagonal line south-east, you will find another about two hundred metres away – The Wooden Building on Exchange Street at the western end of Temple Bar. The materials are, again, brick and wood, the colours subtly unified, the hardwood panels creating a pattern of verticals which suggest a medieval motif; this slender apartment building on a sloping street occupies its space with an absolute sense of belonging and propriety. There is a garden courtyard behind, and a sliver of space beside its southern neighbour lets in what Shane de Blacam has called ‘a crack of west light’.

Light matters: the building is both lucid and lucent, all the way up to the library tower which crowns the top apartment.

Towers, the masterly introduction of light, the texture of appropriate materials (brick, hardwood, pre-patinated copper), a use of space and volume at once imaginative and respectful of their surroundings: the leitmotifs of de Blacam and Meagher’s Dublin buildings.

These qualities enliven the Beckett Theatre and the Atrium at Trinity College, and they flood the parish church at Firhouse with an eerie calm. (No tower here, though, nor even any stained glass: just a spreading cruciform plan, enclosed by four gardens and itself framing Imogen Stuart’s dark Byzantine Stations of the Cross.) These buildings are concerned with the intersection of spaces, the conjunctions of inherited urban, social and spiritual history, and the way Dublin’s atmosphere is irradiated by ‘cracks of west light’.

Temple Bar, a conglomeration of Georgian housing, nineteenth-century warehouses, religious meeting-houses and early-twentieth-century industrial buildings in the heart of Dublin, was once slated for wholesale destruction in favour of a 1970s transportation terminal.

It was saved by one of the few helpful interventions by an Irish government in the sphere of architectural tradition, when they set up Temple Bar Properties and invited young Irish architectural firms to design developments which would enhance the character of these cobbled streets and obscure corners.

Many of these architects had been taught

by Shane de Blacam and John Meagher, and it shows. In the corners of Temple Bar and elsewhere, the pervasive influence of de Blacam and Meagher as well as their own buildings enable meetings – in a city where Leopold Bloom’s daylong walk through streets as well-known and well-worn as a favourite garment reflects a time-hallowed pastime.

That is a tradition threatened by aggressively insensitive intrusions into the urban landscape since the 1960s; even in the 1930s, Yeats denounced the process.

‘When I stand upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark…’ Seventy years later it is hard to walk past the brutal Central Bank, or the ESB offices in Fitzwilliam Street, and not feel that hatred. But the work of de Blacam and Meagher demonstrates, with a quiet certainty, that heterogeneity need not be discordant; that history is an accumulation; that streets evolve out of a shared and successive series of interventions; and that traditions need to be understood in order to work with them and around them, in a human landscape. Where people are able to meet each other.

Circle Square Line Elizabeth Hatz

ooooooooooo The circle is simple, eternal, clear.

It is also uncompromising, hard-line and absolute.

Across the Irish landscape the profusion of man-made circles echo the geometry of geological processes long since forgotten but powerful in their silent traces. Like water rings on a sea of sedimentary limestone, the megalithic circles garnish the bedrock of petrified marine organisms, penetrating the green frothy grass bed. Circles enclose, focus and invite, drawing every part towards a centre, but also radiating out in all directions, a watch-full eye in defense.

The air is vast in Ireland, the sky is huge. And all around is the enormous sea. Endless and constantly moving. Therefore the geometry need be strongly linked to the ground, anchored to the dense earth, tied in the bedrock and to the shelfs of lime. The airy focal circle is forever bound to the solid rock. Earth and sky. It all starts there. The human world is held, described and explained; the middle of earth, scene set for visual clarity. A plane for all encounters. At CIT the circular yard, dropped like a big ball in suburban fragmentation, is the center of interest, emptied of things. Yet the centre itself is dislocated, the perimeter perforated, the perfection broken, interfered with, like born a ruin. The circle is made open, yet the form retains its centrifugal powers. People arrive on tangents, cross in all directions, dwell on segments, inhabit circle within the circle.

Their movements and their stillness are made visible at once. A couple is sitting on the stone border, two people are resting on the grass, someone is emerging from the cool shadow into the focal heat, a small lunch eaten on the steps, a quick conversation behind a column, two teachers meeting at the porch. The circle is like carved out of a structural order of linear repetition. This creates accidental spaces at the intersections of the two geometries. And more spaces to accidentally meet, casually, suddenly, en passant. More spaces to linger and gaze. The geometry is monumental. It makes the smallest movement beautiful, it gives casual stillness power. It expands time as it makes every part and every human being discernible.

The order celebrates the accident. It allows small things to be comfortably close to large ones, casual bagatelles adjacent to big moments. It allows the ordinary to be made visible, it lets the everyday be embraced by the festive. Like Kahn used his ‘society of rooms’ in the plan, to create negotiations between clear spatial characters, here the two geometries form individual hierarchies of spaces, negotiating at different scales. The most focal and collective parts are also somehow exterior spaces, to which the more enclosed individuals relate and refer. In this civic spatial intercourse, the in-between spaces play a decisive role of mediator and time gap. The circle itself is learning from them: borrowing their capacity to take up irregularities, shifts and forces from outside.

Strong learns from weak.

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Brick is angular. Easy to pile, stereotomic, heavy, dense. It belongs to ground. The property of a material is formed in the process of its creation and as materials become more composed, so grows their complexity. As the sculptor Antony Cragg once noticed, it takes a long time to develop a relationship to a material. When we combine composed materials, complexity grows further, sometimes beyond our understanding, towards complication. Even a single material may contain a whole world of properties, choices and accidents; rich and laborious like its process of becoming. When a brick is fired its character of strength, porosity, surface colors, sintering, are formed. But already in the choice of clay lay the primary conditions. Brick is earth, fired. The form gives this process an architectural measure, suitable for the hand – a fixed angular format like a loaf, a solid repeated type. With the wet joint the process is made softly languid again, like porridge. The solid loafs float in a heavy mass. A considerable part of a brick wall is mortar. Sigurd Lewerentz worked with such broad joints at Björkhagen Church, that the wild bond makes the wall seem like a thick textile, weaved and supplely stretched, renouncing rigidity while enhancing solidity. Not a format was vocabulary, the language single brick was allowed to be cut; the At the CIT site there is some lack of articulate in its soft birch meadow. stale surrounding. The brick is a new resistance from the flat landscape and than soil, but warm as earth. It creates ground, harder than clay and denser setting. The major geometrical order of firm civic order in an empty nondescript is one larger + two smaller squares the Tourism and Hospitality Building plaza. The squares are a hidden matrix, partially intersected by the circular a an abstract skeleton behind the fleshy presence of the brick, revived only in certain openings in walls and ceilings – and for instance the voids between the ventilation towers. They are an absence allowing presence. The power of such an order works on a sense of basic restfulness: the shifts and irregularities are all leaning on a restful order. This all starts at the Taoiseach’s House in Phoenix Park where the five by five square grid regulates all. Once this is in place, the individual situation is given its realm within this order. The square allows a single house to create a focus inscribed in a large park.

At Trinity, the squareness of the Beckett Theatre performs another architectural power. Here the cubic sense of the solitary block-like piece turns it into both a type and an individual character. As it is tucked into a corner, this singular power helps charging the in-between spaces it creates with its neighbouring buildings. It’s like being close to negotiating personalities – you feel the vibrations. Squareness helps here: with the close relation to a strong geometry it enters the category of types and classics.

It is different, but on speaking terms with its surrounding. Squareness here makes the small grow in density to counterweigh its neighbours – paradoxically it also makes it intimate – despite its power.

The predominant structure throughout Ireland is linear: the wall. Walls divide every house, every field, every ground. Walls follow winding roads, cut across hills and mounds, lineate domains. Few landscapes offer stronger geometric powers, both geological and manmade. This also shines through the lush softness of some of its mellow parts. It is laid bare in the arid widths of the west. Climbing a Burren hill towards a neolithic cairn you seem to walk a man-made spiraling stair until you follow a long straight line to the up to the base of the mound. This is a fissure from a geological process predating the site by some hundred thousand years.

Lines drawn up by violent climatic mutations, cracks formed when liquid matters cooled down to solidify. It striates the ground like an irregular three-dimensional grid. The tension between man-made form and natural processes is dramatically balanced. The walls of Inish Meáin, fruit of centuries of labour to rescue every potential patch of soil, protect it from the devastating wind and shelter humans and cattle, geometrisize the landscape with a powerful spatial pattern. Endless rows of walls become the measure of a world, measure of work and time. Here the Textile Factory lines up its slender volume in the same way as most houses on the island: along the topographic curves. The monumental stone staircase underlines the linear order and the inner structure keeps the long volume intact. It is a subtle line, raising tall and stubborn, yet generous as space for encounter – with visual contact near and at distance. But a new adjacent building by Shane de Blacam, for his nephew, pushes the line further. In a nearby layer between the low stone walls delimiting the fields above the factory, this restaurant and rooms is simply

arranged as one very long stone wall, parallel to the old ones. On some 70 meters, the linear house boldly and elegantly lines up the restaurant as a rounded head piece, four suites with stunning views on the sea and lime terraces and finally the private house of the owner. It is uncompromised, proud and seems to go on forever, like all the walls in this magic place. It is shamelessly modern and blends seemlessly with the existing. It reinforces the horizontality, congenial with the sea. This linear building is a condition. It is a climate. It is an edge of resistance and persistance. It is a shield against flattery and compliance. It becomes a sharp and purposeful backdrop for ordinary situations. Growing of herbs, drying wet clothes, resting from the wind. In the restaurant a huge photograph by Bill Doyle hangs above the entrance: an old man caught while he flungs himself in a fearless leap over a stone wall. The bucket of milk is safely placed a few armlengths from him. Although the face is hidden by his cap, his body radiates of energetic joy. He can still do it. Walls are lines ordering and measuring the grounds. But they are also lines crossed and contested.

Their physical presence is not only for division. They also become the place for encounter, zones for negotiations, furnitures for meeting – for chats sitting with dangling legs, intimate talks leaning against their warm sunlit sides, a few words en passant. At CIT the library building has a structure of closely repeated lines, like a ploughed field. The lines are a loose yarn, allowing spaces weaved between them and across them. The axis is a major element in de Blacam and Meagher’s practice.

Thanks to the axis, spaces may be strung like beads on a line, formality can embrace individuality, accident and impulse. Only if you have a line, can you step outside it.

The Taoiseach’s House Dublin, 1979

de Blacam and Meagher, recently returned from Philadelphia, placed joint second in the competition. The winning scheme, by Evans & Shalev of London, was never realised due to changes in government and a deteriorating economy; and the competition may be best known today through proposals by the muchpublished Zaha Hadid and by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Yet the Irish architects’ proposition not only heralded the arrival of critical talents for local architectural culture, its character was somehow recognisably Irish, integrating the formal and informal.

The house has a beautiful, and beautifully drawn, plan. It’s a precise square, five square modules by five square modules – i.e. twenty five squares in toto, each measuring 5x5 metres. Smaller rooms are designated a single module, extending on occasion into the porous, encircling fringe (part-poché, part-veranda). A garden court, inspired by that at New York’s Frick Collection, occupies two tall interior modules. It connects the principal volumes of the house: a doubleheight salon measuring 10 metres square and a dining room, 10x15 metres, with a central inglenook.

As Dubliners, the architects also instinctively understood the immediate context. Instigated as a royal deer park in 1662, Phoenix Park has for centuries hosted large public gatherings and the houses of political dignitaries. Near the midpoint of its central avenue are Áras an Uachtaráin, the residence of Ireland’s largely ceremonial president; the U.S. ambassador’s house; and Ashtown, for many years the Papal Nunciature – three symbolic seats of power. Today the Ashtown lodge has been demolished. A medieval tower house and gardens survive, now incorporated into a visitors centre.

This architecture of halls and volumes is akin to Kahn’s Esherick House (1961) and, at a more institutional scale, the Yale Center for British Art (1974) on which de Blacam worked whilst in Philadelphia; the salon fireplace as freestanding element and the balancing of served and servant spaces also signal a Kahnian influence. Yet de Blacam and Meagher were equally conscious of indigenous prototypes, of the spirit and haptic characteristics of such centuriesold country houses as Beaulieu, County Louth, another two-storey block containing a splendid double-height hall.

The Irish country house, in its essence, is a comfortable hybrid of the formal and the informal, a place where history, classical allusion and a proper sense of scale reside alongside rain gear, motley heirlooms, and whatever the bountiful garden provides at any one particular time. This ‘house of the middle size’ is an object to be seen in its landscape (aspect) and conversely a shelter and apparatus through which that surrounding terrain is framed and understood (prospect). It should be generous without being grandiose, practical to use as much as beautiful to look at.

From the site today, one may imagine the views from elegant salons out across the Park to the city’s rooftops and distant glimpses of the Wicklow Mountains. As in the masterful œuvre of de Blacam’s Philadelphia employer, Louis I. Kahn, this is an architecture of rooms, discrete rectilinear volumes added one to the next, with minimal corridors.

The entire ensemble of single- and doublestorey rooms was wrapped in a habitable outer skin of small terraces and servant spaces, an epidermis housing French doors and mullion-less window planes linking interior and exterior worlds.

The ambience of these Irish country houses – the way light enters a chamber, the morphology of an old stone floor – is of course intimately indebted to their contents.

For the Taoiseach’s House, de Blacam and Meagher envisaged a kind of modern Hibernian Gesamtkunstwerk. They specified a full panoply of contemporary Irish-made furniture, utensils and art, sourcing oak from Abbeyleix in County Laois and colourful Ulster quilts for the interior walls. In the ground floor plan, we see not only each table and chair but individual paving bricks in their basketweave pattern.

The Taoiseach’s House proposed by Shane de Blacam and John Meagher as a home for the Irish Prime Minister maintains or revives that tradition. It would have stood on a grassy swathe of Dublin’s Phoenix Park as a low cubic block of oak and glass. Approached along Chesterfield Avenue, the long diagonal route leading northwest from the historic urban core, the house would have appeared as a compact double-storey pavilion constructed about an inner frame, its non-hierarchical facades composed from a restrained lexicon of posts and panels, some recessed, others flush.

In order to achieve this singular object, de Blacam and Meagher divided the competition brief in two. They placed accommodation for visiting foreign dignitaries in an independent structure separated from the main house by parallel rows of trees, the vertical accent of freestanding tower house, a renovated stable yard and a large walled garden. The Taoiseach’s House would therefore have been one key element in a settlement combining old and new, hard and soft, architecture and landscape.

This allowed for a somewhat relaxed articulation, the avoidance of overt rhetoric.

Raymund Ryan

Edward McParland

We can easily imagine this unrealised house in use, with bureaucrats and politicians as well as the Taoiseach’s family coming and going. There’s an ease about the place with the array of terracotta urns and canvas awnings suggestive of an elegant recreation pavilion. Colour pencil vignettes depict the changing position of doors and oak shutters at different times of the day and year. Like older country houses tuned to nature and the seasons, the Taoiseach’s House in Phoenix Park would have offered its inhabitants a simultaneous sense of shelter and openness, of stewardship in the world.

There is furthermore something Nordic about these interiors: the clean, light-filled volumes, the honest use of natural materials, the application of Design to everyday life.

If de Blacam was inspired by Kahn, Meagher was also influenced by graduate days in Helsinki. In subsequent projects, the spirit of Aalto, Asplund and Lewerentz is present in both plan and materiality – timber for Dublin’s Beckett Theatre and Temple Bar apartments, brick for mews in Dublin 4 and the robust Cork Institute of Technology.

This Scandinavian ethos helps anchor the project as recognisably modern architecture.

The Irish Architectural Archive first opened its doors in 1976. It then consisted of two very beautiful, but entirely empty, late 18th-century rooms in Merrion Square prepared for us by de Blacam and Meagher.

Without books, or drawings, or photographs, or documents of any kind, empty shelves stood in front of walls of brilliant white beneath elaborate neo-classical stuccoed ceilings. Conventionally, de Blacam and Meagher had stripped these ceilings of 200 years of paint; dramatically, they had left the plaster exposed, completely unpainted, its rich natural patination evocative of, and as beautiful as, an antique Roman soffit. Over the years, I have come to see this respect for the past, and their critical interaction with it to utterly original ends, as one of the guiding principles in their work.

This work for the Irish Architectural Archive and their subsequent support for that body, culminating in their recent presentation to it of their drawings, leads into the theme of what we now see in the Oratory of San Gallo. Their architecture does not start from a tabula rasa, but is rooted – in the past, yes, but more productively – in the enduring abstractions of the design of buildings: geometry, humane surroundings, the monumental, detail, wit, and tradition. All the time, they are making architecture and its past new.

The ‘making new’ of the 18th century kitchen by creating the Atrium was the principal triumph of their work in Trinity which they still regard as a formative experience for their practice.

‘Beautiful’, the hard-nosed committee commented, ‘but what’s it for?’. Back came the Kahnian answer: ‘it will suggest its own use’. Happily the committee was not too hard-nosed.

The beautiful management of light and materials (wood), refinements which are never petty, the evidence of designing minds at work on whole and on detail, and the discreet avoidance of any expressionism distinguish the Atrium. And this brings us back to their respect for the past in the revelation of the 18th century volume of the original kitchen and the exploitation of its early trusses. The old made dramatically new.

And when the Atrium reappears in the library of the Cork Institute of Technology (RIAI Triennial Gold Medal 2003) it illustrates a continuity of principle in their work: the searching examination, development and refinement of chosen classic solutions rather than the pursuit of the novel.

In an age when Irish church design gave scope to many a fan-, and amoeba-, and kite-shaped plan, their Parish Church, Firhouse (1979) has a simple Latin cross plan of six squares. A high external wall without windows, extending the unfenestrated end walls of sanctuary, transepts and nave, circumscribes the Latin cross, thus enclosing four gardens overlooked by the arms of the church. And if the outside world of Firhouse is thus excluded, the result is a truly natural sanctuary.

