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.”