“I design buildings as a way of adjusting the world,” says the architect Tom de Paor, who has just been awarded an International Fellowships by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) – one of only three Irish architects to ever be so honoured. “I make minor improvements to make the place more fit for purpose, more comfortable to live in.”
The RIBA citation describes de Paor as “the leading Irish architect of his generation”, and the award is meant as an acknowledgment of the contribution he has made to architecture. So, what has he done and what can he teach us?
His first major work to catch public attention was his N3, a temporary pavilion built in 2000 out of 1,741 bales of Bord na Móna peat briquettes. It marked Ireland’s first-ever representation at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and was featured recently in this paper as one of the 100 artworks that represent modern Ireland, where it was described as an “intelligent structure that managed to incorporate a rich stew of ideas and references into a singular form”. It was basically a corbelled, sky-roofed chamber of briquettes that was alive with meanings and allusions.
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De Paor’s buildings frequently combine erudite thinking with a gleeful sense of play. “Each building is a means of communicating,” he says. “I like when people say it reminds me of, or it’s like, something else. A door should be a door, but also much more.” His structures tend to be giddy with playful hints at everything from erosion theories to arcane religious practices, but always moulded into the most elegant, contemplative form.
A pumping station in Clontarf was his first public building, a copper and reinforced concrete structure near the sea wall that holds an ESB substation, a Dublin City Council maintenance depot and a pump house all within the shape of an origami bird clad in copper lozenges. Despite its utilitarian purpose, it resembles a plaything or a puzzle, and, 13 years after it was built, appears as fresh and surprising as ever.
Bizarrely creative
These structures, along with some ingenious and bizarrely creative urban houses, earned him the international title of Young Architect of The Year in 2003 and two nominations for the prestigious Mies van der Rohe prize. He lectures now in Harvard College, so what can he teach us?
“It’s all about compromise and the thrill that this offers,” he says, referring to architecture, but applying it more widely too. “An idea springs fully formed, but then to realise all the parameters that come into play the idea has to change to remain true to itself. The process by which a thing can become more fully itself is what I most enjoy.”
And what else can I learn? “It’s all about the technique of rolling around a problem to get it to a point where it can move into a situation that is productive, rather than stuck. This is a trade that I try to teach: thinking through the medium and finding the solution. There’s a game in that. Like watching Zidane messing around with a football.”
For the last few years, the citizens of Galway have lived with the exterior of his most ambitious project, the Picture Palace, a multi-screen arts cinema beside Galway City Museum that is due to finally open soon, at which point its many internal secrets will be revealed, including the final artworks of Patrick Scott which are already installed as stained glass in the windows.
“It’s full of inside,” says de Paor, regarding the cinema’s somewhat sombre exterior, “the outside is the outside of the inside – unusually for a black box. I call it a tower house, and it is in how it works and looks. It alludes to fortification and silos, although it is a bit far-fetched to argue that concrete is limestone. Yet this allows a dialogue to open, which I’m very interested in: that the thing is open-ended, that it’s playful – because maybe then the work can have some sense of being engaged, possessed and ultimately loved.”
Currently, he is working on a viewing point in Valentia for Kerry County Council and the Wild Atlantic Way.
“It’s basically about knitting the Skelligs with the headland, and positioning people to see it from an ideal angle.”
Camera obscura
It will take the form of a clochán, or corbelled cone of Valentia stone, inside the ruined outer walls of a Napoleonic signal tower which will act as a camera obscura, projecting the sky onto the interior floor. The 19th-century sea wall will be repaired and amplified to make a platform from which to capture the ultimate photograph of Skellig Micheal.
“I am after the silent power of the material,” he says, “whatever it might be. I love the clang of raw materials against one another and the old-fashioned idea of economy, that somehow one plus one can add up to three.”
For the river Dodder near Lansdowne Road in Dublin he is collaborating with the artist Peter Maybury to create an inverted pyramid to mark the projected high water level in 2100.
“It’s sculpture really, in that it is architecture without function. At heart it’s a monument to flooding, in the grand tradition of Dublin obelisks from Dún Laoghaire to the Phoenix Park.”
There's also a redesign of Ireland's oldest board game, Brandub – think endgame chess with ravens. The pieces are of compressed peat which notch ingeniously into each other to create a cylindrical briquette. There's also a range of crystal glassware and a recently completed Japanese-style courtyard house in Harolds Cross, not to mention an illustrated novella, Previous, Next which uses Yuri Gargarin's journey into outer space as a prism through which to explore design and nature.
Outbuildings
And, of course, always in the background is his long-running, unclassifiable project, Dysart – a collection of semi-ruined yards and outbuildings on Bray Head.
“It’s a built acre – an unusual thing. Not quite a garden, as it is ignorant of gardening. It has its own autistic qualities.”
This structural meditation on the act of adding new constructions to pre-existing structures is almost impossible to define, but may well prove to be his most defining work. It's both dizzyingly simple and intellectually sophisticated – the fact that it featured in Domus magazine last year may have further turned RIBA's attention on him.
Only time will tell if RIBA was right in singling de Paor out for such a distinguished fellowship, but if it focuses more attention on his diverse projects, from writing to art to garden-making, and ultimately gives him the opportunity of making some major public buildings, it will not be for nought.