The parti is lucid while the introverted plan generates great complexity within the surrounding wall, through the interaction of church and gardens. This interplay of lucidity and complexity recalls Brunelleschi’s Santo Spirito, to which there is in Firhouse no conscious or stated reference, merely the shared preoccupation with an architectural universal.

Lucky students in Cork Institute of Technology to inhabit such enhancing buildings and spaces! It is not easy to achieve the monumental and to stay humane, as is done here. The scale is grand, but the brick and the wood and the detailing, together with mannerisms arising naturally from sympathy with materials and structure, and the use of the classically familiar (loggie, piazze, axes, portals) unfailingly reassure.

The enjoyment of reminiscences is one thing (Kahn, Moneo), but such academic excavation is beside the point as you enjoy the main circular courtyard, with its sloping site, and off-centre lawn. There may not be a lawn in the Campo, but if you can’t get to Siena, go to Cork!

Firhouse Church was a new building on a cleared site. Different problems faced the architects in restoring the Dining Hall in Trinity College Dublin after a fire in 1984. The restoration of the Dining Hall itself was a complex but almost routine job of ‘putting back’ what had been there. Working to a committee who both appreciated the architects, and at the same time knew their own minds, de Blacam and Meagher proposed changes to the damaged neighbouring buildings. Here, they recreated Adolf Loos’s Kärntner Bar in Vienna, made minimal changes to subsidiary spaces with startlingly elegant effect, and tackled the conversion into an atrium of what had been unpleasant eating areas inserted into the 18th-century kitchen.

There is an integrity of purpose which characterises their work, from the stripped ceilings of the early Irish Architectural Archive, to the respect paid to the 18th-century spaces of Trinity College, to the award winning Cork Institute of Technology. If I call it classical, I mean neither Doric, nor Ionic nor Corinthian, nor do I mean what passes for the classical in Post-Modernism. I mean a preoccupation with timeless architectural universals. And here in San Gallo, an archival timelessness is celebrated in the work of de Blacam and Meagher – their Platonic geometry, their strict discipline which accommodates wit, their monumentality which enhances without intimidating the user, their sympathy with materials and attention to detailing, their management of surprise, their minds delighting in design, their fastidious achievement of all this in the course of the almost impossibly difficult task of getting one stone on top of another. And their skill in making the past new.

One can see the appeal to them of Loos: the beautiful materials, the exacting detail and the classicism of the trabeated structure, architectural universals which they have always respected. And it was daring enough 25 years ago to recreate a 70-year-old design. But the invocation of the past was independent of current fashion, and it was fastidiously and wittily done.

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A similar theatricality is latent in the Beckett Theatre, its mass rising slightly above the cornice line of Trinity to declare itself through a flamboyant roof and opaque timber revetment. It is surely no accident that this primordial barn of a building should be built in the name of Ireland’s most existential playwright.

What both the atrium and the theater have in common is the dramatic elevation of the subject so as to look down onto a performance irrespective of whether one happens to be a spectator, a dramatic participant or a technical operative.

The culture of materials in the work of de Blacam and Meagher: An Appraisal

Kenneth Frampton

As Raymund Ryan has remarked, de Blacam and Meagher are the last of a line of Irish architects who have looked to America for inspiration as to how one might proceed with the cultivation of an architecture appropriate to the modernizing Irish Republic. The first move in this direction came with the flamboyant Michael Scott who, after realizing his audacious NeoCorbusian bus terminal in Dublin in 1953, switched, somewhat inexplicably, away from Europe and back to the States, in order to embrace the seemingly universal tectonic stemming from the office of Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. Twenty-five years later, de Blacam will opt for Kahn instead of Mies and for a more stereotomic point of departure. Hence, his stint as assistant architect on the posthumously completed Mellon Center for British Art in New Haven, before returning to Ireland in 1971 to start his own office in association with John Meagher, who had been in the States over the same period working for Venturi in Philadelphia.

In retrospect, one may even think of these separate American apprenticeships as referencing the tectonic and atectonic aspects of the American postmodern culture; that is to say the revisionist polemic of the New Monumentality of 1943, which influenced Kahn throughout his career, and the impact of American Pop Art on postmodern architecture dating from the early 60s.

Despite this American background, the early work of de Blacam and Meagher would be mediated by a mutual feeling for the civitas of the North, for a sensibility that, in my view, has always lain in the background of the peripheral Celtic capitals, in contradistinction to London which, for the last half century, with few exceptions, has kept Scandinavia at arm’s length. This may account for the Nordic spirit that is latent in the work of de Blacam and Meagher given their discrete admiration for Asplund, Aalto, Fehn and Lewerentz, as is suggested by such works as their Chapel of Reconciliation, Knock (1991) or their Beckett Theatre, built for Trinity College, Dublin in 1993. Kahn will still be the dominant influence, however, in the introspective dining facilities that they design and realize for Trinity in 1988. In these set pieces for Trinity, executed in wood, there is a surprisingly theatrical, one might even say Elizabethan tone, which makes itself manifest through articulate timber construction. In the first instance, within the labyrinthine dining complex, we encounter an introspective three-storey atrium which, with its tiered galleries, is reminiscent of the Shakespearean Globe Theatre. This seems to have been conceived as an inverted panoptic vantage point from which to observe the collegiate ritual of dining in the rooms below.

The wall, the floor and the frame.

Observations on the architecture of de Blacam and Meagher

Edward Jones

‘Have you returned or what?’ was once a refrain to be heard in Dublin bars. Many Irish architects, artists and writers travelled abroad, some making their reputations and many never to return, most notably the likes of Eileen Gray, Sean Scully and Samuel Beckett. By the mid 1950s the tide had begun to turn. Apart from a brief period in America with the Abbey Theatre as a successful actor, Michael Scott was the exception to this exodus.

He established his Dublin practice in the 1930s and had a direct connection with the heroic period of modern architecture. As president of the AAI in 1937 he invited Walter Gropius and Eric Mendelson to Dublin. More of an impresario than an architect, he assembled a talented group of people around him, some coming, some going. They all worked on Busáras, Dublin’s central bus station and arguably Ireland’s first significant modern building. Kevin Roche departed in 1948 to work for Eero Saarinen whereas Robin Walker returned after an extended tour working for Le Corbusier in Paris, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago and studying under Ludwig Hilberseimer and Mies at IIT. Ronnie Tallon was to join a few years later with his great enthusiasm for the work of Mies, producing the impressive television studios at Donnybrook and the unambiguously Miesian Bank of Ireland on Baggot Street. By 1975, the office of Scott Tallon Walker had set the standard. Shane de Blacam in turn following graduation worked for Louis Kahn in Philadelphia, specifically on the Mellon Gallery in Newhaven, and John Meagher studied and worked in Finland before also working coincidentally in Philadelphia for Robert Venturi. They returned independently, to Ireland in 1972, where they met and set up their practice in 1976 and bringing with them the influence of their respective apprenticeships.

It might be interesting to reflect in the course of these notes how Kahn’s preoccupation with the monumental and the material might combine with Venturi’s matter of factness and his contention that ‘Main Street is just about ok’; and how the initiative of Scott Tallon Walker with time was passed on to de Blacam and Meager for the realisation of another architecture, an architecture more rooted in the place and its existing institutions.

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One may conceive of this as ‘the space of public appearance’, in the Arendtian sense, as this tends to be confirmed by the monumental timber framing of the dining hall atrium. However, the rebated and panelled timber revetment, first elaborated by Kahn in his Salk Laboratories, only comes fully into its own in the external skin of the theatre, which steps progressively out at each floor to culminate in the large overhanging eaves of the roof. Here and there, crystalline sheets of plate glass, set close to the surface, emphasize, by association, the tessellated stonelike character of the timber cladding. However, the most dynamic aspect of the theatre is indutiably the vertical sub-division of its internal volume; not only the square, 80 seat, three-storey Players Theatre situated on the first floor, but also the dance studio in the attic and the 300-seat, Beckett Theatre situated to the rear of the tower, which announces its volumetric presence through external galleries and escape stairs and two double-height barn doors which may, on occasion, be opened in order to ventilate the auditorium.

If one divests the atrium of its structure it will dematerialize into a courtyard, as in the mews house that the architects realized in Heytesbury Lane, Dublin in 1997. Here, a simple paved court precedes an elongated, top-lit atrium, which serves as an honorific foyer, affording access to the living volume running parallel to the foyer. de Blacam’s habitual timber paneling and precision joinery serves to separate these two spaces and to impart an unusual monumental character to what is otherwise a double-height, top-lit domestic interior.

Here, as elsewhere in the work of these architects, we encounter a particular penchant for wood as if it were the aboriginal material of all architectonic form, thereby recalling the ancient Greek term tekton, meaning carpenter and, hence, through the prefix arche arriving at the term architekton; ie. master builder or architect. de Blacam and Meagher have nurtured this material preference in one project after another and never more so than in two particular works: the one comprising two 35 meter high, tapered, cylindrical masts in wood which now announce a new gateway into the campus of the University of Limerick, dating from 1999 and the other, an equally remarkable, single storey, thick-wall house, square in plan, with a central clerestory atrium, designed for a site in County Carlow, in 1977. This strictly modular house is enclosed by a contrapuntal, orthogonal periphery in which precision joinery promises to be inseparable from the tectonic of the work as a whole.

Our paths first crossed in the early 1970s in the corridors of Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin, then UCD’s school of architecture before its regrettable exodus to Belfield. We came together to participate in Ivor Smith’s interregnum at UCD. Following the RIBA visiting board’s refusal to give recognition to the school, Smith the architect of Parkhill Sheffield and teacher, was hired with an open brief to reorganise the school, and to introduce new teaching staff with special emphasis on the third and fifth years.

Various colleagues and myself were hired as part of an emergency teaching staff; Chris Cross, Mike Gold, Fenella Dixon, known then as the Grunt Group, were hired from London to run the third year; Andy MacMillan, Izzy Metstein and Charlie McMullan from Glasgow were hired to run the fifth year. Shane, on his return from America, was invited

by Smith to be the first year master. These were polemical times. This radical arrangement was immediately put in place and christened the ‘flying circus’ deriving partly from our weekly flights to Dublin and from the popular television series of the time. This was also underlined by Chris Cross having a passing resemblance to, and the mannerisms of, John Cleese. It is difficult to accurately characterise the conjunction of postswinging London of the late 1960s to the strangely conservative pre-Celtic tiger Dublin.If our design studios for the third year exhibited an enthusiasm for public housing and the comprehensive school of the British welfare state, Shane’s concerns were more to do with the autonomous qualities of architecture. I remember attending and being impressed by one of his first year reviews (1972) in which he ruminated about the value of a good floor and the importance of the wall; intimations of things to come. John was then also teaching UCD, though he had come from Bolton Street the ‘other place’, (his alma mater).

An important first observation on de Blacam and Meagher is that they recognised the important connection between theory and practice, between the generous exchange of ideas in the schools, versus the more singular experience of design and the making of buildings. It is difficult not to think of Mies Van der Rohe without IIT, Kahn and his relationship to Yale, Venturi and the University of Philadelphia, and de Blacam and Meagher at UCD. Interestingly, Robin Walker was a frequent visitor to UCD studios during the flying circus period.

Across the broad spectrum of recent Irish practice the work of de Blacam and Meagher holds a central position, with others waiting patiently or in some cases less patiently in the wings. In contrast to today’s obsession with image, with buildings conceived as objects and the need to be noticed above all, their work stood for the opposite. Buildings that were sane, understated and reflecting Peter Smithson’s concern for an architecture ‘without rhetoric’. The floor, the wall and the frame have been perennial topics in their work and with particular emphasis on the interior, recalling the echo of Shane’s commentary to first year students forty year ago.

The courtyard type is more active as a figure/ground formation in the Parish Church, Firhouse, completed in the midst of a Dublin suburb in 1979. Here a large, sub-divided, twelve square court, enclosed by concrete block walls, serves to circumscribe the cruciform figure of the church in plan, while the negative ground is made up of five open-air squares planted with trees plus a single, paved atypical, court providing for side entry into the church. The laconic monumentality of this work derives from its reinforced concrete frame, consisting of a grid of down-stand beams carried on square columns. As in the timber atrium of the Trinity, this is ‘a building within a building’, with its full height glazing being sustained by the trabeated concrete frame of the church. The elevated podium, carrying the altar, serves to situate the structure in terms of the late modern tradition, somewhere the New-Brutalism of Aldo Van Eyck’s canonical orphanage, of 1952, and the Neo-Miesian minimalism adopted by Arne Jacobsen in much of his postwar career.

The composite office/apartment building erected in Dublin, in 1999, opposite Christchurch Cathedral at No. 1 Castle Street, is an Aaltoesque batiment d’angle built out over an existing concrete framed structure dating from the nineteen sixties. This re-faced, fourbay, three-storey structure, subtly linked by virtue of superimposed framing to the scale and rhythm of the adjacent St. Werburgh’s Church, is crowned by a fivestorey corner building, stepping out towards the cathedral in dark, fair-faced brickwork. The contextual plasticity of this work raises the delicate issue of form in a particularly critical way in as much as the broken, cantilevered ‘cliff face’ of the corner is capped by a timber framed and paneled, top-lit projection which seems to be at variance with the syncopated, asymmetrical character of the brick mass. From a formal/tectonic standpoint, this belvedere asserts itself as a monumental set piece, superimposed rather than integrated into the brick backdrop from which it rises.

Coming belatedly on the scene, as far as the redevelopment of Temple Bar is concerned, the so-called Wooden Building, completed at the millennium to the designs of these architects, is not only a tower but also a tour de force in so far as it is a consummate demonstration of their ever more sophisticated, material syntax. This development comprises an eight storey tower carrying two apartments per floor, plus a penthouse, and a four storey adjunct block accommodating a crèche, at the first floor, and three one-bedroom apartments on each its three upper floors. Like No. 1 Castle Street, completed barely a year earlier, this complex rings the charges on a number of, subtly juxtaposed materials, so as to create a unique kind of abstract relief. Thus, where the stair shaft of the nine storey tower is carried out in precision brickwork, with an allusion to the nineteenth century warehouse tradition, the five storey block is cement-rendered, save for the creche over the parking entrance which is faced in brick. Against this rendered complex, and the stair that rises in the gap between the two blocks to serve the crèche and the elevated garden court beyond, there rises a nine-storey, glass and timber skeleton which all but totally encloses the brick core of its stair shaft. The brilliantly rhythmic detailing of this skin serves to establish the tactile modelling of the whole, whereby the timber cladding

This revaluing of the room might for some suggest a more archaic project; raum plan versus plan libre.

Main stream modern architecture had generally discarded the idea of the room for polemical reasons in preference for the spatial possibilities of cubism.

Whereas de Blacam and Meagher’s preference for the plan of rooms continued to recommend itself as an alternative route to modernity with an interest also in discontinuity inside and outside (the work of Wagner, Loos, Aalto and Kahn come to mind.)

The matter of fact exterior versus the surprise of a more elaborated interior was first demonstrated in their entry for the Taoiseach’s House competition in the Phoenix Park of 1979. This was further evident in the Parish Church, Firhouse also of 1979. Here the exterior recalled the neutrality of the traditional walled garden or cloister establishing a locus for the sanctuary of the church within, detached from its suburban surroundings. This in no way prepares the visitor for the dramatic transparency of the planted courtyards revealed by the large areas of glass held within their oak frames.

The theme of discontinuity between inside and outside is again in evidence in the improvements to dining facilities for Trinity College of 1984.

The intervention of a four storey high atrium, double square in plan dramatically brings together wall, floor and frame in a fine oak panelled self referential space. It is no coincidence that by way of homage to Adolf Loos, his Kärntner bar should be an inspiration for the bar at Trinity. The combination of the repaired 18th century Dining Hall, the new Atrium and the Loosian bar form an assemblage of rooms of varying pedigree and date sitting comfortable side by side, eschewing the modernist dogma for consistency. Also at Trinity, the Beckett Theatre of 1993 appears to have turned the dining atrium inside out. This oak clad tower house is first glimpsed tantalisingly through the gap of Narrow Lane when seen from Lincoln Place and more frontally when approached from the front gate on College Green. In either presentation we have an early indication of de Blacam and Meagher’s considered language of the exterior, highly crafted and composed with an eye for the unexpected. The development of timber and brick façades is further explored in their various mixed use and residential Dublin projects. In a sense these might be seen as providing an opportunity for honing their tectonic skills in anticipation of Cork (CIT) project of almost a decade later. Special mention should be made of their fine mews house at Heytesbury Lane (1997), the corner infill at No. 1 Castle Street (1999) and the Wooden Building at Temple Bar (2000). In all these we have a surprising generosity of space and light found within the light dimensions of the Dublin fabric and a cogent demonstration that the forms of Modern Architecture are not necessarily antipathetic to the repair and renewal of the traditional city.

The master plan for the Cork Institute of Technology was initially drawn up by Scott Tallon Walker in the late 1980s and given my introductory remarks about succession in Irish architecture it is appropriate

and its framing assume a different character as one passes from balustrade to window opening, to under the window panel, to side panel, and, finally, to the flush solid oak paneling of the tower just beneath the cantilevered metal canopies, which serve to cap the overall shaft of the tower, across two adjacent elevations. Here, as in the Beckett Theatre, one encounters the familiar de Blacam anti-perspectival trope of stepping the building out as it rises, floor by floor. In this instance, the rhythmic crescendo is emphasized by an increase in the area of clear glazing above the sixth floor, the mullions which stiffen the full height glass, assuming slightly wider spacing at this level. This subtle dilation seems to anticipate the free-standing, cylindrical columns of the two-storey, timber loggia, with its inset balustrading, which imparts an appropriately monumental inflection, to the wide-span, cantilevered canopies above.

