Smash hit

De Paor’s Clontarf pumping station — an angular, clanking, copper-clad bunker at the end of Vernon Avenue — will be finished within three months. Id est, a gritty, bent-tube lamp standard he designed for Clontarf, has been licensed for production by the London manufacturer, Urbis.

Although architectural projects in Ireland have taken rather longer to get off the drawing board, de Paor hopes to have 15 houses — including residential studios in Donegal and Cork, for the artists Willie Doherty and Eilis O’Connell, respectively — on site by the end of the year.

“We’re getting a lot out of our system right now,” he says, mentioning houses in Galway, Kildare, Dalkey, Ranelagh, Dublin’s Strawberry Beds and inner city. “They are all buildings in the round, autonomous objects intended never to be extended. After Ballincollig I spent 10 years adjusting other people’s work.” N3 was only his second stand-alone building. He needed others.

“I’m looking for a certain temperature. I know when a project’s cooked. You just know when something has achieved more than the sum of its parts — when, no matter which way you cut it, it comes out the same and there’s no more to do except build it.”

De Paor’s work may look different, but belonging to a tradition is important to him. “I was educated by Group 91, who believed in critical regionalism,” he says. “Their real achievement was to have regained the ground that was robbed by the importation of corporate American architecture. They gave us the 1930s we never had.

“Busarus, the masterpiece, had already been made, but Group 91 filled in the gaps,” he says. “They’ve sold out now, most of them, because modernism is cheaper and easier. Modernism’s premise always was: love the machine. I’m not interested in modernism. It’s a curse, a post-colonial rage.”

He is still a critical regionalist “and, after that, a Baroque Catholic”. He names Michelangelo, Gaudi and Le Corbusier as architects he loves.

After that, he believes in emotional intelligence — the aesthetic adjustment to order what he calls “felt” geometry, “which comes from your stomach”. He mentions the pyramids and the Pantheon, round towers and Gallarus oratory, Etienne-Louis Boullée’s unrealised cenotaph for Newton, James Turrell and, without batting an eyelid, the stealth bomber.

“You can spin architecture out of anything,” he says. He grew N3 out of a convoluted narrative about St Nicholas. Telling stories is important to de Paor, to the conception and development of his work. He has been accused of talking too much.

“I don’t want to sound like a Rose of Tralee contestant, but the most important thing about architecture is that it’s about people, so it’s about love. Ideally you will have a client who’s more intelligent than you. Then all you need is to have a site and just listen. Fall in love with it. Love architecture. It speaks all languages.”

It cuts both ways. Love must be reciprocated. “Love modern architecture for its young and zealous practitioners in every country,” advised Ponti. “The future, the mystery of unwearied creation and of human hope lies in their hands.

“Love modern architects — there are no other architects for you — but be ruthlessly demanding of them. Love them demandingly and without indulgence.

“Give them work.”