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The

of manmeasure

Raymund Ryan assesses the career of Níall McLaughlin,the Irish architect whose research engages with thevalues of humanism

How to instigate a professional life is, for many ayoung architect, a formidable challenge to encounterat an early age. How to keep a career lively, innova-

tive and purposeful can be even more perplexing for the archi-tect in mid-career, by then fêted for the originality of firstworks yet cocooned perhaps by an ability to produce ‘signa-ture’ buildings conforming to client and media expectations.Exhibitions should be an occasion to take stock, challengeassumptions, and point to the future.

Born in 1962, Níall McLaughlin is now well into his thirddecade of independent practice, a practice launched by a setof rooms – ecclesiastical chambers – inserted into existingbuilding stock for the Carmelite community of London’sKensington Church Street. He has realized several subsequentprojects (the insect-like Shack, for example, on its rural pondin Northamptonshire and Fishing Hut, Hampshire) that, whileof modest square footage, are similarly complex and expan-sive in terms of ideas and spatial experience.

Concurrent with such artistic interventions, McLaughlin’swork has increased in scale to encompass multi-unit housingprojects (Figs 5 & 6) as well as such high-profile institutionaland planning assignments as the raft of recent competition-winning proposals for historic Oxford colleges, a context inwhich tradition and the known have frequently been at oddswith the new and the experimental.

Can the intellectual and poetic intensity of McLaughlin’s earlierworks translate into larger buildings? Indeed, how much shouldcomplex, civic institutions, frequently adhering to tight budget-

ary constraints, reflect their architects’interest in concept, theory and art?

Raised and educated in Dublin,Níall McLaughlin relocated toLondon soon after graduation fromUniversity College Dublin in 1984.Shortlisted for the RIBA StirlingPrize, the most prestigious in Britain,in 2012 and 2014, for the BishopEdward King Chapel, east of Oxford(Fig 10), and Peabody Trust housingin London’s East End respectively(Fig 6&7)), he can now be num-bered among the Great and theGood; an insider, even, in an English

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1 Tracing floorinstallation UCDplaster drawingfloor installation20x20metrePhoto NíallMcLaughlinArchitects

2 NíallMcLaughlin

3 The AlzheimerSociety ofIreland - TheOrchard Day andRespite Centre:the quiet roomwith views to thegarden. PhotoNick Kane

4 Drawing of theOrchard Day andRespite CentrePhoto NíallMcLaughlinArchitects

It is not, I think, an exaggeration to imagine the youngMcLaughlin, with his encyclopaedic interests, distilling thelessons of Walker (McLaughlin worked for Scott Tallon Walkerafter graduation), de Blacam and Meagher, and O’Donnell +Tuomey (Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey established theirown practice in 1988). McLaughlin is of course his own man,tuned now to avant-garde ideas of art and technology in theBritish metropolis. If his work seems at home in both Britishand Irish culture, its origin is in Dublin.

Three decades ago, architecture might have been broadlydescribed as Postmodern, codified in fact at the famous VeniceBiennale of 1980 as a collage of signifiers cherry-picked fromhistory. Although McLaughlin’sarchitecture is fecund with allusion,references are, in the finishedproduct, distilled with specific atten-tion to use and context. IfPostmodernism aspired to evokememory and a sense of placethrough imagery, McLaughlin aimsfor not dissimilar ends through acritical integration of structure,material, programme and light.

Like many of the best architects ofhis generation, he has absorbed themany critiques of Modernism andplaced the human being – body andmind – at the centre of his architec-tural research.

To-date, Níall McLaughlin’s largestIrish project is the Alzheimer Societyof Ireland - The Orchard Day andRespite Centre in Dublin’s Blackrock(Fig 3). Dubliners may already knowit, in a casual way: a walled garden,once belonging to a convent, justsouth of Frascati Road as it entersBlackrock village. Of course manyalso know it in ways considerably more stressful and personal.