Apart from formally terminating the structure these also serve to shield the top two floors of the building against the sun. This sublime, seven column set piece, is complemented by wire cables which descend at an angle over the two floors beneath, thereby serving to restrain the leading edge of each canopy.

Rising somewhat above the cornice height of Temple Bar, the resultant tectonic image arouses multiple associations, in part nautical, in part oriental. One may think of it as an exuberant termination, comparable to that of the Torre Velasca in Milan, but lighter and less historicizing. Despite the flush-framed, iroko paneling so characteristic of the practice, we are a long way here from Kahn for the overall approach is more empirical, which presumably it had to be in order to meet the needs of a small scale developer, committed to occupying the leftover spaces of the city fabric. Hence, as in Castle Street, the accommodation of a shop front of Victoria proportions on the ground floor plus syncopated vertical grillwork differentiating between the semi-public entry to the crèche and its garden court and the private entry to the apartment tower.

This is certainly a manifestation of the culture of materials taking us away from abstraction towards the cultural significance of mixed-construction as a phenomenological presence in itself. Despite the way in which this would appear to conform to the current vogue for reducing the expressivity of architecture to little more than the decorative, tactile iteration of the skin, here de Blacam and Meagher continue to accord full measure to the significant articulation of both structure and space in the development of the overall form. Above all else, both Castle Street and the Wooden Building are remarkable achievements at the level of the client for in what other capital city could one find clients who are willing, in this globalized age, to commission elite architects in order to develop tight sites for residential occupation with such a small margin of return. This is the time machine par excellence for such undertakings return us to the economy and techniques of the late 40s or early 50s; to the values of Aalto’s Saynatsalo Town Hall before the American consumerist dream took over, sixty years later, to devastate the green fields of Ireland through mindless suburbanization; the Celtic Tiger at its worst.

One may safely assume that such profligate patterns of land settlement are an anathema to these architects as they must be to the best of the Irish profession as a whole.

therefore that de Blacam and Meagher through winning a series of competitions should be commissioned for the three new buildings for Administration, Tourism and Hospitality and the Student Centre. Here we have many of the same themes discussed above but at a macro scale; interestingly CIT is the same area of the entire Trinity campus. In order to bring identity to an otherwise featureless and flat terrain, the introduction of a large circular courtyard at the centre of the plan acts as a referential space for the campus as a whole. Again this is an autonomous space and if its enclosing wall had been higher it might have been understood as a very large room with its windows, doors and loggias set within it; some giving access to other rooms and other buildings and some to the world outside.

The library and IT building completed a decade earlier as a result of circumstance, is not integrated into the same ‘field’. It sits detached further to the south. Its mostly blank shallow crescent establishes a clear front versus the informality of its back.

Central to the plan is a grand east west arcade relating to the various levels of the library above.

A familiar palette and hierarchy of materials is once more in evidence; brick for the primary structure and timber frames for its temporal occupation by book stack, staircases and reading places. From level to level windows within the stack reveal long skewers of space seen in perspective enfilade across the various voids of the library. This interior is a tour de force with the architects at the height of their powers, rising to the challenge of the larger scale, a city in miniature.

The colossus at CIT is for some, architect’s architecture, highly cultivated and urbane with knowing references; from Louis Kahn’s brickwork at Ahmadabad and Dhaka to the heating systems of Otto Wagner’s post office in Vienna; from Lewerentz’s wide mortar joints and steelwork at the Petri church at Klippan to the Shamrock Bar as a distant tribute to the plan of Michael Scott’s Irish Pavilion at the New York world’s fair in 1939. On the other hand CIT represents the marvellous obsessions and eccentricities of its architects and presents an opportunity to look into their imagination, with lasting memories of the sculptural virtuosity of the north elevation of the Hospitality building, its door for giraffes entering the dining room and the realisation that in the fullness of time CIT will make a magnificent Piranesian ruin.

This will no doubt confound future archaeologists as to which millennium it was produced in, a Roman castrum in Ireland, surely not.

SdB I don’t think that’s of huge significance.

I would say that would be normal. I think to make a certain stage in a project, you probably have to go further than you are ready to go.

I mean, with most buildings you would do it two or three times. Do you know what I mean?

It’d be a step on the way. You’d be forced to get stuff together, to put it together in order to make a presentation. So you’d make a presentation and there’d be stuff that you’d have just because it’s sort of... It’ll do for today but it’s not really the real thing.

To talk of many things: of rooms and books and this and that...

Shane O’Toole

SOT Some people work their way very quickly to a solution.

It is a perfect June evening in Raglan Road.

We enjoy antipasti and prosecco, chatting on a stone-and-raked-sand terrace that overlooks a backlit garden of emerald green grass, raised just a jot and framed by golden granite walls.

Mediterranean Cypress skyrockets add drama and a scale that is revelatory in the suburban setting, so close to town. The expert manipulation of scale – the secret weapon of architecture, the extra dimension that heightens and intensifies our experience of the manmade world – is, more than any other thing, I think, the key to understanding the power of the work of de Blacam and Meagher. Scale has nothing to do with actual size, as I am reminded when we head inside for supper and talk. The interior, generous behind a plain brick front, is luminous, white and lofty, but no different in dimension or construction from its sober neighbours. Upstairs, in the librarycum-studio, is a table almost as wide as the house. Rooms are furnished comfortably, with paintings, books, sculpture, huge drawings and beautiful objects, many of them quite tiny.

The stair hall walls are papered with prints from a portfolio edition of Palladio’s I Quattro Libri, hung without frames or glass in simple mounts. You can feel the weight of silence. And it feels good, clarifying. Writing these few words, I realize that the whole evening spent in this house, in Shane and Una’s home, was itself a metaphor – a felt experience in time and space, a brief living-through, of the architectural values I had come expecting to explore with words.

Shane O’Toole Do you go back to your buildings?

Shane de Blacam No. SOT Why not?

SdB Because I’m terrified of them… There comes a moment when you let go and you’d prefer that people would... I mean, the nicest thing in practice, I find – and this is a very personal view – is a building that works and that people are happy with and that... that it works for them. The worst thing is people who are fighting with a building and who are unhappy with it. That’s what kills you in practice. That’s the most distressing thing.

And the reward in practice is not anything else other than to see people for whom you’ve been asked to make an institution or to build a building – which means something to put order in their scheme of things and their aspirations – and then if that works, that’s the reward of being an architect... It’s very, very rare that you get clients or people who under... and who are strong enough and clear enough and that are not using you for another agenda or something like that or for some other thing that’s going on. You know what I mean? That in some ways that you failed. I mean, that you didn’t achieve what you were trying to do...

SOT Do you go back to your buildings?

John Meagher No… No, no, no. Because I know all the mistakes, in my head.

SOT (chuckling) The Blue Studio, John? Why did you do that and what were you looking for out of it?

JM I was looking for nothing. I just thought it would be nice. We had the space and we didn’t need it and we thought we’d have a gallery there and that people could have exhibitions and there’d be no charge and that would be that. Simple as that. No other motive to it.

SOT I remember two exhibitions there. There was the Aldo Rossi one and there was the City Architecture Studio, with the projects for docklands, which Ruairí Quinn opened, in 1984.

JM I remember Robin Walker’s one and the Aldo Rossi. I thought the Teatro del Mundo...

I thought that was so beautiful. But it was no more beautiful than the hoardings and scaffoldings they put around buildings in Venice. It was just a version of that, this beautiful thing just sitting in the water. It was the most... fantastic. It was a lovely idea, really nice, as an exhibition piece.

SOT What are the most important things in designing a library?

JM I don’t know, I think Trinity and Marsh’s Library are two of the most beautiful libraries, and then Asplund’s, in Stockholm... and I wouldn’t leave out for a minute all the Oxford libraries, which I think are wonderful...

I mean, the thing that should hit you when you go in is that it’s just books. That’s what it’s supposed to be. But a lot of libraries that you go to, you wouldn’t think they are libraries at all. You wouldn’t know what they were. Not far removed from a supermarket or something…

Libraries and art galleries are pretty similar to me. If you go to a gallery like the Prado or, say, the Hermitage, they just – if they have Cézannes and Matisses and Picassos – say... Ah well, these are contemporary paintings. Look, hang them up here. Just hang them. And where will I put this one? I’ll just put it there. The next one?

It’ll fit. Just hang them, plaster the place with them. Wonderful! Wonderful. That’s the way to hang pictures. Now, I think it’s the same thing about libraries, because I think that the older libraries just have more sense about books and about storing books. You just take a book down and you have a table and a window and you can sit there and you can read a book or look at a book. So they’re not too precious about anything other than the book, the storing of the books, the protection of them and the light and the table and the place to read the book. And I mean, in the same way as like in the Hermitage, they’re not too precious about Cézanne being beside Picasso or whatever. If you want to see the Cézanne painting, you can go and look at it. The fact that the Picasso is beside it or above it is neither here nor there.

SOT Would you talk a little about the making of architecture? It’s very interesting, for example, looking at some of the drawings in the archive from Cork, to see how much that building changed during the design process – in terms of where the reading room was, in terms of how the curved wall was treated. You know, at one stage it had very tall windows.

There were quite a few elaborations of how the light would come in along the long arcade...

SdB No. No. no, No. No. It’s done several times. You would do it several times. There is a scheme that would be going on and then...

Mary Laheen was the project architect on the library. There is a difference between the way John and I work in the office in that John delegates more than I do. I said to Mary, I said, now what are the consultants like in Cork, you know? I had sent her down to the meetings and then I was handing it out to her and I said, who was who? What was their QS like? Could you get round him? How do we handle him?

And Mary said he was like, she said he was like a farmer, she said, you would meet on the road, he was real cute. So then I knew he wasn’t to be trifled with. Then the moment came. It was going nowhere. There was a complete block about money. And then he came up to the office one day and he sat down and he said... It was because he wanted to know who I was and he was trying to square me up. And trying to see what was going on.

He said... He was really kind of gunning for the roof and the lighting in the roofs, the high– level lighting in the roof and everything like that. And then I said, well, actually, I’m not interested in the high-level lighting, I said, that’s just the way it is for the moment. And he said, well, it’s costing far too much money.

SOT These were the projecting concrete elements that...

SdB Yeah. But it’s of no significance other than... And I said, that actually I am much more interested in clerestory lighting than I am in top lighting, because I think that top lighting has to do with greenhouses and it’s for plants and not for people.

SOT (chuckles) SdB He understood the walls because I knew I had him foxed on that because it doesn’t get any cheaper than concrete block on the flat, the lump and everything...

SOT But you had an awful lot of walls in the reading room at the start.

SdB I’ll tell you. Yeah. So I said to him, put precast concrete slabs across the whole lot.

And his face lit up! He said, you mean, just exposed concrete slabs? Yeah, just like in our office. Just precast whatever it is, you know.

Just Breton slabs, I said, that’s fine. I couldn’t care less, I said. There’s no theology about finishing the concrete or anything. We’ll put Breton slabs. He packed his bags immediately and went out of the office and said this guy makes sense. That was a huge problem off his back. There was never an issue about the money after that whatsoever. That’s the story of the roof lighting. It’s no more… I wouldn’t make very much more of it other than that.

Other than to say that in a room of that size I didn’t want a dark void overhead. It was simply a way of… It was the job to be done for the moment. So Cian Deegan has got out these drawings (for the Biennale) and I was trying to explain to him. The miracle moment in that library, the magic moment, was when I realized that I was trying to make a reading room. I mean, the whole thing… the critical thing… about the library is the room. The point about a library is that it’s a room surrounded with books... Made with books. The stacks are absolutely anathema. I said the stacks are a French nineteenth-century invention. And that they were the destruction of the British Museum – of the King’s Library, the original British Library, Smirke’s round reading room with clerestory windows, the most wonderful reading room in literature Cian was saying about the Exeter library and I said the Exeter library is fundamentally flawed, in my view.

In the same way as is the History Library in Cambridge. I mean, the History Library in Cambridge is a nightmare on wheels. But what you’re presented with is the gable of the bookstack. And then what you read in the gable of the History Library is 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.

SOT That’s for surveillance. That’s for the librarian in the panopticon, who can watch everyone.

SdB (sighing) I used to hear Lou Kahn going on about that and I couldn’t understand it.

I didn’t think it was a problem, actually. I mean, it’s quite reasonable that the library should be supervised and that students need, in my view... that there is some sense of enforcement of the rule of silence. Or supervision of the rule of silence.

SOT And why the rule of silence?

SdB Because, I mean, if you’ve ever heard Eddie McParland about it, he’s apoplectic about the students carving their names in the desks in the library in Cork. He loves the library in Cork… Well let me finish first of all the thing about the stacks, I mean about the question of the stacks. There were stacks in our library, in the original library at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Furness building (where Lou Kahn’s master class in the graduate school was based). They were the most beautiful things in the world. I mean, you see them in all the beautiful libraries in England – steel frames, glass floors, five stories high and the light coming down through five floors of glass in the stacks between.

Absolutely wonderful but fundamentally, just a warehouse. And nothing to do with reading and the presence of books and the window and whatever – taking the book and having the desk and all that stuff. Nothing to do with any of that. And nothing to do with the St. Jerome, you know. And what John was saying about paintings and which he didn’t finish… Fundamentally what John was saying, there is no such thing as an art gallery. I mean, paintings belong in buildings.

They are part of architecture. Most art from the nineteenth century on, most art galleries are sort of academic concoctions. Here I would stand away from a whole lot of my generation in relation to this business. There is the whole concept of public art and art for exhibition and shows. It’s all a fraud. It is corrupt. And in my view it is fundamentally and totally the opposite of that book which is over on the chair there, which is Jim Ede’s concept of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, where art is an everyday thing. It’s part of people’s lives.

It’s private and is related to architecture and it belongs... He would have had stones that he collected on the beach or beautiful things, pieces of archaeology or whatever it was that he had in the house. I’ll just elaborate on this question of paintings and books and in Venice, the buildings that... the Scuole. I mean, they’re also... Ultimately, they are corrupt, later on, but what they were is sort of guilds for craft and meeting places for civic... civil meeting places, not religious meeting places.

Civil meeting places for community welfare and for training, teaching, academic standards and whatever. And there in the Scuole, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the paneling in the walls as part of the furnishing, as the full furnishing of a public room, is where paintings belong, where public art is part of architecture.

SOT You’re suggesting that it’s a more intimate relationship.

SdB There’s only so much that anybody can do. There’s just so much you can do, so much you can know about, and then you lose control.

Jim Ede’s thing, the light is beautiful in it and fundamentally, I think he was an architect.

He has no furniture... He has chairs around the edges of the room. It would remind you something of Bothar Buí (the Walker holiday house on the Beara peninsula). It has a feeling of Bothar Buí about it. There is very simple furniture. And he was in touch with...

He described himself as a friend of artists and he was in touch with all the important people in Europe, who gave him paintings. And he had open house, because he wanted the students... He was the godfather of what George Dawson was doing in Trinity College, where he was lending students paintings for their rooms. And he opened his house and he had his collections. And then eventually he built an extension on the house and then he built a gallery, where there is a show of Agnes Martins as we speak. And the daylight is absolutely beautiful. Very simple, continuous roof lights... But that’s radically different, that notion of books, furniture, paintings, in daylight, in the home, in life, with students. It’s the total opposite of the Fitzwilliam Museum...

He has paintings and you’re encouraged to go and sit on his furniture, to go from chair to chair around his house and to, and to look at...

Most of the stuff is that size.

JM He has beautiful little Victor Pasmores.

Tiny things. All just dotted around.

SdB And there’s a collection of stones on the table. The things that most people would have in their house.

JM Exactly.

SOT It’s interesting that you would make that kind of comparison between pictures and books and between the gallery – as you said, there is no such thing as an art gallery – and there’s another thing. I remember, when you taught us in first year, you used to say that you wanted the studio to have a library atmosphere.

SdB Well, I’ve always said that because I think it’s to do with the seriousness of... of respect for books and for... and for learning and for... and discipline in communication and so on like that and the freedom, the independence, that it gives students. I mean... I mean, I was absolutely crystal clear, laying down the law.

I was in my element in Cork, laying down the law for them about libraries... I mean, where was the centre of the university – all the stuff I’d learnt in America. All this stuff, theoretical stuff, you know. What is the university? And then it was subversive in that I was saying that you didn’t need staff, you didn’t need... If you gave the students the books... And there were arguments about... I mean, some things that I was not very proud of. I went for the librarian... I got him off the pitch.

SOT And what were the different views?

What was it that he wanted?

SdB He wanted... He wanted the Ilac Centre.

He wanted stacks on wheels. He wanted to change the furniture around. He wanted to be able to move the furniture around. And he said that… that… that there would be another idea in two years’ time. And I said, not in my library, you’re not having another idea in two years’ time. I said, this is the way it is and this is what you want... What a student needs is a table and a chair and a place, in silence, to go on his own, to read... to be on his own with a book. It’s the religious space, the spiritual, most important, space of the university. Ask any student when it’s coming up to the exams. And I said, whether there is a computer on the table or a wire or a book, I said, it doesn’t matter a fiddle.

I said, what a student wants is a place to study.

A place where he is in comfort, where he is in silence and where there is a place of... a sense of wellbeing, day in and day out.

SOT Where he can concentrate?

SdB So, so I said to them that you couldn’t have the tables on wheels, I said, because you had to have... The wires had to be fixed in the floor. And we had to (laughing) the tables had to be attached to the cables… Done!

SOT You say that the thing is about the books going up through three storeys, yet what really hits you in that space is the staircase. Do you deliberately up the scale of elements in your architecture?

SOT I think, for example, that curved wall of the library in Cork...

SdB No. The scale has to do with the child.

SdB Yeah?

SOT Is that not a reworking of an earlier idea you had for Trinity, for a new square, as part of the Quatercentenary master plan, where you proposed an enormous, south-facing curved wall? I mean, these things come back. They are not lost, even if they were not built.

SOT There’s the scale of the roof light, there’s the scale of the large granite flags in the approach to the library...

