Our exquisite recent Architecture

6 6 April 2017

ESIGNED MUCH like a guidebook, to ﬁt into

the pocket of a good tweed jacket, and with

not one but three ribbons to hold one’s place,

'One Hundred & One Hosannas for Architec-

ture' is in fact a collection of essays by Shane

O’Toole, Ireland’s most celebrated critic of the island’s

contemporary architecture. The book makes a good trav-

elling companion. The brief pieces hold your attention

well, but do not individually demand it for very long.

Unusually for a book about architecture, it is not illus-

trated. Perhaps the author and his designers simply

assumed that we all carry smart phones, on which we

can call up the colour photographs that are too expen-

sive to print. It is also possible that they simply did not

want even the buildings that are his subject to distract

from O’Toole’s eloquent prose The volume’s design is

handsome without being distracting, although I dread

the many late night e-mails from my students on how to

cite a book that lacks page numbers.

The journey here proves temporal rather than geo-

graphic. Almost all the essays have Irish architecture or

the celebration of it at their core. Most were written for

publication in The Sunday Times. These are particularly

effective at communicating to readers with little back-

ground; those published in Architecture Ireland,

especially the accounts of prize ceremonies in Barce-

lona, where the focus shifts from buildings to

name-dropping, are less successful. At O’Toole’s best,

- and he is almost always at his best – he reminds us how

the Irish architects who are now among the most

renowned in Europe achieved their current position and

what other younger Irish architects are following in their

wake.

The earliest essays date to 1999; only in the middle of

the following year did O’Toole begin to address contem

porary Irish architecture. The boom and bust associated

with the Celtic Tiger does not ﬁgure prominently here.

Instead one subject traced is the steady rise in ﬁrst local

and then international signiﬁcance of the architects with

whom O’Toole collaborated as Group 91 on the revitali-

sation of Temple Bar. Since then, while O’Toole has

mostly focused on criticism, his former collaborators:

Grafton, O’Donnell & Tuomey and McCullough Mulvin in

particular, along with the slightly younger partnership

heneghan peng, have achieved a degree of international

renown that has little Irish precedent. The story of their

rise unfolds in O’Toole’s pithy pieces as it happened and

with little mention of such accompanying frustrations as

the relatively small slice of the pie they were accorded at

home, when much new construction before the crash

was decidedly subpar and very little was built for many

years afterwards. There is no mention of ghost estates

or Priory Hall here!

O’Toole instead focuses on success. At the same time,

his take on what will endure is particularly convincing

because it is so ﬁrmly rooted in an understanding of both

the recent and the not so recent past. His appreciations

of the pioneering Irish modernism of Michael Scott and

of his subsequent partners Ronnie Tallon and Robin

Walker, as well as of the much more controversial Sam

Stephenson, are some of the ﬁnest pieces of recent writ-

ing on Irish architecture. He is also excellent on de

Blacam and Meagher, who probably did even more to

prepare the way for the current Irish stars. These often

affectionate accounts will entice even those Irish read

ers not already committed to the cause of outstanding

architecture. At the same time they are sure to engage

those from abroad drawn to the subject by the high cali

bre of our very best new buildings.

O’Toole has a good story to tell, but a larger issue for

the concerned local public is how the success he chroni

cles can be embedded in Irish society as a whole. There

is very little in these pages about housing or for that

matter about ofﬁce blocks, two of the building types that

do the most to shape the daily experience of Irish cities

and even towns, but whose quality is more often than

not far less distinguished than it would be if developers

were as willing as local authorities were during the open-

ing years of the new century to work with the most

talented ﬁrms. Hobnobbing with Pritzker Prize winners

in Barcelona is no substitute for more affordable apart

ments of the calibre of the Timberyard.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty is professor of art history

at University College Dublin.

Even if most of the recent legacy is subpar

Kathleen James-Chakraborty reviews 'One Hundred & One

Hosannas for Architecture' by Shne O’Toole, Gandon Editions

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