Great Scott of modernity

Michael Scott opened up architecture in isolated 1940s Ireland. His extraordinary life and work is now being celebrated, writes Frank McDonald Environment Editor.

Michael Scott was an extraordinary human being, a true Renaissance man. Not only was he one of Ireland's leading architects, he was also an actor, an artist, a patron of the arts, a bon viveur and a raconteur. So it is entirely fitting that a centenary exhibition to commemorate his life and work is called Master of All the Muses.

Designed by Scott Tallon Walker, successor of the architectural partnership he founded in 1959, the exhibition at Cork's Crawford Gallery features drawings and photographs of his most important buildings, portraits by Robert Ballagh, Louis le Brocquy and Seán O'Sullivan, film footage, medals and topographical sketches.

Had he lived, Scott would have been 100 years old last Friday. He died in January 1989 at the age of 83 in Geragh, the iconic house he designed for himself and his family beside the Martello Tower in Sandycove in the late 1930s; he and his house formed an indelible image of "modern" architecture in Ireland for more than 50 years.

Scott's impact was recognised abroad, too - notably in 1975, when Britain's Queen Elizabeth presented him with the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. "Through his leadership and the example of his buildings, Ireland has been set a standard of architectural quality from which the whole country has benefited," the citation read.

He had already won the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) for Busáras, one of the first major buildings to be completed in Europe after the second World War. "Built in a time of privation," as the catalogue notes, "it remains by common consent the outstanding achievement of Irish architecture in the last century."

Completed in 1953, it was described much later by architecture critic Robert Furneaux Jordan as "a tour-de-force of glass, metal and mosaic immediately beside Gandon's great Custom House". What he saw in it was "contrast, not discord. Metallic glitter, colour, structural tensity and drama are matched with dignity, solidity, reserve."

As Fintan O'Toole wrote in 1989, Busáras has been awarded "a kind of honorary nostalgia . . . partly because the building pre-dates the predatory building boom of the 1960s and thus avoids association with the sharks and speculators of that time . . . Its shiny, streamlined surfaces seem innocent and Utopian rather than mean and oppressive."

Obviously influenced by Le Corbusier's work in France, the Busáras project gave Scott the opportunity to assemble a talented team of people, such as Ronnie Tallon and Robin Walker, who later became his partners, and Kevin Roche, who went on to make a big name for himself in the US.

Ever the impresario, Scott also brought in some of the best of Europe's technical brains to work on the project, with a lasting impact on the Irish building industry. Ove Arup provided the then innovative reinforced concrete design while Jorgen Varming - another Dane - devised the air-conditioning system. Both of them set up offices here.

This is all the more remarkable when you consider how isolated Ireland was in the late 1940s, when Busáras was designed. Irish architects didn't hop on to planes and travel halfway around the world to see major buildings for themselves. There was little or no television, not many magazines on design and no instant access to the Internet.

"Michael was working in a vacuum," his son, Niall, recalled at the official opening of the Cork exhibition. "The Bauhaus architects were feeding off each other, but he did it all on his own."

Indeed, there were precious few "modern" buildings in Ireland at the time, apart from Desmond FitzGerald's original terminal building at Dublin Airport.

Scott himself had designed light and airy county hospitals in Portlaoise and Tullamore, and he was awarded honorary citizenship of New York for his Irish pavilion at its World's Fair in 1939. Shaped like a shamrock, when seen from the air, it projected a startlingly modern image of Ireland, then in the grip of de Valera and the Catholic Church.

"His interest in the new was firmly based on his love and respect for the traditional artefacts of his country," the late Peter Doyle, one of the brightest of the many talented young architects he recruited, wrote about Scott after his death. "His Irishness was never cosmetic; what he feared was that Ireland might be insular and inward-looking.

"He believed his work was as naturally based on the simplicity of vernacular architecture, both rural and urban, as much as on the work of the modern masters, and that a genuine national character can only arise in all art by allowing the artist freedom to pursue his vision without the imposition of superficially perceived national characteristics.

"This architecture of optimism came directly out of Michael Scott's personality. A small, light man, his sparkling personality was forever cheerful, interlaced with a passionate conviction that his view of art was a necessary and important cause . . . He could not understand why the Irish should not enjoy the best of the world's most progressive art and architecture."

The beginning of his professional career, as RIAI president Tony Reddy noted, coincided with the foundation of the Irish Free State and grew with it. He started as a pupil of Dublin architects, Jones and Kelly, from 1923 to 1927. At the same time, he trained in acting at the Abbey Theatre and spent a season on tour with the company in the US. There's even a letter in the exhibition from Seán O'Casey, dated "Aug 19th, 1929" and addressed "Dear M Scott", inviting him to play the part of Barry Bagnal in a London production of The Silver Tassie. Apparently, O'Casey had been impressed with his Jack Clitheroe in the Abbey's 1928 US tour of The Plough and the Stars.

Though he gave up the stage for a sketchpad, Scott maintained his association with the theatre, remodelling the Gate for Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir, and rebuilding the Abbey - even though the grey brick box that emerged on its site in 1966, under the hand of Ronnie Tallon, was never a popular favourite. By then, the dominant influence on the work of Michael Scott and Partners was Mies van der Rohe rather that Le Corbusier. This was reflected in the campus-style layout of the RTÉ television studios in Donnybrook, the superb Carroll's factory in Dundalk and, most literally of all, the Bank of Ireland headquarters in Baggot Street.

As Tallon and Walker became more dominant in the practice, Scott involved himself in other pursuits - what his son Niall described as "extra-curricular, non-core architecture activities" - such as shaking up the art world with the first ROSC exhibition in 1967 and taking on the chairmanship of Dublin Theatre Festival a year later.

He also founded the Music Association of Ireland, the Contemporary Irish Arts Society and the Building Centre of Ireland. He was a member of the Arts Council, the Department of Foreign Affairs Cultural Relations Committee, Dublin Corporation's Art Advisory Committee, the Stamp Design Advisory Committee, the Royal College of Art and An Taisce.

With film director John Huston, he established the James Joyce Museum in the Martello Tower in Sandycove that features in the opening pages of Ulysses. He also set up a design company with Louis le Brocquy, sketched in ink in his spare time and always insisted that paintings and sculptures should be incorporated in his buildings.

In the past, as the exhibition catalogue notes, "Ireland was a place where the written and spoken word were publicly revered but visual expression and architectural expression, in particular, attracted no public notice. This is the context within which Michael Scott made his enormous contribution to architecture, painting and visual culture."

Master of All the Muses is the first independent initiative of the newly established Irish Architecture Foundation. It runs at the Crawford Gallery in Corkuntil July 23 as part of the city's Festival of Architecture, sponsored by John F Supple Ltd