SdB Yeah, yeah.

SOT ... and very often, it seems to me that you ‘giant-ise’ or exaggerate the scale of particular elements in a building. So I am wondering, for what purpose?

SdB Yeah, I mean...

SOT The book stacks are the Atrium in Trinity.

SdB That’s right. That’s what Eddie said to me the other day. He said, I was very jealous, he said, when I went down there. They have five atriums.

SOT (laughs) SdB Eddie’s so nice, an absolute gentleman.

But the stacks in Cork have become reading chambers. And the first chamber, which is just cleared out to make the librarian’s hall, has a fireplace in it.

SOT Talk to me about fireplaces in libraries and why you would have them.

SdB Because there’s one in... Did you ever see the movie, Rocky? He’s coming down the steps in the Art Museum in Philadelphia and then they’re in the library in the university, in the Furness library... In the reading room in the Furness library. There’s a huge fireplace.

It’s designed like a living room.

SOT And the fireplace is lit?

SdB Yeah. Oh, yes. And when Robert Venturi renovated the library, he put big sofas and everything in, he did it properly. He did a lovely job. Venturi did a beautiful job of it.

SOT You always try to put a fireplace in your libraries, don’t you?

SdB Always. Well that’s just to do with that notion of it being... It’s also to do with the Spanish notion of these workmen’s clubs, where they have... places where older men, old people, go during the day and they can... they can’t afford a newspaper, but they can read a newspaper because they can get a newspaper and they can sit down. There’s more to life than the rule of the librarian, that’s what I’m saying.

SOT So it’s a kind of a hospitable gesture?

Okay, I can understand that. That it’s almost domesticating...

SdB Exactly, exactly, exactly. That’s what it is.

SOT ... the library. But then there’s a kind of an interesting thing between what is... What is the proper scale for a library? Or whether reading is, as Kahn did at Exeter, where he made the architecture support the idea that reading was a private activity? In other words, you went and got your book and then you went on your own to your window, your carrel...

And how that is different from a reading room, where it’s a collective endeavour or a public business to be among others with a book?

SdB I mean, Exeter is not... I think you could be very critical of Exeter. Exeter has the stacks wrong. The books are thought of as in a warehouse, thought of functionally. And it has this big void in the middle, you know what I mean, which is kind of just... Ah... Sort of entrance hall sort of stuff. And then what it has is the carrels, and that’s all he got to do, really, in Exeter. That would be my reading of Exeter.

Then the concept of the reading room and being in... in a collective or being, sort of, in public or being together... I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, you know. Shane, this idea is so important. A room of books. How students learn is the most extraordinary...

I mean, they don’t necessarily learn what you teach them in the classroom. They teach themselves. Do you know the thing we did in Cluain Mhuire in Galway, the library?

SOT GMIT, yeah.

SdB The library in that transformed that institution. It struck a chord with the art students, who were completely undisciplined, and their teachers were worse... It gave a spirit to a building that had... you know, it just gave them a touch of something... It put something there that people could connect with.

SOT That library is like a giant piece of furniture, isn’t it?

SdB That’s what it is, yeah. Well, it’s a product of the availability of the space and the location, so I was just working within the existing dimensions.

SOT Can you talk a little about the expression of the furniture in that library, which has a kind of a Gothic intensity about it? For example, those projecting triangular ends to the carrels?

SdB Yeah, that’s a geometric thing that maybe is over-expressed.

SdB I’ve learned to understand that the question about approach and entry and so on is all pretty important but I think that, internally, it has to do with the child climbing up to the top floor. That’s what the spiral staircase is about. Because when I was a child, we were in the Anglesea Road library, the Pembroke Library, and we used to come down from Mount Merrion to Anglesea Road.

My great delight was that I could leave my mother. The children’s staircase was around the back and we went up the stairs – we had our own library as children and we could be on our own. And I thought how magical it would be for the kids to go up, up through the library and so on. That’s all.

SOT Gardens and libraries. If you go back to the Taoiseach’s House competition, you had two libraries. You had a very small one in the Taoiseach’s House itself, where you, John, did the coloured drawings...

JM That was the Taoiseach’s office.

SOT ... and it was looking out to the parkland and there was a table and furniture.

The furniture was very important in it. But in the State Guesthouse, the library is bigger, with a long table to seat twenty or so. And you go out from the library, through a circular court and into the walled garden. Is an external space something that’s important or desirable for a library or is it... a metaphor for the Garden of Knowledge?

SdB No, it’s not. It’s really fundamental stuff.

And it has very much to do with John, because of the whole question of… nature, and being with nature, and being in a garden… It’s anchoring yourself in reality. I mean, where people lose the sense of… I mean, look at the cities of Ireland. It’s really, really serious. You understand it if you go to the North of Ireland and you go to Derry or Armagh, where they actually bombed the insides of their city centres, but Dundalk, for example, is a ghost town. Limerick, or Kilkenny – if you climb the tower in the Cathedral and you look down, it is empty. The gardens are gone. And you’d wonder why, in Dublin, the city is failing.

In my lifetime, they’ve robbed all the gardens off all the houses and turned them into car parks, because they didn’t care or they didn’t know what they were doing.

JM There’s two gardens left in the whole of Merrion Square.

SdB And you’d wonder why the city would not work?

JM The fundamental thing is, we need nature.

It does not need us. Nature doesn’t need human beings, because it gets on with itself.

But we need it.

SOT You’ve done quite a few domestic libraries over the years. Andy O’Mahony’s...

JM No, Shane did that.

SOT Are the issues different?

SdB In a way, the Galway library is a bit like Andy O’Mahony’s, in that it’s very narrow and it’s very tall. Andy O’Mahony had a lot of books... A library is a workplace in the house.

It’s a very good thing to have in a house. It is a very practical thing to have in a house, to have a study and workplace – even in a holiday house – where the business of the house can be looked after. It’s about running the house.

SOT What would the quality of that space be?

SdB It’s just to do with having... apart from anything else, nowadays you’d have to have your papers there and access to your business documents and your computer and stuff like that and your records and so on. But then also, the more important bit... you’d have your books with you. And people accumulate books, all the time. I mean, John Meagher has more books than anybody I know, and is having a room in his new house for books. So it’s a sort of important thing, that’s all.

JM I would die and dry up if I didn’t have all my books around... The fact that they’re in storage right now makes me mental.

SOT So, Shane, tell me about that book on the wall here.

SdB Up the stairs?

SOT Yeah. The Palladio prints.

SdB It’s to do with our holidays in Italy.

SdB Where, where... where he can think.

Where... where there is room and time for him to think.

SOT You also incorporated lecterns into some of the balconies.

SOT So that furniture that you made is obviously terribly important.

SdB Yeah. There’s a lectern in Abbeyleix.

It’s just a place to put the books down, that’s all.

SdB There was trouble between the architect and the librarian and the college didn’t know which... The administration didn’t know what way to jump. And then he said he wanted Ilac and I said that... I told a lie, actually. They thought that they didn’t need a library at all.

They thought they needed an information technology centre or something like that.

SOT In Abbeyleix, there’s a whole different language employed. I have come to expect your public libraries to be ‘woody’... but there is a huge amount of glass and brushed aluminium or stainless steel there. It has a completely different feel, a different character...

SOT And how do you feel about taking the plates out of their binding?

SdB The glass has to do with the books.

I wanted a wall of books. I wanted three floors of books. That was the only thing I was interested in. I put glass balconies so you can see the books from the table downstairs.

So... that’s all. That’s the height of it, really.

SdB No.

JM Whatever the hell that is.

SOT (laughs)

JM I’ve heard about that story but the book didn’t come from holidays.

SdB It was in the newspaper. It was in a country auction. And we just went down to the auction and bought it.

SdB They were loose in the book. Not bound.

SOT Oh, it was not bound?

SOT Now that it is interesting, because there has been talk about libraries and art galleries and books and pictures and, actually, in your house, you’ve got a book hanging on the wall. (chuckles)

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the armature that encloses and supports the exhibitions content and amplifies its meaning.

As people enter the square they encounter the early eighteenth century architecture of the oratory and therein rests reproductions from the archive of de Blacam and Meagher.

Chiesa di San Gallo, Campo San Gallo. photograph: Peter Maybury

The Director of the Biennale, Kazuyo Sejima set the theme ‘People Meet in Architecture’.

Her theme implies that architecture has a role in shaping people’s lives, and the power to open up new perspectives. The oratory and its contents relate to Sejima’s statement and provide people with an experience of a highly influential practice in Ireland.

An exhibition can be about research and experiment providing more questions than answers. The final act to be played out in the curatorial process is the effect the exhibition has on the audience. This is perfectly understood by the curators.

Each year the commissioner and curator for Ireland at Venice is set the challenge to research an appropriate space to host the exhibition.

It has been perceived, and understandably so, that not being within the confines of the Giardini alongside other countries, is a deficit to Ireland, particularly in relation to footfall.

However, I believe that a venue geographically outside the enclosure can expand the curatorial potential for the exhibition. The act of locating the appropriate space enhances the theme and in-turn can profit the curatorial proposition.

The curators, Tom dePaor, Peter Maybury, Alice Casey and Cian Deegan, set out to find that perfect space before the final visualisation of the exhibition was understood by them.

The National Pavilion for Ireland is the Campo San Gallo, a square just off San Marco. Campo San Gallo is a busy open square which routes hundreds of people every hour, locals and tourists alike, from San Marco to the shopping district of Rialto.

The exhibition starts as you enter the square, and perfectly placed within that square is the Chiesa San Gallo, an oratory built in 1703 in honour of St. Gall. (This saint is inadvertently linked to the earliest known architectural drawing; the St. Gall plan. It is currently held in the archive of the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland). The San Gallo Oratory is

The exhibition encourages the act of reading and observation, research and questioning.

At the same time, the imposing paper stacks, scaled to physically and theatrically occupy the space, makes an immediate visual impact.

The intensity of the public encounter is matched by the cultural impact of the practice itself.

The oratory’s perfect jewel-box dimensions, establishes the right architectural and historical setting for the critical evaluation of de Blacam and Meagher’s work.

DePaor, Maybury, Casey and Deegan reveal that the work of de Blacam and Meagher is grounded by the people who use their buildings, and that their legacy is assured by the generations they’ve influenced. It’s about people meeting in architecture.

The impact of their exhibition is unexpected; you cannot plan for it. The audience is a participant, and the audience cooperates in the realisation of the promise from the curators.

Members of the public are invited to read the work and take it away. Over time the stack is depleted, until finally we are left only with the furnishings. The archive will, in essence, be consumed.

Sometimes an exhibition can find its strength in being unapologetically naïve and open. This is its beauty and simplicity. Nathalie Weadick

St. Gall plan

Sketch for cut Dining Hall chair (Gall), 2010

Gall (Gallech, Gilianius, Gallo)

Dancers are like buildings

St. Gall died on 16 October 646. A fellow student of Columbanus at the school of Bangor, he was one of twelve that went with him into exile to preach. His cult is named in early 9th century martyrologies and his emblem derives from the foundation story of his abbey in Switzerland when a visiting bear obeyed his instruction to place a log of wood on the fire at the site of his hermitage. His shrine was broken during the Reformation and his bones were said to be unusually large. 20 Febuary is an early translation feast. The library of his abbey holds a notable collection of early chant manuscripts and the St. Gall plan. The Oratory of St. Gall in Venice was completed in 1703.

I was to be a choreographer and my brother James was to be an architect.

He was ten years older than me and he was studying architecture at UCD with John Meagher as his tutor. When you are ten, ten years seems like a lot. James was like Dionysius to me. Being around him I always felt like something was going to burst in to flames. He had amazing red hair and was gifted beyond belief. When James graduated from UCD John Meagher continued to be his mentor and it was not long until he went to work at the offices of de Blacam and Meagher.

Exhibition plan, San Gallo

Recording Ireland’s architecture and the foundation of the Irish Architectural Archive On the occasion of the presentation of material representing the work of the distinguished firm of Irish architects de Blacam and Meagher to the collections of the Irish Architectural Archive I felt that it might be worth taking the opportunity in this short essay to chart the history of architectural recording in Ireland culminating in the foundation of the Irish Architectural Archive.

While the Archive of which I am director was only founded in 1976, the idea for recording buildings in Ireland goes back much further, to 21 February 1908, to be precise, the date on which the original Georgian Society was inaugurated. At that meeting a committee was appointed to carry out the society’s objectives which were to inspect and record by means of sketches, measured drawings and photographs the remaining architectural and decorative work of the Georgian period surviving in Dublin.

Probably inspired by the work of The Survey of London which published its first volume recording the buildings of London in 1900, the work of the society was the first serious attempt in Ireland to record buildings erected after 1700. The results of this work were to be published in an annual volume ‘The Georgian Society Records’ which appeared each year between 1909 and 1913. Following the publication of the fifth and final volume which differed from the others in that it concentrated mainly on country houses, the original drawings and photographs were to be presented to some unspecified Irish public body which would undertake to preserve and make them available for future reference. Despite this stated objective the Society’s collection seems not to have found a single home and today parts of its now scattered collection can be found in the collections of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, The National Museum of Ireland, The National Library of Ireland, and The Irish Architectural Archive.

Following the demise of the Georgian Society the task of recording Ireland’s architecture was then largely left to a number of interested private individuals, most notably the late Fr. Brown, Maurice Craig, the late Hugh Doran, William Garner, the late Paddy Healy, Alistair Rowan, and others. The outstanding work of the Office of Public Works, National Monuments Branch who commissioned photographic surveys of buildings in its care as early as 1877, and the work of An Foras Forbartha’s National Heritage Inventory, and the Railway Record Society should also be mentioned.

The first public exhibition of Irish architectural drawings ‘An Irish Georgian Record’ was held at the RIAI, 8 Merrion Square, Dublin in May 1958, and others followed. A major touring exhibition ‘Irish Architectural Drawings; an exhibition to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Irish Architectural Records Association’, was held in 1965 and travelled to Dublin, Belfast, Armagh and London. The splendidly produced and illustrated catalogue was written by Maurice J Craig and the Knight of Glin.

The beginnings of this Archive then known as the National Trust Archive which was set up in 1976 go back to April 1974 when an exhibition ‘The architecture of Parnell Square’ was held at Trinity College. When this exhibition which had been sponsored by the Irish Georgian Society was being dismantled it struck our founders Nicholas Robinson and Edward McParland that it was both sad and wasteful that there was still no obvious permanent home for such material in Ireland. A report making a case for the establishment of an Irish national record was presented to government in 1975, however due to other priorities the co-founders were left to set up an archive by private voluntary initiative.

We opened our doors to the public in our first home at no. 63 Merrion Square in 1976 which is owned by the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.

Our mission then as now is to collect, preserve and make available to the public records of buildings of every type, style, and date on the whole island of Ireland. Our collections now include about three quarters of a million photographs, original architectural drawings dating from the late seventeenth century to the present day, together with manuscripts, pamphlets, news cuttings, architectural models, books and journals etc. Indeed it was our very success in the field of collecting that necessitated our move to no. 73 Merrion Square, in 1992 and finally in 2004 to no. 45 Merrion Square our present home, both provided by the Office of Public Works. We have over the intervening years in effect become Ireland’s national buildings record and a first port of call for those interested in the country’s built heritage.

It almost goes without saying that the archive as a registered charity depends on the good will of donors to improve and preserve its collections and make them available to future generations in order that a permanent record of Ireland’s architectural heritage at least will survive.

We would therefore like to thank de Blacam and Meagher for their generous donation.

The archive can be contacted at 663 3040 and its public reading room open to all without payment or introduction Tuesday to Friday 10am-5pm. David J. Griffin

The task of collecting and preserving architectural drawings was left to the Advisory Committee for the Recording of Irish Architecture founded in 1939 at the instance of the Earl of Ross, Professor R. M. Butler and Dr R. I. Best. In 1945 it was decided to expand the work of this committee and to change its name to the Irish Architectural Records Association. The RIAI and a small number of private individuals most notably R. M. Butler, the Hon. Desmond Guinness and his late first wife Mariga should also be mentioned in this regard.

The Georgian Society’s successor the Irish Georgian Society was founded by Desmond Guinness at Carton, Co. Kildare in 1958, and while it too sought to record buildings and collect photographs etc. It differed from it as it also sought to preserve buildings.

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The archive, becoming

Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin. photograph courtesy Irish Architectural Archive

I wonder: is the time it takes to work out a city’s code a direct correlation to how long it takes to feel at home? To no longer feel foreign?

This is too obvious.

Times, of necessity, are local; and this goes too for the relations between places and their respective times.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space I remember being lost in Tokyo. I had believed that when I arrived, I could visually match the characters on the tourist map I held to those on the street signs and successfully navigate my way through the city. I quickly realised this was impossible. It seemed that in the shift from paper to street, the names changed, somehow cognizant of a fundamental difference in context from map to sign. Text and image to space and time. As I stood on a corner by Ueno Park a young couple approached me and asked if I needed help. I conceded and pointed on my map to the Ryokan where I was staying. I asked, could they simply point me in the right direction? Giving each other knowing glances they signalled that they would walk me there.

I felt completely helpless. We zig-zagged through narrow streets and I soon understood that there was no ‘direction’ to point me in; I had to follow.

I moved to Dublin from New York on 31 December 1999. Soon after arriving, two aspects of the city revealed themselves to me as I went about the task of acclimating to daily life.

The first, is that street names change, not according to a grid or to the unambiguous end of one road and the beginning of the next, but from block to block. Sometimes in the middle of a block, even. A vague distilling of ‘zones’ apportions street names in the absence of any notable differentiating markers. This naming, of course, refers to the city’s history, its archive.

Layers of benign concessions and mutual conflicts, of centring and re-centring, of social migrations and economic shifts that have pushed and pulled its limits. So in Dublin, in places, we are not actually talking about streets, but about areas, patches of city that melt into each other and that lifelong inhabitants have trouble identifying when asked, for instance, ‘Where does Wexford Street end and Lower Camden Street begin?’ Does it matter? As long as you have a sense of the general, the particulars will work themselves out.