As Western societies age, dementia is an in creasingly urgenttopic. An enormous challenge for staff and government budgets,architects have by-and-large avoided this complex and difficultsubject. Countering the somewhat hermetic specialization ofhealthcare design, especially in the United States where hospi-tal design seems withdrawn from mainstream design culture,now is the time, surely, for Irish architecture to work inven-tively for the betterment of those dealing with public health.

The Blackrock Respite Centre was designed throughprocesses of evolutionary analysis and discussion as befittinga subject of great sensitivity. That experience may now proveto be the seed, or retroactive origin, for McLaughlin’s instal-lation representing Ireland in Venice.

The word ‘image’ is a difficult one for Modernists, espe-cially older architects trained under the tenets of ‘form follows

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scheme of things. Yet McLaughlin has not abandoned thehome country. Indeed, since those inventive early works inand around London, McLaughlin has consistently returned toIreland, designing what might be categorized as a suite of Irishhouses, for Cork, Dublin, Wexford and Galway. Some werebuilt; others remain unrealized. Two dwellings in rural Cork– one at Dirk Cove, near Galley Head Lighthouse; the otherjust outside Goleen – are admirably tectonic and articulate.They riff fluently on context.

Dirk Cove, the earlier of the two, is a planar extension tosmall coastguard cottages, vernacular forms now reimaginedas ‘found objects’ on a topography of striated rock.McLaughlin’s intervention is a wing both in the sense of houseextension and, more metaphorically, of limb, here hostingliving space glazed on multiple facades to prioritize maritimelight and views. It’s a surprisingly delicate thing, this crys-talline white canopy taunting, it seems, the Atlantic waves.

Further along the coast, the house near Goleen takes vernac-ular form into the realm of couture (Fig 8). There the tradi-tional Irish typology of elongated cottage with linear pitchedroof has procreated, sashaying seaward as an array of sharpparallel bars. On close inspection these commodious struc-tures are unmistakably new and Modernist, clad in a mono-lithic limestone cloak detailed to create an origami-like profile.Perhaps only an Irish person of cosmopolitan persuasion couldhave sought this particular Hibernian sense of place.

McLaughlin’s design for Goleen recalls the double strategyof Robin Walker, in the early 1970s, for a West Cork retreatfor the artists Louis le Brocquy and Anne Madden. Althoughneither was built, Walker developed two distinct proposals:one a kind of Miesian earthwork, the other a rationalizationof traditional long house typologies. The Goleen house syn-thesizes the two attitudes. It is abstract and singular as wellas vernacular and local. We might claim it is simultaneouslyinternational and Irish.

Now that Níall McLaughlin is to represent Ireland at the2016 Venice Biennale, attention may focus on the Irishnessof his work. ‘Represent’ is in this regard a curious verb. Everysecond year, an architect or practice or curator, or some com-bination thereof, is tapped to exhibit in Venice. ‘Represent’suggests more than nationality. Architects and curators maynot see things this way; nevertheless their presentations com-municate to a global audience something of the characterand talent, social objectives and technical ability of theircountry of origin.

The character of McLaughlin’s architecture is due at leastin part to his Irish upbringing and training at UCD. It istempting to align his concerns with the almost primal yetgenerous work in brick and oak by Shane de Blacam, thenrecently returned from the Philadelphia office of Louis I.Kahn. Younger than de Blacam, John Tuomey also returnedto UCD around this time, in his case from the London officeof James Stirling, with inspirational ideas regarding archi-tectural and urban form, history and the narrative of site.

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HE HAS ABSORBEDTHE MANYCRITIQUES OFMODERNISM ANDPLACED THE HUMANBEING – BODY ANDMIND – AT THECENTRE OF HISARCHITECTURALRESEARCH

5 The Stratfordregenerationhousingproject.Thefaçade is madefrom reliefcastings fromthe ElginMarbles. PhotoNíallMcLaughlinArchitects

6 DarbishirePlace,Whitechapel,Housing for thePeabody Trust,London. PhotoNick Kane

7 DarbishirePlace,Whitechapel,Housing for thePeabody Trust,London:interior stairPhoto Nick Kane

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something of a measuring instrument, revealing the ellipticallayout of the plan and structure of the King Edward Chapelnear Oxford (Figs 1&10). It was also, one might claim, alivein the sense that, after McLaughlin’s team had worked on thefloor for several days, the drawing was gradually erased by thepassage of feet transiting the space.

