Irish architects' show is best ever

What extraordinary riches there are in the 1999 AAI Awards exhibition. The standard this year is so outstandingly good that the French assessor, Yves Lion, said that if it had been up to him he would have given the honour to the "Irish architecture team" for the quality of its collective work, rather than featuring the performances of individuals.

He also described the best of it as "modern architecture as it ought to be" - high praise indeed! Yet, as Dublin-based architect Shelley McNamara said, most of this work is being produced by a relatively small number of people who operate within a literate architectural culture and invest "the enormous amount of emotional and intellectual energy required to make a good building".

Ms McNamara, who was one of the four Irish members of the jury, also noted that 16 of the 20 projects selected for exhibition are either institutions or private houses and only four are from the commercial sector. What she feared - and she is right - is that this imbalance would indicate that the much-touted Celtic Tiger has "not yet reached the stage of being interested in architecture".

Peter Tansey, another of the Irish assessors, also complained that there were "no projects dealing with the new territories of our expanding cities - the suburban landscape of housing enclaves bounded by motorways, of shopping malls and industrial parks". However, it seems improbable that his wish to see "imaginative" architecture in these types of areas will actually be fulfilled.

Inevitably, perhaps, the Ranelagh Multi-denominational School won the Downes Medal for its architects, O'Donnell and Tuomey, who have taken it twice before for the Irish Film Centre and the Gallery of Photography, both in the Temple Bar area. This is a project invested with such significance that it was selected as the only Irish finalist in this year's Mies van der Rohe Pavilion Award.

Built on the site of a makeshift collection of buildings, some of them no more than sheds, the new school has a very prominent location on the curve of Ranelagh Road. Its frontage consists of four two-storey classroom blocks, separated by recesses and clad in Dolphins Barn brick. The entrance is marked by an asymmetrical limestone porch in front of a rubble stone wall of Dublin calp.

The rear elevation, facing the venerable houses of Old Mount Pleasant, is much less sombre, with a continuous row of glazing at first-floor level shaded by louvre shutters and a long verandah over the main entrance and timber-clad staff rooms. A roof terrace can be used as an open-air classroom and there is ample space for children to play behind the perimeter railings, away from noise of traffic.

Mary Doyle, who designed several schools along with her late husband Peter, said she believed that the architects had created "a very successful school" on quite an awkward site. Shelley McNamara agreed. "To make a really good school is very difficult, socially, spatially and architecturally", she said. "It is picking up on the urban landscape, but also succeeds in making a world of its own". O'Donnell and Tuomey also won an award for their very unusual, even bizarre, concrete house in a long back garden in Navan. Designed for the family who own a restaurant on the street frontage, it consists of two buildings separated by an open courtyard. One of these is a living area with a "cave-like character" and the other a partly sunken "tower" of bedrooms, two and a half storeys high.

Two of the assessors, Theo Dorgan and Shelley McNamara, had their doubts about whether they would like having to walk across the open space in the middle of the night - to get a snack from the kitchen, for example. But Yves Lion said the family who commissioned the project "want to have another life, so they organise a kind of city, with different buildings around a square". For Mary Doyle, the use of in situ poured concrete was "very unusual", but she liked the way it had moulded a "mini-monument". Peter Tansey was also "very struck by it", saying the construction was "very powerful in its simplicity". One also suspects that the architects might have preferred the stark quality it had while under construction, before the concrete forms acquired roofs and windows. The AAI's first-ever "special award" went to Shane O'Toole, Michael Kelly and Susan Cogan, of Group 91 Architects, for their renovation of 11 Eustace Street, in Temple Bar - and, in particular, the entry to Meeting House Square which was carved out of it. For Ms McNamara, this exquisite archway with its cascading steps, polished stone walls and inset handrail, is "one of the best things in Temple Bar".

According to Theo Dorgan, the poet and broadcaster who was this year's lay assessor, "every time you walk up and down that archway, you get a little lift . . . It's not like one of those piss-stinking alleyways that you are used to in cities". And what impressed Peter Tansey was that there was no pastiche; the integrity of the building had been retained "while allowing a new dynamic in the city to flow through it".

OF the six other awards, McCullough Mulvin Architects took one for what is probably the most stunning mews house in Dublin. Located on Louis Lane, in Rathmines, coincidentally right next door to another award-winning mews by Derek Tynan Architects, it was designed for clients who are "passionate about modern architecture" and had a major input into realising their dream house.

The long, narrow plot was no bother to the architects. They exploited it to create an enormously long livingroom on the first floor, with white walls, a smooth-as-glass "fillet of maple" planked floor and nearly everything (apart from some well-chosen designer furniture as objects in the space) secreted away behind sliding panels to guarantee a clutter-free minimalist look, a la John Pawson.