The second aspect probably developed out of the first: Nobody in Dublin gives directions according to street names. Forget about meeting on the corner of Grafton Street and College Green. I’ll see you at Trinity’s gates. I’ve learned to direct taxis according to the pubs that mark major intersections, and (here’s the catch) it’s important always to use a pub’s original name no matter how many times it may have changed owners, because no one knows Farrington’s and everyone knows the Norseman…

In 1948 a photographic exhibition Georgian architecture in Ulster was held in Belfast with a catalogue by the architect Denis O’D Hanna.

IAA accession no.: 2010/56.1.344/A12

In thinking about the codes that unlock a city to us, a consideration of time and the local is somehow necessary to understand how the city defers access or makes itself available and ready.

Yet, how often do we refer to civic time? We comment to each other that, ‘the city is changing’, but this observation usually refers to changes in space over time rather than the experience of changes in time. Time deferred, time lost, well spent, hard to find, or for all intents and purposes, deemed ‘wasted’. In the psyche of the citydweller the city is time. As we move through city space, we sketch abstract links in between places. In civic time, communities form and disperse. Crowds gather, dissipate and dissolve, so that at any time disparate communities overlap, disband, and reconvene in many configurations throughout the day and night so that no one community remains intact or grounded.

Perhaps what I am really wondering: What makes a place legible? Giorgio Agamben speaks of the archive: ‘As a set of rules that define the events of discourse, the archive is situated between Langue, as the system of construction of possible sentences – that is, of possibilities of speaking – and the corpus that unites the set of what has been said, the things actually uttered or written.

The archive is thus the mass of the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of enunciation; it is the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act of speech.’ Walking down Broadway, I once overheard a man and a woman arguing as they looked at the Twin Towers in the distance.

One was determined that the towers were the same size; the other insisted that one tower was smaller.

After a time in Dublin, the city’s landmark buildings begin to materialise through the histories and local knowledge they contain. The General Post Office, the Central Bank, the Four Courts, Liberty Hall, Busáras. Each assigned to a specific use or function, conventionally denoted.

But there is more to every building’s meaning than this – buildings are more than architectural objects and they communicate in ways that are as varied as any human communication, with affect that ranges from the most candid and sincere to the oblique. In a famous essay called, ‘Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture’, Umberto Eco tells us that architecture assumes a symbolic function beyond its primary use.

We use buildings – not only to inhabit them for certain undertakings – we use buildings to read the societies from which they emerge and remain. This role has nothing to do with ‘architectural language’ or style. It is not about places we privilege, landmarks or historical buildings, in the stories we tell. It is about hundreds and thousands of innocuous articulations, each contributing to and speaking powerfully about this place in time.

John Meagher’s creative genius illuminated the path along which James travelled for some time and when James set up his own practice with Charlie Donnelly his friendship with John continued.

My work as a choreographer has been deeply influenced by my older brother. The architecture of the buildings in which we play our productions is fundamental to their success or failure. And this is something, which I have struggled with for most of my creative life.

The way in which the architecture of our world or our set, as it is more traditionally known, responds to the architecture of the space in which it temporarily rests is deeply significant to the power of the experience we aim to create.

The way the dancers and actors appear to be in these spaces is the basis of the energetic shunt

As one of my other older brothers Charlie, also studied architecture I grew up in a house full of architectural drawings. James was passionate about Contemporary Art and Film and he unknowingly educated me by generating a highly artistic and contemporary milieu in a house in a very mundane suburban estate in late Seventies and early eighties Clontarf, North Dublin.

I realize now as things stand, the greatest achievement of my work is not the choreographic content of my productions but their design.

The shape of the imagery is where I am most strong and I had a fine mentor in James who had a fine mentor in John Meagher. I can boast a direct connection to this awesome architectural lineage. And of this I am very proud.

Tragically James died young and although the world never ceases to amaze me the space James left when he departed has not been filled.

And although this has been terribly sad for all the people who knew him the energetic legacy he left behind has helped fuel my creative life.

I am sure that I am not alone in this.

I would like to congratulate John Meagher and Shane de Blacam and I am deeply honored to have met both these men through my wonderful older brother. Michael Keegan-Dolan

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I first met Shane deBlacam and John Meagher at Trinity College, Dublin in 1983. I was sent to photograph their restoration of the atrium and refectory by ‘Designer’s Journal’ magazine.

This very elegant space was full of light making interesting shadows on the raw oak timber.

Being a very tall space it was quite difficult to shoot the volume to effect. Using a perspective control camera, then on 4x5 inch film, I used a very wide-angle lens – 90mm – to make the image work.

Shane and John each have an individual approach to design. However, I have noticed from photographing their work, they do have a certain amount of influence on each other in the practice. Their architecture is beautifully detailed with assured taste. A minimal use of colour allows nature to give colour to their schemes. The use of timber and stone, make their buildings welcoming and comfortable.

It is very important to capture this feeling in photographs. Standing in the garden of the house in Ibiza it was thrilling to see the morning rain clouds clear to give crisp light making the white building in the landscape look very dramatic.

John’s houses have strong, orthogonal proportions. The simple lines and symmetry have to come across in images. A wide-angle

A recent move unearthed a photograph that I took one Thanksgiving Day while walking along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan.

Two buildings angled against a grey sky. It was impossible to capture them in their entirety.

Spatial proximity made this impossible: I was too close. The extent of their brilliance was only truly discoverable at a distance as part of a skyline that is now forever changed. A disastrous event released the inevitable consequences of increased pressure. Forever changed. All future discussions, anywhere, related to buildings and skyscrapers will include this moment. Maps, plans, drawings, models, imaginary designs will be conditioned by knowing that these two buildings, once super-visible, have disappeared.

The archive. A way of remembering and forgetting. A condition of memory, conditioned by what remains. Is everything else forgotten?

How can we know? What can we know? We imagine archives through an idea of synthesis where the coming together of parts make something whole. An accumulation. But what if we reverse this to imagine the archive as a dispersal, a disintegration of knowledge.

The archive incites a contest between time and material, between memory and disappearance, between public stories and personal lives – a contest that is at the crux of any notion of ‘representation’. The items belonging to an archive are ever attendant, and yet, like the Twin Towers it is impossible to capture an archive in its entirety. Temporal proximity makes this impossible: we are too close. Parts can be made visible, but never as ‘spectacle’, never as ‘one’, never ‘whole’. Always becoming.

We become ‘of’ a place, which is different to being ‘from’ somewhere, when origin no longer matters.

The native is no more authentically bound to meaning than the stranger. As the interpreters of codes that communicate separateness and unity, being together and also apart, always knowing these are two sides of the same coin, we enact the city through varied and conflicting moments of participation, where ‘the local’ is but a cross-current, a conditional we who are of a particular moment. Sarah Pierce

you are trying to provoke through performance.

Dancers are like buildings, they are like microcosms within the macrocosm of the architecture. It is the energetic play between these two that makes for excitement.

Denis O’Brien

lens can create distortion, so I try to use a lens with a focal length as long as possible to keep the symmetry in proportion.

Shane’s use of curves and high volumes, as in the Cork Institute of Technology and the Beckett Theatre, Dublin, give his buildings dignity and presence. Setting up the camera in the correct place to convey this style of architecture can take longer than normal. When buildings have curves, it can give an exaggerated perspective if the wrong view-point is chosen.

The quality of light on curved façades can substantially enhance an image or give a flattening effect. This is so important to get right so as not to over exaggerate perspective and shape.

When they amalgamate their talents, as in the Chapel of Reconciliation, Knock, County Mayo, the harmony of their work blends into very finely considered architecture. This building was full of details to photograph. One of my favourite images is of the shot of the lantern from inside the chapel.

It has been a great honour for over 20 years to photograph de Blacam and Meaghers work and I am looking forward to be able to continue to provide them with images in the digital age.

Peter Cook

IAA accession no.: 2010/56.1.240/SK1

The Wooden Building – The making of drawings

Fine material is God’s own wonder. A. Loos ‘Hands off’, Ornament and Crime, 1917 Block B3, ‘ The Wooden Building’ is the built expression of a refined study in craft, in the masterful assembly of materials to effect.

Underlying this ‘built essay’ is an equally authoritative essay in the use of drawing to develop, control, and realise a work of architecture. It is this understanding of Making and the role that Drawing plays in the process that is fundamental to the work de Blacam and Meagher Architects.

The documentation for the project consisted of 349 working drawings, in which each opening, component and element is numbered, scheduled and cross-referenced, where every interface is identified and detail resolved.

The result is an inventory of every part of the whole, a comprehensive description of every aspect of the building.

But this is not a building whose resolution has been driven by a constructional logic in accordance with industry convention. It is one in which the conventions of assembly drawing are used both to explore and achieve complex effect. It is Coordination at the service of Craft.

For de Blacam and Meagher the process of detailing, and thus the ordering of the construction drawings, is the process of making architecture. It affords them a ‘closeness’ to the work required to truly investigate, where the grain of materials, the pattern generated by the putting of materials together, can be considered and refined.

Theirs is not an architecture driven by an interest in contemporary construction methods, and block B3 is not an exception. A conventional structure of block and pre-cast concrete planks, although carefully resolved, it is but a carcass to support an envelope of fine materials – a matrix of brick and mortar punctuated by joinery, a tapestry of timber screens.

Informed by Celsing and Lewerentz, the drawing of brick coursing becomes the first decision in re-considering the convention of construction of an external wall. By drawing in section, plan and elevation each over-burnt stock brick as though already laid in its matrix of white Portland cement and Wicklow sand, the drawings take on a density, a materiality and a sense of scale that lends the effect of massive construction to what is but cavity wall.

Equally, the proposition that each timber element is to be assembled of solid sections generates a logic of assembly for frame and panel that pervades both drawing and building. The assembly of boards, the framing of a panel, each is resolved according to an idea of the inherent nature of the material and recorded in line.

But this is to seek out generalities in a world of specifics. The resultant drawings, through an exhaustive process of working and reworking, where elements are dissected, re-composed, inhabited, modified, re-imagined and then drawn once again, weave a world of refinement.

It is a world where granite steps dress up to enfold a panelled oak balustrade, where fine internal linings and furniture are enfolded in robust boarding of an external wall, where slender galvanised railings are propped off marble-smooth concrete columns.

For those with the ability to read this filigree of lines, the final working drawings which are but the matter-of-fact recording of construction information, describe more evocatively than renderings the sense of place and character of this project. Braille-like, one can almost run one’s fingers across the inked paper to sense the density of the weave of materials, the texture of masonry, the burnish of metal. This, the Making of Drawings to instruct the making of things, is the architect’s craft. John Parker __________________________________________________________________________

is in the details Office Building, 35 Barrow Street, Dublin

from God

In the deep, dark dawning Of the morning Shimmering shapes emerge In the half light as buildings surge, imposing themselves on our consciousness Richard Barratt __________________________________________________________________________

Cluain Mhuire From the outside, the onetime Redemptorist fortress at Cluain Mhuire is a forbidding sight.

It menaces with grim orderliness. Its blind windows glare.

A place of rules, of obedience to a disapproving god.

Inside, in honeyed contrast, de Blacam’s immense swinging portals and prayerful soaring library welcome spaciousness and light.

Yes, you might still hear the pacing swish of a soutane or imagine a pale novice tholing his lonesome way.

But nowadays there is the warmer chaos of art and film students.

Their ragamuffin styles and colours and voices fit well into the long groundfloor corridors.

There is the possibility of wild imaginings.

The library is a golden hush.

This is a good place to work, to ponder and remember.

The house at Heytesbury Lane, Dublin, is located on a narrow mews plot of a late Georgian terrace in Dublin, with an east-west orientation.

The constraints of the site did not permit natural light from both party walls. A top-lit double height atrium was introduced. The internal atrium now opens three sides of the house to natural light and creates a third façade.

This cedar-panelled façade wraps around to the entrance court. The main area on the ground floor is treated as one space, which connects the entrance court in the east to the garden in the west. The master bedroom has dual aspect, overlooking the atrium and opening to a hardwood roof deck. Granite setts lead to the white limestone floor of the atrium and garden terrace, while the living space has an oak floor.

SENIOR ARCHITECT: NEIL CRIMMINS

Textile Factory, Inis Meáin. photograph: Alice Casey

Working in the office, with thoughts from Louis Kahn

Notes from the archive

Notes on the archive

It was always there. Quiet, white light all around.

A big wide flat table, white delicate translucent paper. A pencil ground sharp. A long wide blue handled brush. And then there was John and Shane. Shane’s look piercing the space demanding pure concentration. What is the thought? The thought is light. What are the materials? White oak.

The Architectural Drawing As a design practice, architecture is unusual in its reliance on the scaled representation of the physical reality that it explores and describes.

As Robin Evans suggests: ‘Architects do not make buildings, they make drawings for buildings’.1

The form of the church at Firhouse, Dublin, is a walled garden or place apart from its secular neighbourhood. A cruciform plan and the rectangular perimeter walls form courtyards planted with groves of trees. Canvas awnings, suspended from the sanctuary rooflight, diffuse and modify the day light in the sanctuary.

The building’s interior is derived from the Vatican Council decision that church plans would represent the congregation gathered at prayer around the altar. This project was a premiated entry in a competition to select buildings and architects for many sites in the developing suburbs of Dublin.

I sit down on the three legged Alto stool at my table. Staring at the table, prepare, clean table, new paper, tape it down, keep it clean, sharpen the pencil, begin.

It’s a big piece of paper. Shane comes and sits on the stool beside me. His elbows on the table, his head in his hands. He stares at the drawing, he doesn’t say anything. He just stares.

He stands up and walks away. (It must be ok).

Turns around and smiles.

It’s that time of year again. It’s so bright we can’t see each other. We get the white paint and big wide brushes.

We ask Liam. He knows how to do it. He goes upstairs and out through the French doors and climbs onto the glass lantern. He paints it.

It’s less bright and less hot. We can see again.

We put the clay tiles on the floor in the office.

We put the white oak on the floor, we put the limestone beside them. This is our palette.

We drink coffee. We keep looking. This is all we need. Stone, wood and clay. The materials of a timeless interior.

It’s Saturday, people come and go. The odd laughter echoes around the room. John brings flowers. He puts them in water and onto my table. We make coffee. We have so much to do.

It’s getting done.

John sits at his table. He sits down and draws from one side of the paper to the other.

Everything is there. No redrawing, no hesitation, no mistakes, first time. It’s beautiful. Rachael Chidlow

The heart of the matter

My first four years in practice – which turned out to be my only four years in practice – were spent working for de Blacam and Meagher.

It was, of course, a formative experience.

How could it not have been? It is impossible for me to disentangle my own understanding of architecture, and of how architects work, from my memories of the way de Blacam and Meagher did the things they did. And while there was nothing as obvious as a single, clear modus operandi what is clear in retrospect is that each project on which I worked quickly acquired a centre of gravity, on which most of the attention settled. So, for instance, the Chapel of Reconciliation, Knock, became, in large part, about finding a successful resolution and expression for the great lantern over the altar, and specifically its corners. The Beckett Theatre became about the scale and appearance of the oak cladding. And although it seems like a plan-based scheme, the first phase of the CIT library was really worked out almost entirely through sections at two scales – 1:2 and 1:20 – which allowed all the key junctions to be obsessively explored.

In the case of the Trinity Student Housing, on which I worked throughout its construction period, what seemed an inordinate amount of time was spent on the detailed resolution of the windows. To me, fresh from the conceptual and formal certainties of student projects, it came as a revelation that a building’s success might revolve around something so particular and so mundane as the making of a window – its opening lights, the exact profile of its central mullion, its position within the depth of the wall – or the arrangement of windows on an elevation which became the subject of endless redrawing and adjustment.

But these concerted processes of refinement could never be construed as arid exercises in style or pointless exactitude. Unfailingly, those aspects of each project which loomed largest during its design and construction turned out to be the aspects which characterised them in use and subsequently fixed them in the collective consciousness. What a remarkable trick: to be able to predict in advance, and to incorporate in the fabric of a building, the means by which it will be known and remembered. This is building for prosperity – never done in a grandiloquent manner, but simply on the understanding that it is architecture’s role to become part of the material culture and to endure. de Blacam and Meagher get to the heart of the matter. Hugh Campbell

Modes of pictorial representation are the primary tools utilised by architects in order to analyse, explore and evolve their ideas and intentions, as well as to describe and communicate them. These methods and tools used in the process of design are, for architecture, uncomfortably distant from the material world they seek to explore and modify.

In order to be in full command of their process of creation, the architect must be constantly aware of the separation between the activity that they are undertaking (the means [projection and composition]) and the actual process of constructing the given building (the end).

An intuitive grasp of the relationship between the drawing and reality is therefore necessary for the architect to produce a plausible intervention in the material world. This detachment of process from product is necessarily, yet also perilously suppressed. The role of representation therefore serves a far more complex purpose in architecture than in any other discipline, because there is no neutral way of representing reality. The archive represents the architectural product in its purest form, the buildings themselves a near approximation of this.

Furthermore, architectural drawing does not describe a reality that exists but one that it is proposed will exist. From this understanding follows the logical implication that, if the architectural drawing itself is so productive in the definition of the proposed reality, it must actually contain some degree of instrumentality itself. It portends something, which does not yet exist, and as the only existing form of this reality the parameters of its particular composition define to some extent the creation of the future it suggests. Herein lies the multi-layered dilemma of architectural production: we can see that the various forms of mediation that exist in the representations of the reality architects propose, are manifested in the buildings themselves.

Studying the archive alongside the buildings, allows us to see and understand this translation more clearly.

