The modernist architect Liam McCormick is best known for his Donegal churches, which elicit an emotional response from Irish people. He worked in isolation but was far from an outsider, as a new book about him shows. Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, reports
LIAM MCCORMICK (1916-1996) was close to being Ireland's Alvar Aalto. Like the great Finnish architect, he was a committed but not doctrinaire modernist who found inspiration in the context of place and produced some of the finest buildings of the 20th century, working mainly in his own country. He also shared Aalto's passion for boats and water.
As he said himself in 1955, "I represent a generation who have been trained to think of architecture as the result of a particular building problem, irrespective of time or place, being done well. By 'well' I mean using the most suitable methods and materials of the time or place and using them with all the intensity of effort and sincerity of feeling that one can bring to bear . . ." There isn't a single word of McCormick's straightforward approach with which Aalto would have disagreed. And incidentally, there's another bizarre link: the stone cladding on McCormick's Met Office in Glasnevin, Dublin, curled up like stale sandwiches just like the Carrara marble cladding on Aalto's Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, and replacements had to be found in both cases.
In fairness to McCormick, he had specified Welsh blue slate for the striking pyramid he built on Glasnevin Hill. "The next thing, there were questions being asked in the Dáil about the use of imported materials in a public building. We had to find an alternative material, Ballinasloe limestone," he recalled in a revealing interview with architect Shane O'Toole, recorded in 1991.
The pyramid form evolved from McCormick's discussions with his clients. "The essence of the Met Office is the central forecasting office, and they asked for maximum sky view. 'We like to look at the sky,' they said. That was interesting to me. When I assembled the various elements in the programme . . . I put it on the top, with a balcony where they could go out and take the air."
By complete coincidence, the deputy director of the Met Office had taught him maths (not very successfully) at St Columb's College in Derry. As the centre of Catholic education for boys in northwest Ulster, it was also a seminary, and it was there that McCormick first encountered many of the clergy who were responsible for his later church and school commissions.
Foremost among them was Dr Neil Farren, who was Bishop of Derry from 1939 to 1973. He commissioned McCormick to design a new church at Burt, in Co Donegal, overlooking Lough Swilly. The bishop had a site closer to Newtowncunningham, but the architect didn't think much of it and wanted to build the church in a wilder setting below the prehistoric stone fort, the Grianán of Aileach.
As recounted in a new book, North by Northwest: The Life and Work of Liam McCormick, he mentioned this to Dr Farren, who said, "Nonsense, that's all Protestant-owned." Undeterred, he contacted the landowner, Dr Daniel MacDonald, who owned the BSR record-player factory in Derry and had 3,000 acres of land in the Burt area; after hearing about McCormick's project, he donated the site.
Thus was the ground prepared for his iconic masterpiece. Built by John Hegarty of Buncrana, who collaborated with McCormick on many of his buildings and bought into his vision, it was completed in 1967 with thick circular stone walls that echo the prehistoric fort, topped off with an elegant and dramatic copper roof that rises like a breaking wave to the spire and the heavens.
Though he was never part of the architectural establishment, and remote from Dublin, McCormick deservedly won the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland for St Aengus' Church, as it is officially known. It was also a huge popular success and voted Ireland's "Building of the 20th century" in a readers' poll organised by the RIAI and the Sunday Tribune in 1999.
Even before Burt, McCormick had built up a reputation for the new churches he had designed with his partner Frank Corr in Ennistymon, Co Clare, but mainly in Co Donegal where he grew up and later made his home in Greencastle. He had a lifelong attachment to its dramatic landscapes and seascapes, especially in Inishowen, often saying it had "provided me with all of my inspiration".
As O'Toole says, he was "a romantic at heart. He believed that architecture is an emotional art and he was not wrong about this. People respond emotionally to his buildings, which is the rarest and highest praise any architect can receive." And McCormick himself used to say often that "the last thing in the world I'd want to do was to affront people" with his architecture.
His re-ordering of St Patrick's Cathedral in Armagh was the exception. As the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society noted, "neither the quality of the replacements nor the skill of the craftsmanship can disguise the total alienation of the new work from the spirit and meaning" of the original . . . "with chunks of granite and a tabernacle that looks like a microwave", as Jeanne Sheehy put it.
McCormick lived for most of his life by the sea in Greencastle, on Lough Foyle, with his wife Joy - a wonderful woman - and their two children, Finn and Aisling, who was baptised in one of his churches, St Conal's in Glenties (1974); it is distinguished, as Paul Larmour notes, by "a steeply pitched roof . . . sweeping down almost to ground level between tall gables of white roughcast."
HE HAD STUDIED architecture at Liverpool University and became converted to the modernist cause during a school trip to the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, where he saw Le Corbusier's Pavillon Suisse. Many years later, with his wife and two children, he sailed a 39-foot cruiser through the waterways of Europe, visiting the Swiss architect's iconic chapel at Ronchamp, near Basle.
Although among the first Irish architects to embrace modernism, he said towards the end of his career: "I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to work from the two places where I grew up and where my roots are. Being part of a community is a strength and a useful mirror in which to measure oneself: the success is always put in correct perspective."
As he told O'Toole, he "worked in total isolation from any kind of group. I have often said that everything I designed was designed in Greencastle. It was all done in bed on a Saturday morning or in the evening, sitting in the glass gable with a felt pen or a 2B or 3B pencil"; he had got used to drawing in bed in the mid-1930s, when he spent eight months recuperating from TB.
His office in Derry attracted many talented assistants, including several from Scandinavia, which he also visited by boat on several occasions, combining nautical adventure and architectural sightseeing. In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, the office (then located on the Diamond) was fire-bombed, resulting in the tragic loss of almost all of his drawings and records.
McCormick assumed roles and took stands on issues that most architects would never have to do. He served as High Sheriff of Derry in 1970, becoming only the second Catholic to hold the position; the first had been his grandfather, in 1901. His complaints about the actions of the British army on Bloody Sunday went directly to the then prime minister, Edward Heath.
But it is for his churches, particularly Burt, that he will be remembered; as Séamus Heaney wrote, "he cut a broad swathe and left a rich harvest". Other contributors to the book, which is sponsored by Harcourt Developments and the RIAI, include former judge Donal Barrington, who was one of his sailing partners; long-time friend John Hume; and Dr Edward Daly, the retired bishop of Derry.
North by Northwest: The Life and Work of Liam McCormick , edited by Paul Larmour and Shane O'Toole, is published by Gandon Editions (€45). An exhibition based on the book continues at the Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin, until July 4