Building on the future

The jurors for this year's Architectural Association of Ireland awards favoured a human dimension while asking for more risk-takers, reports FRANK McDONALD, Environment Editor

ARE WE SEEING too much “architects’ architecture”? This question was posed by the architect and influential critic, Charles Jencks, who has done more than most to validate postmodernism, in his reflections on this year’s crop of Architectural Association of Ireland awards, the 25th of the annual series.

Jencks, who was on the awards jury, had just arrived in Dublin from Barcelona, where he was involved in judging the World Architecture Festival. There he saw “what seemed like a thousand white boards filled with good-taste abstract architecture, all photographed on a sunny day, without people” (of course).

What he missed among the 100-plus entries for the AAI awards was “the poetic, the non-standard, the non-architects’ architecture”. And his advice was that architects “should cast their net wider than their own taste-culture strength and depth from acknowledging and celebrating ‘the other’.”

Jencks cited the Timberyard social housing scheme in the Liberties and Derry’s new Gaeláras Irish cultural centre – the two projects by architects O’Donnell + Tuomey that won awards – as examples of a “high version of architects’ architecture, comparable to the very best international practice of urban building”.

But he found Niall McLaughlin’s Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Blackrock more convincing “because it is a poetic interpretation of a social condition at a deep level understands the plight of these sufferers and turns affliction into marvellous architecture” – like the Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres in Britain.

“The Irish architecture we saw in the AAI awards was of a very high standard, especially in terms of urbanism,” Jencks said. “But, as a profession, we should also be seeking out schemes that take greater risk and go against the prevailing norms of conformity that sometimes dampen the spirit of architecture.”

He suggested that architects might emulate Brian O'Doherty, alias Patrick Ireland, a pseudonym he adopted for his painting after Bloody Sunday in Derry and then relinquished at its subsequent "burial" in 2008 as a result of the peace process. This was the kind of "critical stance" Jencks has advocated in his book, Critical Modernism.

Yvonne Farrell, of multiple-award-winning Grafton Architects, who was also on the jury, had more practical concerns. “What is striking,” she said, “is the care and skill invested in projects, especially in the smaller ones, while many of the larger projects abandon this attention to detail”, becoming swamped in the commercial tide. “Is this to do with who gets what? Is it that whoever gets many of the bigger projects somehow does not or cannot hold on to some fundamentally necessary ingredients? These are important questions at any time, but especially now during this enforced recession and as we consider building a future.

“In the final analysis, architecture is not a series of images. It is experienced, tested by time and use. Buildings embody culture and hold up a mirror to the values of our society, telling the story of our lives in built form. We walk through and feel space with our bodies, with all our senses, not just with our eyes or intellect.”

John McLaughlin, the other Irish architect on the jury, dissented from the final selection of projects because he felt environmental sustainability was inadequately represented. In his view, two projects that should have been included were Bucholz McEvoy’s new county offices in Mullingar and FKL’s “A-house” in Dublin.

Raymond Keaveney, director of the National Gallery and distinguished non-architect on the jury, said that what mattered most in architecture, as in art or music, was the end result. “Does a well-designed building cost more than a poorly designed one? Almost certainly not. That’s not to say that every aspiration to excellence succeeds.”

But he felt that the fabric of our cities and towns, and the buildings we live and work in, “would be better if we engaged more with the discipline of architecture and became more involved in the process rather than being passive consumers. We should be more demanding of our architects and they should be more challenged.”

AAI awards: eye-catching selections

MEWS HOUSES, STONEYBATTER

A2 ARCHITECTS

The AAI awards jury was captivated by the photograph of the kitchen in one of the two identical mews houses built in a lane to the rear of Aughrim Street, near Stoneybatter. This is the first phase of 10, all identical and designed by A2 Architects, that will turn the project into a street.

Charles Jencks said the picture was “as good as an Edward Hopper” and was “too exquisite” to be real. “It’s so poignant, almost melancholy. It’s late Sunday afternoon and everything’s gone, and there’s no sign of any food or any hope. Look at how the light hits her head . . .”

As for the architecture, he wondered why it was called New Order. “Is this really a Mussolini phrase?” he asked.

Yvonne Farrell had the answer: “I suppose because it’s ordering the lane. The lane is in tatters, so it’s stitching it in with a new type of intervention.”

GAELÁRAS IRISH LANGUAGE CULTURAL CENTRE, DERRY

O’DONNELL + TUOMEY

This centre occupies a long, rectangular plot in the city’s Clarendon Street conservation area. Its facilities include a shop, cafe, performance space, backstage facilities, start-up offices and teaching spaces.

John McLaughlin really loved it. “I think it’s a fantastic scheme,” he said. “It’s really brilliant the way it uses the diagonal to bring you deep into the plot and make this amazing kind of world of staircases in this internal space .”

Charles Jencks called it “architects’ architecture in a certain way, and commendable at that level . . . This is a building where the architectural ideas are threaded through each other nicely”. What it showed was how you could make “such amazing spaces . . . of very simple routines”.

ALZHEIMER’S RESPITE CENTRE, BLACKROCK

NIALL McLAUGHLIN

The architects conceived this centre as a place that has a necessary social hub as well as a set of gardens, each with a different orientation, in which Alzheimer’s sufferers can fulfil their “deep need to wander”.

Yvonne Farrell saw it as a “beautiful interpretation” of the Garden of Eden: “It takes its cue from the patients’ requirements – the kind of walls within the walls – so it’s not just a garden for its own sake.”

John McLaughlin couldn’t comment, as his brother was the architect, but Charles Jencks thought the provision of three different kinds of garden for Alzheimer’s patients (in care to give respite to their relatives) was marvellous.

“Here, the poetry of interpretation of a kind of frailty has produced great architecture,” he said.

TWO HOUSES, MOREHAMPTON ROAD, DUBLIN

TAKA ARCHITECTS

Taka won its award for two houses on Morehampton Road that provide homes for two generations of the same family. A renovated Victorian house for the parents shares a rear garden with a new mews house for one of their daughters.

As John McLaughlin put it, “somebody has built a house at the end of the garden, and then there’s a relationship between that house and the original house. The thing I like most is the garden, actually, it seems like a really nice place.”

Swiss architect Andrea Deplazes, who was also on the jury, detected a “slight overkill” with the brickwork, but Yvonne Farrell liked the brick screen “because it takes a form, a very conventional form, and then slightly moves it”. She also liked the “sense of old and new”.

TIMBERYARD SOCIAL HOUSING SCHEME, THE LIBERTIES

O’DONNELL + TUOMEY

With this scheme, Dublin City Council at least partially repaired what awards juror Charles Jencks called the “ruptured environment” created by its own road engineers driving the Coombe bypass through the Liberties.

Timberyard reminded Jencks of 1920s social housing in the Netherlands, “where it became a monumental statement of the working class . . . a bastion of terrific strength”. As fellow juror Raymond Keaveney observed, “it is superior to most blocks of apartments for middle-class buyers”.

Yvonne Farrell thought it captured the atmosphere of Dublin, especially of the Liberties, with its tradition of large-scale industrial buildings, notably the Guinness brewery. But it also managed to be domestic, with a “strong sculptural quality built into this form”.