Classical and Romantic practices Shane de Blacam begins to draw orthogonal projections immediately, working iteratively between all scales from the outset (including 1:1 scale). He does not subscribe to wilful shape making, preferring the rigour of tried and tested forms and quantifiable geometric shapes.

Materials are carefully researched and depicted using the correct conventions and systems of annotation. His preferred drawing projections are sections, followed by plans and elevations, and he rarely strays from these classical modes of representation. The vast quantity of drawings produced is particularly notable.

Within all these drawings there is an evident obsession with precision, hierarchy and detail.

Any particular preccupation with certain draughting techniques obviously imposes its own restrictions on spatial exploration; though the restrictions afforded by this particularly rigorous creative process have become an integral characteristic of this uniquely complex and classical architecture.

John Meagher employs a wider repertoire of sketching and orthogonal projection and his design process follows a more linear route working from large-scale space planning and zoning towards the detail. The planning is explored initially at a large scale using coloured pencils and soft shading to define zones.

3d sketches in the form of axonometrics and perspectives are regularly used to refine volumes and proportions, while colour and texture give reference to light and shade. His drawings frequently contain entourage, such as flags blowing in the wind, canopies, planting and vegetation in various forms, and the use of soft pencil allows the free flowing lines of cloth and vegetation to merge with the lines of the architecture. The predominance of freehand sketching in Meagher’s practice lends itself to the incorporation of un-regimented forms and sensuous curves of a subjective variety with less reliance on formal geometric shapes.

This freer hand carries through to Meagher’s approach to detailing; while there are numerous examples of immaculately drawn Meagher designed furniture and fittings in the archive, there are fewer detailed construction drawings in his hand. His buildings are therefore characterised more by their refined sense of space, volumes and planes and their elaboration through aspects of planting, and furnishing, rather by their use of materials and junctions.

The incidental and qualitative contributions of nature: light through leaves, wind rippling through material, provides the visual complexity in Meagher’s buildings that can be seen as part of a more essentially Romantic approach to the practice. Chloe Street 1. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. London: AA Publications, 1997, p.156. Robin Evans

Following the completion of the church at Firhouse a second church at Rowlagh, Clondalkin, Dublin was commissioned by the Dublin Diocese. Partly because of the parish priest’s worry about the concrete block at Firhouse there was a struggle at first to find agreement on the design of the next church.

The schemes illustrated are more rigorous than what was built at Rowlagh.

The Chapel of Reconciliation, Knock, County Mayo, was an architectural competition entry.

In essence it is a landscape design. The Chapel is situated at a place of pilgrimage in the village of Knock. The inspiration for the plan was the processional way of Calvary which is marked by fourteen white crosses simply constructed out of telegraph poles to which the architect added the black oak cross that is the focus of the new landscape design. The building has fifty small rooms for the sacrement of Confession.

The chapel was designed so that the height of the building would be absorbed in the hollow of the land. The roof was designed to carry earth so it could be seeded with grass and form a visual continuum with the hill of Calvary behind.

SENIOR ASSISTANT ARCHITECT: GERALD KELLY The Taoiseach’s House, Phoenix Park, Dublin was an entry in an architectural competition.

The site is reached from the Phoenix monument in the centre of the road through the park adjacent to the entrance to the houses of the President of Ireland and the American Ambassador to Ireland.

The plan of this house is a seminal project of de Blacam and Meagher. SENIOR ASSISTANT ARCHITECT: KEVIN KIERNAN Lombard Street, Dublin is characterised by the beautiful daylight in small streets of one and two storey buildings. The streets maintain, at a minor scale, the features of the big squares of the city by including a service lane. In this house alteration, the front room was enlarged by incorporating the half basement, the spine wall was removed and replaced with a green oak structure 9"x 9" from the saw mills at Abbeyleix, County Laois. The two storey back rooms are joined with the front room to form a studio house of kitchen/dining/living room and galleried bedroom.

The plan of the unrealised house in County |Carlow consists of 5 x 5 ten foot square bays, ten feet high with a double height conservatory in the centre for circulation with daylight admitted through clerestory windows. The ancillary and storage elements of the plan are located on the perimeter of the building. This is the project in which the plan of the Taoiseach’s House competition was first explored.

The form of the house at Dalkey, County Dublin is two storey over basement. It is designed with the living rooms stretched along the edge of the site to avail of the views of the sea to the east and south along the coastline. The plan is formed around a central, protected courtyard which admits the evening sun into the living rooms. The construction is at the highest end of energy rating. The structure is laminated oak columns and beams. The façade is articulated in elevation to moderate its scale. SENIOR ARCHITECT: ANDY RICHARDSON The house for John Meagher’s brother at Bessborough Parade, Dublin, is located in a cul de sac near the dome of Rathmines Church.

The ground floor consists of an entrance hall, a study with a bedroom, and a courtyard with a staircase to the first floor balcony. The upper floor comprises a living and dining room with vaulted interior, kitchen, master bedroom and bathroom. A two-storey courtyard lined with brick has a built-in hardwood screen to admit daylight, while the street walls are rendered.

SENIOR ASSISTANT ARCHITECT: JOE LAWRENCE At Waterloo Place, Dublin, the site plan comprises three mews houses, 4 metres wide, on the back lane of larger late Georgian houses on Leeson Street. Each house has two floors and an attic studio. The end house has a larger living room in the shape of a piano and a substantial ingle nook fireplace. Materials used are brick, pre-patinated copper, European and American oak and stainless steel. SENIOR ARCHITECT: PIERRE LONG

The origin of the columunar façade and the small cubes of the solid elements at this house in the Balearics, Spain, is derived from the unique indigenous architecture of the Balearic Islands. This house reads as a complex of small buildings and courtyards with gardens and shaded seating areas. The entrance and gardens have been terraced and landscaped using local stone for the new retaining walls and the restored terrace. Old olive trees are planted along with indigenous wild flowers and shrubs. The house is designed with natural ventilation, for both night and day, winter and summer. The accommodation comprises a double height living room with kitchen and dining open to high colonnades, shading the terrace. The long low buildings alongside the swimming pool comprise guest bedrooms and the last bedroom courtyard space has an outdoor seated area with a fireplace. SENIOR ARCHITECT: JOHN FLOOD No. 1 Castle Street, Dublin is a repair to an important corner in Dublin City adjacent to Christchurch Cathedral. The site was in a poor state of maintenance pending redevelopment on account of road widening proposals by the city council, later abandoned. A reinforced concrete building was retained on the site and incorporated in the redevelopment. Accommodation consists of retail at ground floor, office at first and second floor levels and an apartment at third and fourth levels. The materials used are claybrick, black granite, hardwood windows and pre-patinated copper. SENIOR ASSISTANT ARCHITECTS: TREVOR DOBBYN, ADRIAN BUCKLEY The Wooden Building is part of the rejuvenation of Temple Bar, Dublin. A tower was proposed on the medieval street which leads from the river Liffey to the gate of Dublin Castle. The development comprises a five-storey building and a nine-storey building accommodating seventeen apartments and a crèche. The opening between the blocks forms access to a garden in the middle of the city block. The south building has one apartment per floor, the north building two apartments per floor which share a lift and day lit stair. Apartments have an east west orientation. Apartments at higher levels have distant view of the Dublin Mountains.

The building is built of clay brick and iroko and oak paneling. SENIOR ARCHITECTS: JOHN PARKER AND MICHAEL KELLY The building works at Pearse Street, the new Beckett Theatre, was curtailed by a decision, in which the architect participated, to preserve the jumble of buildings fronting on to the College Park as well as the Pearse Street shops, offices and houses which has since been regretted.

The Beckett Theatre, Trinity College is an oak cabinet housing from the top down, a dance theatre, a student theatre (Players) and a blackbox studio theatre for the drama faculty of the univeristy. The interiors are constrained by the theatre director’s preference for access and service galleries with retractable seating over any architectural expression of Theatre.

SENIOR ARCHITECTS: MARTIN DONNELLY, SIOBHÁN NI ÉANAIGH The work on the Atrium and Dining Hall, Trinity College arose out of a commission to engage in conversation with the College about the planning of facilities in Front Square and Pearse Street to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the founding of the college in 1592. Coincident with this work a series of fires destroyed one of the historic buildings in Front Square. A new atrium, proposed before the fire, was built in the location of the original kitchen of the Dining Hall. The re-planning of the existing kitchens, and other facilities involved the addition of a mirror image of the architect Adolf Loos’ design for a bar at Kärntner Straße in Vienna. The Atrium, in a sense offers the interior that the Beckett Theatre lacks.

A production of a German play on Dante’s Inferno where the galleries of the atrium representated heaven to hell with angels framed within the columns and beams was the architect’s greatest delight. SENIOR ARCHITECTS: MARTIN DONNELLY, SIOBHÁN NI ÉANAIGH The first of four buildings on the campus of Cork Institute of Technology by the collaboration of de Blacam and Meagher with Boyd Barrett Murphy-O’Connor, the Library and the IT extension forms a south facing brick crescent.

Addressing the original campus and terminating the north-south circulation route in the existing buildings, a new entrance was formed by breaking through the north wall to create an external link with the new library, the central building in the campus. The interior is naturally lit by clerestorey windows above an east-west passage which divides the reading room with 400 reader spaces to the south from galleried bookstacks to the north. The furniture including the timber bookstacks, galleries and study carrels were derived from the atrium at Trinity College Dublin. SENIOR ARCHITECTS: MICHAEL KELLY, ALAN BURNS, MORGAN FLYNN, WILL WALSH All sorts of college functions, including student’s union offices, radio, art gallery, bookshop, banks, commericial shops, common room and bar are arranged around the big brick vaulted courtyard of Cork Institute of Technology Student Centre. At first floor, a terrace overlooks the athletics track to the west. SENIOR ARCHITECT: MICHAEL KELLY

The Administration Building at Cork Institute of Technology addresses the new campus entrance and sits alongside the new route into the campus identified in the Scott Tallon Walker Architects’ masterplan for the college. There is public access accommodation for students’ financial and academic affairs on the ground floor, a Registrar’s department on the first floor and a Finance department on the third floor.

The focus of the plan is the President’s suite and circular Academic Council room on the third floor, both overlooking the circular courtyard and lawn. SENIOR ARCHITECT: MICHAEL KELLY A planning scheme for works to Maynooth Castle, County Kildare, was prepared, which, in addition to a proposal for works to the castle, involved the assembly and publication of all historical references, maps and drawings of the 13th century castle buildings and later additions. Maynooth Castle was the house of the Fitzgerald family, later Dukes of Leinster, one of the most important families in Ireland, who in the 18th Century built the town of Maynooth and Carton House in a planned landscape at the opposite end of the town to the Castle. The works, instigated by the local community, establish a small exhibition place of the history of the Fitzgerald family. The proposal to roof the centre with an inverted oval dome above the wall walk was not realised. SENIOR ARCHITECT: FINOLA O’KANE Seven office floors over two basement floors formed in a T-shaped plan around an internal garden at Grand Canal Quay, Dublin. The street façade is a frameless clear glass wall supported on bespoke spider fittings and wind-posts with automated external solar control blinds.

The structure is in situ concrete exposed at the edges. The form of the building is related to the dimensions of the site and the railway line at the rear. The construction materials are riven slate to form a base to the sheer glass wall above.

Internally the floors are finished in white limestone, oak and wool carpet. SENIOR ASSISTANT ARCHITECT: ADRIAN BUCKLEY The brief at Abbeyleix, County Laois, was to reform the building and include a new Library, IT centre, children’s theatre, exhibition room and external landscaping. The original form of market house was a rectangular plan with a small central cupola on the ridge. In the late 19th century it was re-constructed in a rural Italianate style including small tower on the East elevation and mullion and transom windows. In the early 20th century a fire station at ground floor and library on the first floor were introduced. The architect’s ambition was to re-pave the square, really a crescent, and reform the building as a single room surrounded with books with a reading table in the centre of the town. Italian Cypress (Cupressus Sempervirens Sastiata) were planted, in the spirit of the Victorian scheme. SENIOR ARCHITECT: CHLOE STREET The architectural practice of de Blacam and Meagher occupies the third floor of the five storey office building over a basement car park at 4 St. Catherine’s Lane West, Dublin 8.

The site is a former builder’s yard in the Liberties area of Dublin next to the churchyard of St. Catherine’s Church. The structure has an exposed steel frame with a precast concrete floor. Along the glass walls, every second frame slides open to planted balconies. The building is naturally ventilated. SENIOR ARCHITECT: ANDY RICHARDSON The Digital Hub was a proposal for digital media industries in the Liberties of Dublin City adjacent to the Guinness Brewery. The large site on Thomas Street incorporates former industrial buildings in brick and stone. With immediate access to the Phoenix Park and the western motorway to the city, the proposition was to build a high density urban form in the historic part of the city near Heuston Railway Station, in opposition to the eastward expansion of the city towards the sea. Meaningful discussion of the project was ruled out by preconceived convictions of the authorities.

The accomodation included offices, a substantial retail and food market, bar and restaurants, a conference centre and apartments.

Shane de Blacam

__________________________________________________________________________

The architects work

The architect’s drawing is his principal means of communication with his client and builder.

This mode of communication has altered little in the past two hundred years despite technological changes.

This exhibition is a selection of typical drawings produced by architects during that period.

The variety of drawings, showing different building types, from the monumental to the domestic, with their attendant details, attempts to show the range of the architects work.

The drawings are arranged in approximate chronological order.

John Meagher CATALOGUE FOREWORD FROM ‘THE ARCHITECTURE OF IRELAND IN DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS’, OCTOBER 1975

The Technology Tourism and Hospitality Studies building has two entrances, the first from the east end gives access to the central corridor with class rooms and training kitchens.

The second is to the Front Hall with reception, dining, restaurant and staff offices, opening from the circular courtyard. Larger lecture room and exhaust chimneys from the kitchens form the skyline. The deep plan is naturally ventilated and daylit by cubes of clear glass on the roof.

Lelia Doolan

79

Extracts from

The Buildings of Ireland.

Dublin. The City within the Grand and Royal Canals and the Circular Road with the Phoenix Park. de Blacam and Meagher, who also designed the Beckett Theatre and the Atrium at Trinity, designed the ‘Timber Building’ [sic] in the recent West End development at Temple Bar, a richly textured apartment block which, like much of the firm’s work reflects Shane de Blacam’s apprenticeship with Louis Kahn. p.79 … the rehabilitation of the N DOCKLANDS began in the mid 1980s, when tax incentives were used to establish an INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL SERVICES CENTRE (IFSC) at George’s Dock, whose success resulted in the construction of a new business quarter on the C18 North Lotts Street grid. An initial plan by de Blacam and Meagher, whose vision of sustainability (retaining much mid- C20 public housing) exceeded that of the developers. The principal additions to the street plan are a new pedestrian route, EXCISE WALK which runs from the quay into the square at the centre of Mayor Street. p.184 CASTLE STREET nos. 1-3 (S side), 1999 by de Blacam and Meagher, is a sophisticated brick-clad mixed-use building with a big double-height glass-roofed timber oriel at the angle and an elegant juxtaposition of void and solid. The Tudor timber-framed house that stood on the site had a two-tier oriel to Castle Street.

The new building incorporates a 1960s threestorey concrete block on Werburgh Street; admirable in terms of sustainability, if odd in appearance. p.370 Further E on EXCHANGE STREET UPPER is THE TIMBER BUILDING [sic] of 1999 by de Blacam and Meagher, an elegant brick-clad apartment building composed of a shallow fivestorey S range and a distinctive nine-storey E tower to the street, medieval in its associations, and strongly reminiscent of the work of Louis Kahn. Dark red and purple brick with deep joints and thick cream-cheese-like pointing offset against hard-wood panels. p.374 DINING HALL, c.1760-5 by Hugh Darley. Gutted by fire in 1984 and restored by de Blacam and Meagher and McDonnell and Dixon. This is the successor to Richard Castle’s ill-fated dining hall, begun in 1741, which twice collapsed during construction and was finally demolished in 1758. Darley’s rebuild is a sturdy spacious hall prefaced by an entrance hall and first floor common room flanked to l. and r. by stair halls.

INTERIOR. THE DINING HALL is an expansive double-height seven-bay room with a deep coved ceiling, lit from a Venetian window in the N wall and from round-headed windows in the E wall.

The hall is wainscoted to the level of the door-head, and in the upper register on the S and W walls are roundtopped plaster panels containing large portraits. The grandly scaled stone chimneypiece in the centre of the W wall with carvings of flowers and corn was made in Darley’s workshop in 1765. W of the Dining Hall, the former kitchen retains much of its C18 kingpost roof and has two enormous granite fireplace surrounds in the S wall. Into the shell of the building de Blacam and Meagher inserted a tall triple-galleried timber ATRIUM (1987) for entertainment purposes, with tall folding shutters to the upper levels, an attractive if wilful design which reflects formal interests further developed in the Beckett theatre (see p. 409 below). The stair on the r. of the entrance hall to the Dining Hall leads to the Common Room. Of three flights, it is lit by a Venetian window and has a good wrought iron balustrade

by Timothy Turner and brackets to the first floor landing akin to those in Regent House.

The COMMON ROOM is a grand yet plain interior with a deep coved ceiling and an emphatic Kilkenny marble chimneypiece by David Sheehan from Castle’s dining hall. N of the Common Room stair in the Catex Building is the staff bar of 1984 by de Blacam and Meagher – an amusing nuanced copy of the Kärntner Bar in Vienna by Adolf Loos (1907). p.398-399 BECKETT THEATRE, 1993 by de Blacam and Meagher. Rising above the roof-tops at the NE angle of New Square is a truncated pyramidal roof crowned by lettered cresting spelling simply ‘theatre’. Hidden from the old quadrangles, the theatre is properly visible only from the playing fields. The site at the ‘Narrows’, a sliver of ground between New Square and the Pearse Street boundary, was roughly rectangular and hemmed in by a red brick terrace on Pearse Street. The brief required several floors of adjacent residential accommodation: two theatres, rehearsal spaces, offices and classrooms.

