Creating Ireland's new identity

A breathtaking book on the work of architects Scott Tallon Walker shows how they helped shape modern Ireland, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor.

No architectural practice in Ireland has been around for so long and built as much as the firm founded by Michael Scott. So it is entirely appropriate that President McAleese will launch a sumptuous book celebrating the firm's work over the past 45 years in one of its major buildings - the O'Reilly Hall in UCD - tomorrow evening. As architecture critic Deyan Sudjic notes in his introduction, it was the confidence of Scott Tallon Walker's original partners - Michael Scott, Ronnie Tallon and Robin Walker - and the determination of their generation to create a new approach to the country's identity that helped usher the "new Ireland" into being.

"Architecture, for once, has been able to play a part in catapulting a small, predominantly rural nation, still shrugging off the debilitating impact of centuries of colonialism, into the age of the service economy," he writes in the 400-page, large format volume Scott Tallon Walker Architects - 100 buildings and projects, 1960-2005. Of course, as the book acknowledges, Michael Scott had been blazing a trail for contemporary architecture since the 1930s with such forward-looking projects as Portlaoise Hospital, the Irish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, his own iconic house in Sandycove, and Busáras in Dublin. But it is really about what happened later.

Among all the 1,300-plus images, the one that Sudjic couldn't put out of his mind is a photograph showing a group of men streaming out of the box-like Knockanure Church in Moyvane, Co Kerry. "The faces of the men, in their flat caps and their Sunday best, look as if they could belong to the 1930s, or even the 1890s, rather than 1964."

For him, this photograph encapsulated much of what made the history of Scott Tallon Walker's work so interesting. Just as striking as the way it makes so much of the church's clear span, with its concrete roof "floating magically in space above a transparent glass wall", is the portrait of a long-gone Ireland that it depicts so eloquently. In this context, it is ironic that Ronnie Tallon designed the Papal Cross in the Phoenix Park for Pope John Paul II's triumphant visit in 1979, which marked the high point of Irish Catholicism. By then, he had effectively taken over the practice, becoming its strict pater familias; his only remaining rival, the gifted Robin Walker, retired in 1982.

It was Walker who designed the Bord Fáilte building at Baggot Street Bridge (1961), which was the first in Ireland to be designed around a lift core. He was also responsible for the National Bank in Suffolk Street (1964), which had the first purpose-made glazed curtain wall in Ireland; it was demolished last year for the new Habitat store.

THE RTÉ television studios, in 1962, marked the first time in Ireland that precast concrete columns and a flat-slab structure were used, Tallon tells Shane O'Toole in a lengthy, and revealing, interview in the book. It was also the first time a curtain-walling system, based on prefabricated, fully-glazed components, was developed here. "It was a very happy time. We lived architecture; we did nothing else. We had no hobbies other than architecture and the visual arts. It was our total world, and we spent all the time searching for new ways of approaching it and new ways of developing it. We never standardised anything; everything was studied from basics each time."

This will come as a surprise to those who believe that there is a formulaic quality to much of Scott Tallon Walker's work - notably in what Deyan Sudjic describes as their "suave offices for the lawyers and brokers and technologists who are fuelling the country's economic boom" - typified by A&L Goodbody's offices on North Wall Quay.

Though nearly 80, Tallon is still involved in the conception of projects and making sure that the detailed design is right. "I think there's something intuitive about architecture," he tells O'Toole. "When a brief comes in, the minute you read it, your concept is almost formed . . . The longer you spend dithering over architecture, the worse it gets . . . I don't think the principles of architecture have ever changed in this office. I think influences in the marketplace have made us adapt to different ways of making buildings, but we've never given up the principles of clear structure and simplicity in design . . . We won't stop that, because it has always been our way." He calls it discipline.

Tallon's acclaimed masterpiece, which graces the cover of the book, is the former Carroll's cigarette factory in Dundalk; he himself reckons it "may be the best building I have made". Now being remodelled internally for Dundalk Institute of Technology, its cellular module allowed the building to be expanded seamlessly in any direction.

The best building in the world, in his view, is the 17th-century Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, Japan. "Everything that we believed in over the years, about modular co-ordination and so on, it's all there" - based on a tatami mat, which then governed the dimensions of every room. "It's identical to what we're doing today, to our whole philosophy."

