The building blocks of Irish culture

IT SAYS something about this year's Imagine Irelandfestival in the US that when Irish architects addressed an audience at the Cooper Union in New York City on Monday night, they were competing with a sell-out reading by Séamus Heaney on the Upper West Side and Liam Neeson launching Cinemagicon Wall Street.

Organised by Culture Ireland, with a relatively modest budget of €5 million, the coast-to-coast spread of 500 events, involving more than 1,200 performers of one sort or another – and following last year's cleverly titled Extremely Hungaryfestival – is intended to show that there's much more to Irish culture than Riverdance.

Chief executive Eugene Downes explained that architecture was included as one of the art forms, both “to plug into networks that are there for Ireland in America” and to show that the “kaleidoscope of Irish cultural activity” embraces everything from theatre and literature to contemporary music, dance and cutting-edge buildings.

The six architectural practices selected to represent Ireland were chosen by UCD School of Architecture alumnus Raymund Ryan, curator of the Heinz Architectural Center at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum. Apart from New York, the two diverse groups are hitting Harvard, Pittsburgh, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Immensely well-informed and well-connected, Ryan described Imagine Irelandas "a year-long assault or seduction" of American audiences, and he told the 100 or so who turned up for the first "Irish Architecture Now" event this week that Wexford-born James O'Donnell had designed several New York City churches back in the 1820s.

There were two other local connections. Roisín Heneghan and Shih-Fu Peng had met at Harvard in 1999 and set up practice in New York, before relocating to Dublin two years later on the strength of winning an architectural competition for Kildare County Council’s new headquarters in Naas, and they’ve “gone global” since then.

Merrit Bucholz, who’s from Chicago, and Karen McEvoy met in New York while they were working for architect Emilio Ambasz. And what drew them to Dublin was their success in winning the contest to design Fingal County Hall in Swords. Bucholz and McEvoy, and Heneghan and Peng, are also partners in life as well as in practice.

But it was Niall McCullough, of McCullough Mulvin Architects, who had the honour of leading the Irish group in the Rose Auditorium of Thom Mayne’s crinkly Cooper Union building. A veteran of Group 91, the consortium that drew up the Temple Bar framework plan in 1991, he talked knowledgeably about the challenges of building in Ireland.

Their architecture, he said, was “embedded in very strong contexts, a form of engaging with geography” and the often “melancholic nature” of the Irish landscape, peppered as it is with ruins. “There’s an issue of place that you have to harness, and we’ve been trying to do that in an open-hearted, fearless way” – for example, in Trinity College Dublin.

McCullough also talked about transforming St Maur’s Church, in Rush – controversially replaced by a new church several years ago – into a public library by “dropping new elements into it, like folded pieces of paper” so that “it makes its own environment, and you can see old things in new ways”. Some feel it should have been kept as a church.

Near the Casino in Marino, McCullough Mulvin designed a new city morgue “for the unexpectedly dead”, with incisions in its flat roof to “bring light into the process” of carrying out autopsies. But builders McNamara went bust while it was under construction and the half-finished morgue has become (temporarily) an unintentional ruin.

This was not spelled out, however.

Ray Ryan recalled the “somewhat crazy years of the so-called Celtic Tiger” and the all the cash it injected into Irish society that had “now left us with a huge hangover”. But there was no explicit reference to the fact that so many Irish architects are now unemployed, underemployed or have simply gone abroad.

In their presentation, Bucholz and McEvoy concentrated on their heroic achievements in designing and delivering civic offices for Fingal, Limerick and Westmeath county councils. They didn’t mention Elm Park, the huge scheme on Merrion Road by Bernard McNamara et al, which is probably our most architecturally distinguished ghost estate.

They showed a striking satellite image of Ireland last January, with the entire island blanketed by snow – a graphic illustration of how the climate is changing. Their architecture is driven by the environmental agenda, with natural ventilation and screening to reduce solar gain. “Believe it or not, we get a lot of sun in Ireland,” Bucholz said.

He conceded that the public debate about architecture “has a way to go” because most people were living in “yellow houses” mainly built within the past two decades. “There’s a tremendous ambivalence about the city . . . It’s a suburban country where people live in the landscape and the way it’s laid out has everything to do with cars.”

Bucholz, who heads University of Limerick’s school of architecture, singled out actor Gabriel Byrne’s “harsh criticism” of the Department of Finance on Merrion Row. “How could this guy who’s a cultural ambassador say something like that about a building that’s such an inspiration?” he asked.

In fairness, as Eugene Downes pointed out, Byrne's reaction to Merrion Row predated his appointment as Ireland's Cultural Ambassador in the US. Since then, he had opened many doors and personally curated key Imagine Irelandprojects, including the first Irish film retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The Cooper Union event, hosted by the Architectural League of New York, was preceded by a pilgrimage to Philip Johnson’s genuinely iconic Glass House, in New Canaan. When it was finished in 1949, a local woman remarked: “It may be very beautiful, but I certainly couldn’t live here.” To which Johnson retorted: “I haven’t asked you to, madam.”

SHIH-FU PENG’S illustrated talk was like a masterclass in materials and structure, dealing with the difficulties of composing a 1km-long facade of translucent onyx sourced from Iran for the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, and how to overcome the “extremely weak” properties of Irish basalt in building a new visitors’ centre at the Giant’s Causeway.

Peng has also been learning what it means to be an international architect. Working on a bridge design for the highly sensitive Lorelei stretch of the Rhine, in Germany, they get letters from the client saying “you made a mistake, so that’s going to cost you €7,000”; they haven’t figured out a way of getting around this, “so right now, we’re in debt”.

What intrigued Kazys Varnelis, director of Columbia University’s Network Architecture Lab and part-time lecturer in Limerick, was how Irish architecture is likely to evolve, given that it’s now being produced in a “more global context than ever”; one of the good things, he felt, was that Ireland had managed to avoid the “cult of starchitecture”.

But any notion that there was something distinctively Irish about the work of our architects at home or abroad was scotched after the event, by Rosalee Ginevro, president of the Architectural League of New York. “What we’ve learned is that there’s no such thing as Irish architecture. There’s just architecture that’s practised somewhere.”

Frank McDonald travelled to New York at the invitation of the Irish Architecture Foundation, with the support of Culture Ireland.