The main theatre is a large functional breezeblock box placed on an E-W axis bounded by a row of offices and classrooms on the N, and on the S by a four-storey oak-clad rehearsal block flanked on the E by a small forecourt. The lyrical oak-clad tower is the public face of the theatre.

Like de Blacam and Meaghers dining hall atrium (see p.398) it is reminiscent of a timber Shakespearean playhouse, and also, inevitably, of Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, a temporary floating theatre erected for the Venice Biennale of 1979. The weathered oak is grey and in patches black. p.409 Directly E of the theatre stands a pair of residential blocks of 1990, also by de Blacam and Meagher. These are narrow twin ranges (originally intended as four to group with Beckett), their short ends facing the rugby field, rendered with low-hipped roofs and a narrow courtyard between: stylish, but out of place in this setting. p.410 GRAND CANAL QUAY is an attractive engineering works in a utilitarian mid- C20 modernist vein. Across the narrow cobbled street is the headquarters of ESAT, of 2000 by de Blacam and Meagher. An interesting design on an irregular site bounded on the S by the raking line of the railway embankment. The concrete column-and-slab structure is clearly read through the sheer glass entrance front on Grand Canal Quay, which has a stone base.

Fussy portal with upturned canopy and marbleclad column. Two ranges of office encloses a triangular full height atrium hard against the railway line, a bold choice which pays off in giving an animated vista but must surely be a maintenance nightmare. The blunt ridged soffit to the metal roof of the atrium jars with the basalt and polished limestone finishes below. p.456-457 No. 35 Dawson Street is a large three bay four storey C18 house thoroughly remodelled on several occasions. A large and handsome hall erected to the rear in 1891 by the Institute of Civil Engineers of Ireland was effectively remodelled as a restaurant in 1990 by de Blacam and Meagher; altered since. p.516

Christine Casey The Buildings of Ireland, Yale University Press, New Haven and London. ISBN 0 300 10923 7

The Trenton Bath House in early 1955, was a key point of transition for Kahn – now the spatial and structural division corresponded; the open plan so characteristic of modernism had been reconfigured. Later, in the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, his first commission for a church, the cross-shaped concrete ceiling, formed by inclined planes that slope upwards to reveal clerestorey light, deliberately configures the space below.

Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Firhouse de Blacam and Meagher, 1979

The context In the description of the lost church of the double monastery of St. Brigid in Kildare, not too far from Firhouse, by the Saint’s C7th biographer, Cogitosus, we learn that the church was of dizzy height, covered a large area, had many windows and was decorated with frescoes. A wooden partition, also fresco-laden and covered with linen hangings, divided the eastern part from the rest of the church. Bishop Conled and St. Brigid lay buried on either side of the altar in sarcophagi richly adorned with gold, silver and precious stones and bearing scenes in beaten gold and coloured, and over these hung crowns of gold and silver.

At Firhouse, The Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is a small building contained within a rectangular boundary wall. Within this boundary a Latin Cross plan delineates the interior space, enclosed by full-height glazed screens, which form four external courtyards, one in each corner. The cross plan itself is constructed of four independent concrete tetrastyles with diagonal bracing, and a fifth independent central tetrastyle with an orthogonal cross-brace, which locates the altar. This central bay contains four roof lights.

In a surprising echo of Cogitosus’ description, the catalogue for an exhibition of Irish architecture at the RCA in London in 1980, Traditions and Directions, which included this church, published the following ‘words from the job list’: At Firhouse a walled garden with fruit trees, a glass and weathered silver timber screen to form a church and five courtyards, circular spinnaker cloth awning to the roof lights, old silver lamp, russian orthodox blue enamelled cross, indian applique vegetable dyed sedan cover making reredos, a giant clam shell for the baptismal font.

Discussion of the work of de Blacam and Meagher has always involved the notion of an architecture of place. Thus the problem of Firhouse and Dublin’s suburbia generally – featureless, sketchy and windswept, it is doomed to forever seek a notion of place, yet its endless division and multiplication denies all difference.

St. Mary’s Lane, Dublin. photograph Norman McGrath, 1966

The Church at Firhouse, set within an undifferentiated suburban landscape, bounded by a concrete-block wall, offers the courtyard as both an expansion and a critique of the surrounding domus.

In being cut off from its neighbourhood by high walls, within the courtyard gardens of Firhouse is not nature in its pure state, but an artificial construction of nature, an artificial representation of the world.

The church and its walls, then, imply not just the setting of a cosmological representation, but a particular situation as well: this is a suburban parish church. Those walls betray not just the collective in contemplation within them, but also the disparate suburbs, full of noise and movement, on the other side. Within the walls, the collective search for a place of identity takes on a process of self-construction, made possible by the isolation of the interior space from its surroundings.

There is a strange muteness about the walled enclosure when seen as object – but ultimately it surrenders itself to context. It could just as easily survive in a built-up street, adjacent to other structures. The building is focused on the centre, on a self-sufficient interior space that depends precisely for its presence on the world on the other side of the wall. Within this enclosure, the collective is free to imagine a transcendent possibility – indeed, their gaze is reflected back to the centre, as in a homecoming.

Against this view, de Blacam and Meagher’s church at Firhouse is a radical, even aggressive, reaction. But it makes its point wearing the humblest of suits, the clothes of the prophet who would banish the merchants from the temple.

In the discussion of the provenance of Firhouse, I would like to summon two works of architecture – one a courtyard building, one a church building – as precedent and witness to the event of its arrival: Saint Mary’s Lane by Robin Walker and Knockanure Chapel by Ronald Tallon, both completed in 1964.

Parish Church, Firhouse. photograph: Simon Walker

Man takes nature, the means of making a thing, and isolates its laws. Kahn To paraphrase Kahn’s assertion of the difference between Architecture and Nature, Firhouse is isolated, and it takes the most simple, local prescription – concrete block walls – and makes this law its own. Architectural language therefore is the vehicle which expresses the isolated law. But ultimately Firhouse is not a re-ordering of language, it does not depend on ‘expression’ – it is a spatial projection.

Knockanure Chapel. photograph: John Donat

The Courtyard Quality is a necessary constituent of good architecture. It has to do with the choice of materials, techniques and, through the manner in which things are juxtaposed and put together, the expression of the spirit of a work. Richness is not a factor; it is as possible, as easy, to achieve good quality with inexpensive means as to achieve it with an overabundance of riches. There is appropriate quality which is perhaps the same as a sense of propriety. To have this sense and the ability to practice it, with clarity, is the factor that particularly distinguishes the work. Robin Walker FRIAI, 26 June 1983, INTRODUCTION TO CATALOGUE ON WORK OF DE

BLACAM AND MEAGHER.

If the language of a building is capable of conveying meaning in a contribution that its strictly functional provisions do not make, then I would like to think that this approach resonates equally in the work of Robin Walker, who had been a persuasive architect during de Blacam and Meagher’s education and became a close friend on their return to Dublin.

But Walker’s influence – in the houses at St. Mary’s Lane, Dublin, Bótharbuí, Co. Cork, and the Weekend House, Co. Cork – extended also to the notion of re-ordering ‘place’ and expanding typology.

The house Walker built for his family at St. Mary’s Lane in Dublin is modelled on Mies’ project for a ‘Courthouse with Three Courts’ of 1934. Questioned about the structural diagram of St. Mary’s Lane, Walker had said ‘this house has no structural order except for the roof, the rest simply moves to accommodate the spaces desired’. Only a supression of structure, a reduction to two basic elements – slab roof and perimeter wall – could achieve the perfectly variable result that Mies had sought in his courtyard house studies. They are far removed from any idea of the mass-produced ‘objecttype’: possessed, therefore, of the clear intention of emphasising their individuality above all else.

As in the Miesian house, Firhouse embodies both typology and singularity.

Kahn talks about his understanding of the courtyard space at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad – ‘there is something to do with the feeling of association that is remote, rather than direct [linear], and more remote association has a longer life and love’ – this describes the roaming gaze generated by the glazed screens at Firhouse.

The congregation is in an ambient, centripetal relationship, not a linear one.

The Church Mies’ sensitivities with creation of space reacts to imposed structural order with little inspiration drawn from ‘what a building wants to be’... Mies’ order is not comprehensive enough to encompass, light, air, piping, storage, stairs, shafts, vertical and horizontal and other service spaces. His order of structure serves to frame the building but not harbour the servant space. Louis Kahn Ronald Tallon’s chapel at Knockanure could be typical of Kahn’s allegation – yet, in this case, it also frames the landscape beyond, offering a reflection of the mass-goers in their own placeimage. In a sense it is an inversion of Firhouse, yet its affirmation of place is equally powerful.

The most immediate precedent set by Knockanure is the flat roof, used for possibly the first time in an Irish church. But beyond that, its clearly understood nave-and-chancel arrangement, combined with the contemplative expansion afforded by drawing the natural setting in to its interior, both operate in the realm of place-making – once again, in Ábalos’ construction ‘a precise gesture, aimed at activating the memory’. Although it is a bounded space, and its flank walls are mute, its spatial effect is horizontal, extending as it does to the podium and the fields beyond.

But perhaps because of the hostile nature of the surroundings [and not just at Firhouse – the church design was started upon before the architects actually knew which one, out of a number of suburban sites, the Diocese would assign to their project], it is not surprising that de Blacam and Meagher rejected the classical strategy of ‘building in the landscape’, and instead placed their trust in Kahn’s message.

Until Kahn discovered the Platonic image for any given problem, questions of materials and site remained secondary in importance.

But Firhouse is not simply a form evoking an institution, by means of a geometrical determinism, the Platonic solid. Within the primary order – the space enclosed by its perimeter wall – a Kahnian order is established.

At Firhouse, the structural elements betray the same Platonic origin, yet they do not appear as solids, hollowed out to contain servant spaces, as at Trenton and at the First Unitarian Church in Rochester. Here, the independent columns standing side by side are actors within the courtyard space, and have slender dimensions relating to the surrounding trees, yet neither are they freely dispersed elements as in Mies’ conception. The sense of a pre-existing order, the clarity of assembly, the static nature of the space – already alluded to by the small entrance portico outside the wall – all owe their provenance to Kahn.

In his investigations of space Kahn emphasised that spaces providing for one person differed fundamentally from those for many. He discussed ideal images of each: for study, the plan of St. Gall, which diagrammed a series of extended, separated spaces for a monastery; and, for assembly, the Pantheon, with its single, holistic space. For him, places of meeting shared essential qualities that rendered differences between secular and religious use secondary in importance.

Thus the church came to be perceived as an essential space in the lives of the community.

Meaning in Kahn’s architecture came to be derived from the schooldesk or the place of worship – how necessary it is to describe this dimension to the lives of the people of Firhouse, caught between the disorganisation of poverty and the practice of doctrine. Kahn described his sense of the historic origin of assembly – it is what the space wants to be: a place to assemble under a tree.

In this reading, Firhouse at its most elemental is exactly that – a space under a tree, both a mass-rock and a hedge-school, a shelter within a traditional Irish ‘bawn’, or walled enclosure.

The fugitive nature of the institution therefore is accentuated by the walls, which deny any overt signification of the church at eye-level in the neighbourhood.

The other tradition It is proper, therefore, to acknowledge the influence of Aldo Rossi and la Tendenza on the thinking of de Blacam and Meagher in this period in the mid-1970s. With what Tafuri defines as ‘typological critique’, Rossi assumes history as an uninterrupted event to be studied and explored, to be drawn and written. While the Beckett Theatre acts as the perfect vehicle for such a Rossian play on the notion of monument – indebted as it is to the Teatro del Mondo – building a monument in Firhouse, the architectural void, in a place where there is no previous evidence of man’s intention, as distinct from his existence, is a very different proposition. Where there is no memory, where the past has no longer any meaning, such a monument must direct itself to the merely imagined, the unbuilt, the yet-to-be-lived – in Rodchenko’s words ‘a simple and pure love for an unknown future’.

In Massimo Scolari’s analysis of the ‘scuola di Rossi’, with a nod to Calvino, what the city today is in danger of losing forever is its own consciousness, its individuality, its character of civilisation… the ‘new monumentality’ thus implies a demand for unity and simplicity.

It is a response that is supposed to counter the disorder of the modern city with the clarity of few, but decisive, rules. It expresses a wish to recuperate definitively a character of the city, by starting with the simplicity of the needs of the collective spirit and with the feeling of unity in the means used to satisfy them.

Ultimately, the prescriptive conceit of this position was found out by a combination of politics, planning and geography – the impossibility of finding an architecture of commonly understood signs was surely far more acute in Ireland than in Italy. Robin Walker, at the end of his career, held that ‘[the search for] unity is the problem. Only infinity can enable the individual...’ – though an irreducible entity, the individual nevertheless encompasses within himself the infinite possibility for identification with an imagined place. So long as he looks inward, he does not prejudice another’s right to do the same. That is why Firhouse works as a space of identification, on both the urban scale and at that of the individual communicant – it looks inward, it conducts the inward projections of its congregation, and manifests this spatial projection as ‘a façade to the sky’.

Simon Walker

I was only a kid when I listened to Robin Walker, the architect proclaim that Architecture stopped with the Greeks and began again with Mies and Corb. What about the Renaissance?

I asked, ‘An exercise in frivolity.’ Wow. He also told me that furniture design and making was ‘Little Architecture’.

All this was in the late seventies and I was in my early twenties when I first met John Meagher trough Robins wife, Dorothy, the art critic and Patrick Scott the artist who had also been an architect.

John had a fantastic energy about him, engaging and opinionated, dismissive of others he regarded as visually illiterate (only about 95% of the world) a lover of Miles Davis and disco dancing. He talked of Bauhaus, the Shakers, Gunner Asplund, the palace at Katsura and of course Alvar Aalto whom he adored. John had this fluency with a pencil that astounded me, constantly drawing on scraps to illustrate his thoughts. We went to London at that time and to Sir Johns Soanes house, John raving about the wonderful hinged panels creating an atrium space. Years later I could see clearly this device being employed in the atrium in TCD. I knew about Shane de Blacam long before I met him, he had a reputation as Johns opposite, intense, broody, no small talk, he certainly didn’t do disco, to be honest I was in no hurry to meet him but one day John took me into their office, and at once I knew I had entered a sacred space of quiet intensity, a world of parallel motions, clutch pencils and erasers, models of perspex and balsa wood and Shane’s presence permeating everything. There were no computers then and I remember being gobsmacked by a drawing that James Dolan was working on that was already 300 hours of work. One day John sat down with me and showed me how to draw and then said ‘now design a low table’.

Paul Keogh and Rachel Chidlow were there at that time, just qualified and we became good friends. On another day Shane had me make some plywood boxes and there must have been something about them as he quickly got me to make twenty or so pairs of folding trestles to support the fire doors used for drawing on at the time. I figured out the making in a friends garage with basic tools,they worked well.

Scale 1:1, 23 June 2010. photograph: Peter Maybury

... Buildings, the atmosphere that they create and the way in which they are conceived, can be the central starting point of the coming Biennale. Very broadly, the process by which we design can be brought to bear on contemporary and future architectural discussion. We can select and arrange works such that they are rather than as representations. This can be manifested with an architecture grounded in its use by people. … Equally, there is another thread of interest: people in architecture, human encounters in both public and private scenarios, both creators and users. This is an issue of individual life in interplay with the community. It may be as simple as ‘people meet in architecture’. In its totality the Biennale can be a new and active forum for contemporary ideas as well as a close reading of the buildings themselves. Kazuyo Sejima, Director, 12th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice 2010

The exhibition of de Blacam and Meagher, Ireland’s participation at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, is offered as an edition in 9,000 copies from five blocks of 70gsm Reviva Offset paper stacked on unplaned oak pallets, arranged in the Oratory of St. Gall, Venice for free distribution from 27 August 2010, co-incident with the donation by de Blacam and Meagher Architects of their archive to the Irish Architectural Archive.

Tom dePaor, Peter Maybury, Alice Casey, Cian Deegan

In ’82 I went on a two year course at The John Makepiece School for Craftsmen in Wood, learning all the hand skills,inlay, dovetails, veneering etc. and the very day I arrived back in Ireland there was a fire in the Dining Hall in TCD. Shane and John debriefed me on college and showed no real interest in the skills I had picked up. Their real interest seemed to be in the conversion, seasoning, and characters of the different woods and how to use them with flair and ruthless honesty. A long way away from inlay.

I was in the middle of planning out my workshop when the lads got me to make the prototype table for the Dining Hall in Trinity. By this stage I had a secret nickname for them ‘Wind and Gravitas’ and a lot of respect too, I sensed that I was on another kind of apprenticeship, one of style.

Shane was on the hunt for the correct leg to use for the tables and we had heard that there was this bit of an old table in the exam hall opposite the dining hall so we looked at it. It had been adjusted, with the cross rail reduced and the mortise off centre on the cross rail so we worked out the original size from these fragments and made the prototype, The turned leg echoed the pediment on the Dining Hall facade and these were hand turned in my workshop. We made 18 no. 13 ft. long oak tables, mortise, tenon and pegged and assembled on site in the Dining Hall. I think it was Robin Walker who later said ‘You did not make these tables, you built them’.

We were all a bit put out when the client insisted that the tables could not remain untreated.

I clearly remember John in a white boiler suit applying various shades of distemper to details of the high ceiling ‘so it will all look the same from the floor’. Such obsession to detail!

Shane sent me to the Casino in Marino, just to see if they had a suitable chair, I saw this 19th century chair in the kitchen and simply asked the attendant could I borrow it, he said yes but to be sure to bring it back, this chair was adapted and Liam Carroll in Meath made loads of them.

When Robin Walker died in 1991, his wife Dorothy asked if I would make the coffin.