"When I see this clean sculptural space, I just find myself wondering how it would cope with the messiness of day-to-day living", Theo Dorgan commented. But Peter Tansey said the architects had "achieved a huge perspective in a relatively small house" while Yves Lion was impressed by the way that the entrance from the lane doubles as a car port -though perhaps a car would clutter it?

McCullough Mulvin scored again with their Siena Monastery on a sloping site outside Drogheda, designed for an enclosed community of Dominican nuns. They had left an important 18th century building near the centre - now, incidentally, going to rack and ruin - for this New Jerusalem of 30 bright cells, chapel, infirmary, retreat block, kitchen and refectory, laid out around a cloistered courtyard.

Yves Lion thought it was "a beautiful building with some fine internal spaces", though he was not impressed by the "abrupt" way in which the bell-tower rises from its rubble stone base. And while Theo Dorgan wondered if it didn't look more like a psychiatric clinic, Shelley McNamara was convinced that it "really feels like a monastery", with "very calm and very controlled" interiors.

The Gate multiplex in Cork, with apartments perched above the cinemas, deservedly won an award for Derek Tynan Architects. An exemplary exercise in urban design, with a real presence on the River Lee, especially at night, its facade is clad in a warm, polished limestone - a remarkable extravagance considering that it came out of a design-and-build package, with the developers in control.

As Ms McNamara noted, it is very urbane and "streets ahead of anything else around it". Monsieur Lion was equally impressed. "All our multiplexes are absolutely introspective. I think this building could be an example for me, for France". Mr Dorgan, a Corkman, was the only dissident on the jury. "To me, it is a terrible eruption on a riverscape where I grew up", he declared.

The most intriguing award-winner was engagingly titled "Domestic Acupuncture"; as defined by Dominic Stevens Architects, a young Dublin-based practice, it involves "the careful insertion of new structures into or beside existing spaces", as exemplified by four of his own small-budget projects (£36,000 to £320,000). Yves Lion thought the term so apt that he was going to spread it around Paris.

From looking at the projects, all ingenious solutions to a variety of domestic space problems, Theo Dorgan felt that "you could trust the architect to be sensitive to any environment . . . If I had won the Lottery last night, I would certainly want to talk to this architect". Peter Tansey also said Stevens' work, though small in scale, was not so much about building, but about ideas - "built ideas".

The final award went to a complex project in Leipzig, formerly part of East Germany, by a young Cork-born architect, Martin Henchion, and his German partner, Klaus Reuter. It involved the conversion and extension of a decaying 19th century for a mixed-use scheme of offices and apartments - including six penthouses inserted in the roof space and a restaurant with a river terrace.

Yves Lion felt that both the original building and the interventions were "two ordinary statements" but the relationship between them was achieved with "great tact and restraint". The project was so complex that some of the assessors found it difficult to grasp. Peter Tansey felt the cantilevered terrace, projecting out towards the river, was very strong - and no doubt a bonus to Leipzig.

Among the "special mentions", the other projects selected for exhibition, there are two major public projects - the Dublin Dental Hospital (Ahrends Burton and Koralek), which the jury found somewhat discordant, and the School of Art in Galway (de Blacam and Meagher), which might have won an award but for doubts about the intensity of some of its interiors and the "overwhelming" use of timber. Three commercially-driven apartment developments in Dublin are also included - the huge scheme at Beresford Street, part new-build and part renovation, by O Muire Smyth Architects; an infill planned for Amiens Street by Fagan Kelly Lysaght which will certainly stand out from the "planners' architecture" beside it, and an even smaller mixed use building in Crane Lane by Derek Tynan Architects. Much more arresting is the red-walled "oyster shell" which Conor Moran designed to protect the "pearl" of the Sacred Heart Oratory in Dun Laoghaire, which had to be preserved when the Dominican convent was redeveloped for Bloomfields shopping centre. Theo Dorgan liked it because it was "fun", but he was ticked off by Shelley McNamara: "Architecture is a very serious business, Theo!".

And so it is, whether the scale is large or small. This is the best AAI Awards exhibition since the scheme was inaugurated 14 years ago. It is accompanied by a book, New Irish Architecture 14 - excellently produced, as usual, by Gandon Editions - which catalogues the work and, as we have come to expect, also gives almost verbatim insight into how the assessors reached their verdicts. The AAI Awards exhibition continues at the National Photographic Archive, in Temple Bar, where the famous Lawrence Collection is now stored. Running until the end of March, it is open to the public and admission is free. Surely a must for all Celtic Tiger types . . .