For Venice, McLaughlin is after some similar conflationor concurrence of construction and memory. He and hisclients for Blackrock viewed that building process (whichtook several years) as a test case, as an experiment. In col-laboration with London-based Yeoryia Manolopoulou(Manolopoulou recently published a book titled Architecturesof Chance), McLaughlin now envis-ages the installation as a multi-dimensional drawing capable ofresponding to the desires and mem-ories of dementia sufferers. It prom-ises to have something of ‘the eternaland the immovable,’ to quoteBaudelaire, but also ‘the transient,the fleeting, the contingent’.

Níall McLaughlin at mid-careerseems willing to continue taking risks, exploring the possibil-ities of architecture and design and how these disciplines effectour sense of being in the world. His work may not ‘represent’Irish architecture in general; rather it points constructively topotential futures in which society is better served and enrichedby design. That’s a risk worth taking. Venice Architectural Biennale 28 May - 27 November 2016.

Raymund Ryan is Curator of the Heinz Architectural Center, Pittsburgh.

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function’. Yet image and recognition are crucial to our senseof wellbeing and, to paraphrase the Phenomenologists, ourbeing in the world. For Blackrock McLaughlin produced adelicious image – part plan, part orthogonal projection – withcolour and incident, not unlike an Indian miniature (Fig 4). Thisgraphic idealization presents to us the ranges of safely alignedrooms; the various shared spaces (like crossroads or small inte-rior squares); the protected gardens associated with each clusterof rooms; and the ludic presence of plants and trees.

In contemporary healthcare facilities, nature is all too fre-quently banished, depriving patients and staff alike of a ben-eficial awareness of sunlight, chlorophyll, weather and theseasons. Early Modernist projects addressed these issues withaplomb, opening up hospital wards to light and air, as inseminal projects by the Finnish master, Alvar Aalto, and thecomparatively neglected Dutch architect, Jan Duiker; or thefamily of Functionalist hospitals erected across Ireland in the

1930s and 1940s, closely associated with the new state’s cam-paign to eradicate TB. Perhaps it is time for architects toengage anew with health and treatment.

For each Biennale, a distinguished practitioner or academicis appointed as direttore to curate the main internationalexhibition and set a theme that national pavilions are encour-aged to follow. This year the young Chilean architect,Alejandro Aravena, has been appointed. Best known for hiswork on housing and planning for underserved communi-ties, Aravena’s influence reflects a new attention being paidby architecture worldwide to social issues. Underlining thissignificance, Aravena is also the recipient of this year’sPritzker Architecture Prize, the most prestigious internationalaward for an individual career.

In vigorous contrast to the recent phenomena of flamboyantStarchitecture, Aravena’s theme for Venice in 2016 is ‘Reportingfrom the Front’, a potential call-to-arms for architects to addressour many pressing social and environmental crises.

In response, McLaughlin is proposing to learn from theRespite Centre, the processes of its design and the humanexperience of its spaces in use. To achieve this ambitious goal,he aims to engage drawing in an active sense. Drawing as aprocess, as something much more than static graphic repre-sentation. Drawing as a kind of spatial installation constructedin situ in Venice. And drawing with multiple protagonists thatwill potentially reflect or represent the spatial understandingof Alzheimer’s patients at home in Dublin.

Some years ago McLaughlin and his team made a drawingthat may be a precursor to what is presented in Venice, aroom-wide construct, on plaster, at UCD. Tracing Floor was

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NÍALL MCLAUGHLINAT MID-CAREERSEEMS WILLING TOCONTINUE TAKINGRISKS, EXPLORINGTHE POSSIBILITIES OF ARCHITECTUREAND DESIGN

8 House atGoleen, CountyCork. PhotoNick Kane

9 Fishing Hut,HampshirePhoto NickKane

10 BishopEdward KingChapel, OxfordView of mainchapel lookingtowards thelectern. PhotoNick Kane

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