I had 48 hours to deliver, Shane wanted to be involved, he admired Robin a lot. I wanted to make a rectangular casket like the ones I had seen in the crypts under St. Michan’s church in Dublin. There is a crusader in one of them and the tanin which seeps in from the oak or chestnut trees above keep it all preserved.Shane agreed and did a drawing, John supplied a bolt of Linen. There were no metal fixtures or fittings, just slabs of oak and a bog oak cross (from the little bit of bog oak I made two crosses and gave Dorothy the other one after the funeral which she kept beside her bed). Shane took care of dealing with the undertakers.

Patrick Scott had at the time taken a 3ft. square gate-leg table design and created a series of ‘meditation tables’ for exhibition. Shane spotted these and in typical fashion set about adapting it into a 14ft square reredos with wings, for the Chapel of Reconciliation, Knock, except he wanted it to function as a gate-leg table so the Pope could say Mass at it with all the Bishops around it. Pat did some gold leaf work on it.

I don't think the Pope ever got to say mass on it, but it was at that time that Shane called me an ‘engineer in wood’. I liked that. Eric Pearce

Invitation, Dublin, 15 June 2010. photograph: Peter Maybury

___________________________________________________________________________ Ireland at Venice 2010 of de Blacam and Meagher Commissioner The Irish Architecture Foundation, under the directorship of Nathalie Weadick Curators Tom dePaor, Peter Maybury, Alice Casey, Cian Deegan ___________________________________________________________________________ Project co-ordination (de Blacam and Meagher) Chloe Street Project co-ordination (IAF) Katie Darling Venice consultant Paul Bradley Studio ___________________________________________________________________________ Ireland’s participation at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia is an initiative of Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council of Ireland. The exhibition is generously sponsored by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, the Royal Institute of the Architects in Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland: Italy. ___________________________________________________________________________ Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher First published 2010 by Gall Editions ISBN 978-0-9566293-0-2 Edited by Tom dePaor, Peter Maybury, Alice Casey, Cian Deegan Graphic design: Peter Maybury Printing: Lecturis bv, the Netherlands Paper: 70gsm Reviva Offset Inks: BASF Novaspace

Robin Walker’s coffin. photograph: Eric Pearce

GA L L E D I T I O N S

Robin Walker’s coffin. photograph: Eric Pearce

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In partnership with

80

Commissioner

Supported by

Ambasáid na hÉireann Embassy of Ireland Ambasciata d’Irlanda

Drawings

Church Firhouse Dublin

2010/56.1.12/A2a

Year 1976-1979 Area 726m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.12

1

Chapel Knock County Mayo Year 1989-1991 Area 1820m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.352

2010/56.1.352/SK2

2010/56.1.352/SK3

2010/56.1.352/SK4

2010/56.1.352/A100

2010/56.1.352/SK5

2010/56.1.352/A02

2010/56.1.352/SK01

2010/56.1.352/A05

2

Library Abbeyleix County Laois Year 2002-2008 Area 455m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.659

2010/56.1.659/SK1

2010/56.1.659/SK2

2010/56.1.659/SK3

2010/56.1.659/SK4

Entrance Landscape University of Limerick Year 1999 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.585

2010/56.1.585/SK1

3

Taoiseach’s House Phoenix Park Dublin unbuilt Year 1979 Area 1,700m2 (house) 2,225m2 (guest house) IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.98

4

2010/56.1.98/1

2010/56.1.98/2

2010/56.1.98/3

2010/56.1.98/4

2010/56.1.98/5

2010/56.1.98/6

2010/56.1.98/7

2010/56.1.98/8

Taoiseach’s House Phoenix Park Dublin unbuilt Year 1979 Area 1,700m2 (house) 2,225m2 (guest house) IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.98

2010/56.1.98/4

2010/56.1.98/8

5

2010/56.1.00/A1

House alterations Lombard Street West Dublin Year 1977-1978 Area 98m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.00

House County Carlow unbuilt Year 1977 Area 136m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.23

6

2010/56.1.23/SK5

2010/56.1.23/SK6

2010/56.1.23/SK1

2010/56.1.23/SK2

2010/56.1.23/SK3

2010/56.1.23/SK4

Year 2007-2009 Area 600m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.995

2010/56.1.995/A201

2010/56.1.995/PA08

House Dalkey County Dublin

7

2010/56.1.511/A02

House Bessborough Parade Dublin Year 1996–1999 Area 262m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.511

Three houses Waterloo Place Dublin Year 1996-2002 Area 440m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.640

2010/56.1.640/SK1

2010/56.1.640/SK2

House Heytesbury Lane Dublin Year 1995-1997 Area 188m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.487

2010/56.1.487/SK1

2010/56.1.487/SK4

8

2010/56.1.487/SK2

2010/56.1.487/SK3

2010/56.1.671/SK1

House Balearic Islands Spain

2010/56.1.671/SK3

2010/56.1.671/SK2

Year 2002-2007 Area 275m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.671

2010/56.1.671/SK4

2010/56.1.671/SK5

9

2010/56.1.517/SK5

No. 1 Castle Street Dublin

Year 1996-1999 Area 746m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.517

2010/56.1.517/SK1

2010/56.1.517/SK2

2010/56.1.517/SK3

2010/56.1.517/SK4

10

2010/56.1.492/SK1

2010/56.1.492/SK10

2010/56.1.492/SK17

2010/56.1.492/SK12

2010/56.1.492/SK14

2010/56.1.492/SK13

The Wooden Building Temple Bar Dublin

Year 1995-2000 Area 2,340m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.492

11

2010/56.1.240/A405

Trinity College Dublin Atrium and Dining Hall

12

2010/56.1.240/SK2

2010/56.1.240/SK1

2010/56.1.240/A139

Year 1984-1986 Area 4,100m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.240

Trinity College Dublin Atrium and Dining Hall Year 1984-1986 Area 4,100m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.240

2010/56.1.240/A228

2010/56.1.240/SK3

2010/56.1.240/A251

2010/56.1.240/A250

2010/56.1.240/A237

2010/56.1.240/A227

13

Trinity College Dublin Atrium and Dining Hall Year 1984-1986 Area 4,100m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.240

2010/56.1.240/SK4

2010/56.1.240/A445

2010/56.1.240/SK5

2010/56.1.240/A483

2010/56.1.240/A446

2010/56.1.240/SK6

2010/56.1.240/A477

14

Trinity College Dublin Beckett Theatre Year 1984-1993 Area 2,795m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.225

2010/56.1.225/SK1

2010/56.1.225/A212a

2010/56.1.225/A212

2010/56.1.225/A19

2010/56.1.225/A209a

2010/56.1.225/C10a

Galway Theatre Spanish Arch Galway City Year 1993 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.435

2010/56.1.435/SK1

2010/56.1.435/SK2

15

Cork Institute of Technology Library Year 1992-1999 Area 10,000m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.419

16

2010/56.1.419/SK1

2010/56.1.419/SK2

2010/56.1.419/SK3

2010/56.1.419/SK4

2010/56.1.419/SK5

2010/56.1.419/SK6

2010/56.1.419/SK7

2010/56.1.419/SK8

2010/56.1.419/7

2010/56.1.419/A7

2010/56.1.419/SK9

2010/56.1.419/A19a

Cork Institute of Technology Library Year 1992-1999 Area 10,000m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.419

2010/56.1.419/SK10

2010/56.1.419/SK11

2010/56.1.419/SK12

2010/56.1.419/SK13

2010/56.1.419/SK14

2010/56.1.419/SK15

17

Cork Institute of Technology North Campus Year 1997-2005 Area 3,589m2 (Student Centre) Area 4,216m2 (Tourism and Hospitality Studies Building) Area 2,210m2 (Administration Building) IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.543

2010/56.1.543/OD27

2010/56.1.543/SK1

2010/56.1.543/OD22

2010/56.1.543/A403

18

2010/56.1.543/A401

2010/56.1.543/SK2

Cork Institute of Technology North Campus

2010/56.1.543/OD50

2010/56.1.543/SK5

2010/56.1.543/SK4

2010/56.1.543/SK3

Year 1997-2005 Area 3,589m2 (Student Centre) Area 4,216m2 (Tourism and Hospitality Studies Building) Area 2,210m2 (Administration Building) IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.543

19

Maynooth Castle County Kildare

Year 1994-2001 Area 241m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.449

20

2010/56.1.449/SK1

2010/56.1.449/A08

2010/56.1.449/SK2

2010/56.1.449/A22

2010/56.1.449/A02

2010/56.1.449/A07

2010/56.1.449/SK3

2010/56.1.449/SK4

2010/56.1.449/SK5

Maynooth Castle County Kildare

2010/56.1.449/SK6

Year 1994-2001 Area 241m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.449

2010/56.1.449/SK7

21

2010/56.1.532/SK1

Office Building Grand Canal Quay Dublin Year 1999-2000 Area 7,547m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.532

2010/56.1.532/F004

2010/56.1.532/SK2

2010/56.1.532/F005L3

2010/56.1.608/SK1

2010/56.1.608/SK2

Office Building 4 St. Catherine’s Lane West Dublin Year 2000-2004 Area 1,500m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.608

2010/56.1.608/SK3

22

2010/56.1.900/660

2010/56.1.900/665

The Digital Hub project Dublin

2010/56.1.900/663

2010/56.1.900/661 2010/56.1.900/666

2010/56.1.900/662

Year 2006-2008 Area 59,500m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.900

2010/56.1.900/1023

23

Church Rowlagh Dublin Year 1977 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.35

2010/56.1.35/A07

2010/56.1.35/SK9

2010/56.1.35/SK3

2010/56.1.35/SK2

2010/56.1.35/A05

24

Construction

The Wooden Building Temple Bar Dublin Year 1995-2000 Area 2,340m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.492

25

26 2010/56.1.492/A03

2010/56.1.492/A01

27

2010/56.1.492/A09

2010/56.1.492/A04

28 2010/56.1.492/A13

2010/56.1.492/A37

29

2010/56.1.492/A16

2010/56.1.492/A14

30 2010/56.1.492/A43

2010/56.1.492/A20

31

2010/56.1.492/A57

2010/56.1.492/A44 (3)

32 2010/56.1.492/A318

2010/56.1.492/A63

33

2010/56.1.492/P12

2010/56.1.492/P11

34 2010/56.1.492/P13

2010/56.1.492/P34

35

2010/56.1.492/P17 (3)

2010/56.1.492/P14

36 2010/56.1.492/P30

2010/56.1.492/P18

Photography

Church Firhouse Dublin

2010/56.1.12/P1

Year 1976-1979 Area 726m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.12

37

Chapel Knock County Mayo

2010/56.1.352/P1

Year 1989-1991 Area 1820m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.352

38

Chapel Knock County Mayo Year 1989-1991 Area 1820m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.352

2010/56.1.352/P2

2010/56.1.352/P3

2010/56.1.352/P4

2010/56.1.352/P5

2010/56.1.352/P6

2010/56.1.352/P7

2010/56.1.352/P8

2010/56.1.352/P9

2010/56.1.352/P10

39

Trinity College Dublin Atrium and Dining Hall

2010/56.1.240/P1

Year 1984-1986 Area 4,100m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.240

40

Trinity College Dublin Atrium and Dining Hall Year 1984-1986 Area 4,100m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.240

2010/56.1.240/P2

2010/56.1.240/P3

2010/56.1.240/P4

2010/56.1.240/P5

2010/56.1.240/P6

2010/56.1.240/P7

2010/56.1.240/P8

2010/56.1.240/P9

2010/56.1.240/P10

41

Trinity College Dublin Beckett Theatre

2010/56.1.225/P1

Year 1984-1993 Area 2,795m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.225

42

Trinity College Dublin Beckett Theatre Year 1984-1993 Area 2,795m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.225

2010/56.1.225/P2

2010/56.1.225/P3

2010/56.1.225/P4

2010/56.1.225/P5

2010/56.1.225/P6

2010/56.1.225/P7

2010/56.1.225/P8

2010/56.1.225/P9

2010/56.1.225/P10

43

House alterations Lombard Street West Dublin Year 1977-1978 Area 98m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.00

House Bessborough Parade Dublin Year 1996–1999 Area 262m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.511

Three houses Waterloo Place Dublin Year 1996-2002 Area 440m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.640 2010/56.1.00/P1

2010/56.1.00/P2

2010/56.1.00/P3

2010/56.1.511/P1

2010/56.1.511/P2

2010/56.1.640/P1

2010/56.1.640/P2

2010/56.1.487/P1

2010/56.1.487/P2

House Heytesbury Lane Dublin Year 1995-1997 Area 188m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.487

44

No. 1 Castle Street Dublin

2010/56.1.517/P1

Year 1996-1999 Area 746m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.517

45

No. 1 Castle Street Dublin

Year 1996-1999 Area 746m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.517

2010/56.1.517/P2

2010/56.1.517/P3

2010/56.1.517/P4

2010/56.1.449/P1

2010/56.1.449/P2

2010/56.1.449/P3

2010/56.1.449/P4

2010/56.1.449/P5

2010/56.1.449/P6

Maynooth Castle County Kildare

Year 1994-2001 Area 241m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.449

46

Maynooth Castle County Kildare

2010/56.1.449/P7

Year 1994-2001 Area 241m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.449

47

Office Building Grand Canal Quay Dublin

2010/56.1.532/P1

Year 1999-2000 Area 7,547m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.532

48

Library Abbeyleix County Laois Year 2002-2008 Area 455m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.659

2010/56.1.659/P1

2010/56.1.659/P2

2010/56.1.659/P3

Education Centre Galway Mayo Institute of Technology Year: 1997-2001 Area 685m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.529

School of Art and Library Galway Mayo Institute of Technology Year 1995-2001 Area 3,490m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.484

2010/56.1.529/P1

2010/56.1.484/P1

2010/56.1.484/P2

Office Building 4 St. Catherine’s Lane West Dublin Year 2000-2004 Area 1,500m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.608

2010/56.1.608/P1

2010/56.1.608/P2

2010/56.1.608/P3

49

Year 1995-2000 Area 2,340m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.492

50

2010/56.1.492/P1

The Wooden Building Temple Bar Dublin

The Wooden Building Temple Bar Dublin Year 1995-2000 Area 2,340m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.492

2010/56.1.492/P2

2010/56.1.492/P3

2010/56.1.492/P4

2010/56.1.492/P5

2010/56.1.492/P6

2010/56.1.492/P7

2010/56.1.492/P8

2010/56.1.492/P9

2010/56.1.492/P10

51

Cork Institute of Technology Library

2010/56.1.419/P1

Year 1992-1999 Area 10,000m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.419

52

Cork Institute of Technology Library Year 1992-1999 Area 10,000m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.419

2010/56.1.419/P2

2010/56.1.419/P3

2010/56.1.419/P4

2010/56.1.419/P5

2010/56.1.419/P6

2010/56.1.419/P7

Cork Institute of Technology North Campus Year 1997-2005 Area 3,589m2 (Student Centre) Area 4,216m2 (Tourism and Hospitality Studies Building) Area 2,210m2 (Administration Building) IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.543

2010/56.1.543/P1

2010/56.1.543/P2

2010/56.1.543/P3

53

Cork Institute of Technology North Campus

2010/56.1.543/P4

Year 1997-2005 Area 3,589m2 (Student Centre) Area 4,216m2 (Tourism and Hospitality Studies Building) Area 2,210m2 (Administration Building) IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.543

54

Cork Institute of Technology North Campus Year 1997-2005 Area 3,589m2 (Student Centre) Area 4,216m2 (Tourism and Hospitality Studies Building) Area 2,210m2 (Administration Building) IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.543

2010/56.1.543/P5

2010/56.1.543/P6

2010/56.1.543/P7

2010/56.1.543/P8

2010/56.1.543/P9

2010/56.1.543/P10

2010/56.1.543/P11

2010/56.1.543/P12

2010/56.1.543/P13

55

House Balearic Islands Spain

2010/56.1.671/P1

Year 2002-2007 Area 275m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.671

56

House Balearic Islands Spain Year 2002-2007 Area 275m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.671

2010/56.1.671/P2

2010/56.1.671/P3

2010/56.1.671/P4

2010/56.1.671/P5

2010/56.1.671/P6

2010/56.1.671/P7

Restaurant and Rooms Aran Islands County Galway Year 2002-2005 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.700

2010/56.1.700/P1

2010/56.1.700/P2

2010/56.1.700/P3

57

House Dalkey County Dublin Year 2007-2009 Area 600m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.995

58

2010/56.1.995/P1

2010/56.1.995/P2

2010/56.1.995/P3

2010/56.1.995/P4

2010/56.1.995/P5

2010/56.1.995/P6

2010/56.1.995/P7

2010/56.1.995/P8

2010/56.1.995/P9

House Dalkey County Dublin

2010/56.1.995/P10

Year 2007-2009 Area 600m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.995

59

Church Firhouse Dublin Year 1976-1979 Area 726m2 IAA accession no.

2010/56.1.12

60

2010/56.1.12/P2

2010/56.1.12/P3

2010/56.1.12/P4

2010/56.1.12/P5

2010/56.1.12/P6

2010/56.1.12/P7

2010/56.1.12/P8

2010/56.1.12/P9

2010/56.1.12/P10

Photography

61

62

The Wooden Building, Temple Bar, Dublin, 19 March 2010. Photo: Peter Maybury/Marie-Pierre Richard

71

70

House, Dalkey, County Dublin, 10 April 2010. Photo: Peter Maybury/Marie-Pierre Richard

63

64

Grand Canal Quay, Dublin, 13 April 2010. Photo: Peter Maybury/Marie-Pierre Richard

69

68

Trinity College Dublin, Beckett Theatre, 16 April 2010. Photo: Peter Maybury/Marie-Pierre Richard

65

66

Maynooth Castle, County Kildare, 17 April 2010. Photo: Peter Maybury/Marie-Pierre Richard

67

72

Cork Institute of Technology, North Campus, 2 January 2010. Photo: Peter Maybury/Marie-Pierre Richard