Modern Ireland has thrown up few world-class figures the field of architecture. Eileen Gray, Kevin Roche and Peter Rice all made their marks far from these shores, but at the end of a golden, defining decade that has left the country brimming with perhaps more architectural talent than it has ever known — even in its Georgian heyday — Shane de Blacam is a homegrown genuine article.Mary McAleese, the president, acknowledged as much recently when presenting him with the triennial gold medal of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI) for the library and information technology extension that has redefined the Bishopstown campus of Cork Institute of Technology (CIT). Speaking at the ceremony, the president extolled the “heart, imagination and genius” de Blacam and his team had brought to creating what she called the “great intimacy of a good library”.
The RIAI gold medal — the highest accolade in Irish architecture — is awarded for the design of a building of exceptional merit completed within a three-year period, in this case 1995-98. The award is delayed for several years so that buildings can be assessed on how well they have performed in use.
The partnership de Blacam established with John Meagher in Dublin in 1976 towers over contemporary Irish architecture, but their first gold medal has been a long time coming. Many anticipated the breakthrough in 1989-91, with their Chapel of Reconciliation at Knock — the first Irish finalist for the Mies van der Rohe award for Euro- pean architecture.
Last time out, there was amazement in many quarters when their CIT library, completed in 1994 but part of a larger scheme then nearing completion, was pipped at the post by the Ceide Fields visitor centre in Mayo, designed by the Office of Public Works.
On this occasion de Blacam and Meagher, who carried out the work at CIT in association with local architects, Boyd Barrett Murphy O’Connor (BBMOC), got the reward they have long deserved, beating off competition from Group 91’s the Ark children’s cultural centre and the national photographic archive and DIT school of photography, all located in Temple Bar’s Meeting House Square.
With the award of the gold medal, de Blacam and Meagher are the first architects to complete the grand slam of all the big prizes in Irish architecture. In the late 1980s they received the RIAI silver medal for conservation for the reconstruction of the dining hall complex in Trinity College Dublin, which had been gutted by fire in 1984.
Ten years ago they won the Architectural Association of Ireland’s Downes Medal for the Beckett Theatre, also in Trinity College. And earlier this year Meagher’s joyous reinstatement of the desolate corner at Castle Street, opposite Dublin’s Christ Church cathedral, walked off with the RIAI silver medal for housing.
“Cork has been a huge odyssey,” says de Blacam. “We have three projects, worth €40m, on site at the moment: the college of tourism and catering, which has 14 kitchens, a dining hall, a restaurant and a bar; the student union; and an administration building for the college.
“Together they form a 70-metre diameter circular quadrangle, a fully enclosed circus of brick. It all arose out of the library and IT building.”
His intensity and enthusiasm are infectious. As he approaches 60, there remains something boyish about the man. Pale, yet big-boned and athletic, he still has gangling limbs. There is a fractured cadence to his speech that adds to the aura.
Although they admire his architecture, de Blacam remains unfathomable to most of his professional colleagues. He is renowned for slipping into an abstracted, monkish silence that many, especially his former students, find unnerving. By turns mercurial, obsessive, singleminded and strongwilled, he is a demanding, intractable — but ultimately generous — perfectionist.
Fifteen years ago, the flaws in the identikit, soulless buildings that housed the republic’s expanding regional technical colleges were all too evident. Whether in Dundalk, Carlow, Waterford, Limerick or Cork, the utilitarian concrete structures, wrapped in grey precast panel walls and single-glazed aluminium sliding windows, were reviled.
The standardised facilities were so awful that in Limerick they built an outer doughnut of accommodation to hide the original.
In Waterford, they built upwards, on top of the buildings. In Cork, they couldn’t decide whether they wanted a doughnut or a pile, so they held an architectural competition.
De Blacam and BBMOC proposed a south-facing courtyard, related to a lawn beside the original buildings. “I drew a curving wall, 120 metres long, that formed a rudimentary courtyard,” he says. “The advantage was that you could build the library and IT building in bits. It had a regular front but you could extend as far as you wanted, wherever you wanted, at the back.
“You’ve got a lot of responsibility with an institution like that. I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to do that again — to give form to the aspirations of a college. I always said that what was most important was that students should have a quiet place to study, to read books and think about what was said to them during the day.
It’s the religious space — the spiritual, most important space of the university.”
CIT’s library houses 70,000 volumes and provides 500 study spaces. The fan-shaped reading room is lit by a roof light that traverses the building above the main circulation route, increasing in height as the reading room widens. The book stacks are wide and galleried, with a large table in the middle, so they become reading chambers. Periodicals line the curved, brick diaphragm wall.
Spatially, the second phase is not as complex as the library. Nor, geometrically, is it as well resolved. The wall, with its stacked windows and intrusive, over-scaled roof light, has lost some of its power. A rockery garden creates a barrier between the building and the gathering gesture made by the brick wall.
“You don’t get any more relaxed as you get older,” says de Blacam. “You need the energy of a horse to push things to the limit. There are millions of flaws in things and some of them stand out.
“But the achievement is to have built the wall. It’s very hard to explain the power of architecture. The silence of that wall, speaking subconsciously to the students about the institution — about the mood or spirit of the place — creates a sense of wellbeing, day in, day out.”
www.debm.ie
The architects’ web site