When it came to designing his own house in Foxrock, he drew inspiration from his great hero, Mies van der Rohe, but also from the observation that his five children had followed his wife Nora from room to room in their first house. So in the new house "we made one open space, and at the ends we had rooms you could withdraw into".

The extraordinary Goulding Summerhouse, a rectangular box that cantilevers out over the River Dargle, near Enniskerry, is more dramatic, almost requiring a suspension of disbelief. Also Miesian in style, if not structure, it was declared a Modernist icon and is now a listed building - restored by its current owner, Johnny Ronan, in 2002.

The influence of Mies was most clearly - even slavishly - expressed in the Bank of Ireland headquarters on Baggot Street. As Arthur Gibney notes in an essay in the book, "the bank's architecture makes strong references to Mies's New York Seagram Building in certain aspects of its formal organisation and in almost the entirety of its detail imagery".

Tallon concedes that their "almost total commitment" to the Miesian ethos was "overstated" in the bank, which used exactly the same material and mullions as Seagram. Equally, as Gibney says, Robin Walker's powerful structural concept for the Restaurant Building in UCD was inspired by Mies's unrealised Square House of 1950. Though Scott Tallon Walker were "completely uninfluenced" by post-modern architecture in the 1980s, Gibney suggests their later work may owe something to the debate it provoked. Tallon agrees: "Although I hated it, I'd have to admit that it helped us to overcome a very restricted approach to architecture" - making it "freer".

The driving force for the second phase of the Civic Offices at Wood Quay was to repair the gash on the quayfront and restore the scale of the river by covering up the pair of "bunkers" that were a legacy of Dublin Corporation's defensive days. Traditional materials - granite and Portland stone - were used, and the building was given a portico.

Yet its relative transparency, compared to what went before, and the arrangement of the office space around an atrium garden, created a building where the general public felt welcome. "That was a major, major change of philosophy by Dublin Corporation. The building forced that change in philosophy. It's a people's place now," Tallon says.

"GENERALLY YOU'LL find that the public sector is more supportive of new ideas. They have more belief in new things and they're not solely in it for profit," he goes on. "Back in the 1960s, it was very rare for a client to want a building of his own time. That struggle is over, because everyone today wants good modern architecture."

The approach is also different. "You're much more involved now in early decisions about environmental design and how to minimise the use of energy and create pleasant working environments for people. There's a whole delight in light in buildings - at long last people appreciate lots of light! Light is the most important gift we have in our life."

One of Scott Tallon Walker's trademarks has been the integration of works of art into their buildings, such as Michael Warren's Viking prow sculpture at Wood Quay. "We would tell the artist what we wanted in terms of location and scale, but the artist would have absolute freedom regarding the concept, as long as the scale was right."

Deyan Sudjic singles out Tallon and Warren's collaboration on Tulach a' tSolais, an austerely beautiful memorial to the 1798 Rising, cut into Oulart Hill in Co Wexford. "In its abstraction, it seems to transcend the constraints of the past and any sense of victimhood to achieve a more universal exploration of human values and memories."

However, Sudjic is wrong in saying that Scott Tallon Walker's science buildings for Trinity College (1985-1997) "worked with the past, and retained Georgian terraces rather than demolish them"; the original master plan for the college's east end followed its established grid pattern, requiring the demolition of one side of Westland Row.

Like many other architects, Ronnie Tallon believes Dublin needs to go higher, and he's critical of the height restrictions on new buildings in Docklands. "There was a sort of obsession with the theories of Rob Krier and his brother Leon, and medieval cities and all that nonsense. Fine, but the scale of the city has to change. It's only a matter of time."

We'll see what kind of urban realm Scott Tallon Walker produce at Spencer Dock, where they are designing all of the buildings. In Arthur Gibney's mention of it, there is an unfortunate error where he refers to the plan for a new linear park in this area "as an adjunct to the refurbishment of the Grand Canal" when, of course, it's the Royal Canal. Such slips apart, this is a breathtaking book. The 13 pages of thumbnail photographs showing all of their projects since 1960 demonstrate the range and quality of Scott Tallon Walker's work - even though, as Tallon says ruefully, architects are now struggling to maintain their dominant role.

Scott Tallon Walker Architects - 100 buildings and projects, 1960-2005, edited by John O'Regan, is published by Gandon Editions, price €75 (hardback)