This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Last September, I went to the annual Robert Maxwell Lecture given at the Athenaeum under the auspices of the Architecture Club. It was by Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey, Irish architects not as well-known as they deserve to be on the English side of the Irish Sea, even though they won the RIBA Gold Medal in 2015.
They have been jointly responsible with Allies and Morrison for the masterplan of the cultural buildings along the waterfront of Olympic Park, have themselves designed the new theatre for Sadler’s Wells (Sadler’s Wells East) and V&A East in the same sequence, and were responsible for the brick-built Saw Swee Hock Student Centre at the LSE, shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2014. Tuomey has also recently published a beautifully written short memoir of his upbringing, First Quarter, which stops short of his training as an architect.
Towards the end of their lecture, they showed images of three buildings in the countryside between Cork and Kinsale, built in collaboration with a craftsman, Joseph Walsh. There was something so unexpected about these three buildings that the following morning I booked a return flight to Cork.
Joseph Walsh is an Irish craftsman — he calls himself a designer and maker — who was born on his family farm, went to the local school, and left at the first opportunity to learn how to work with wood. He established his workshop in 1999 and specialises in making elaborate, freeform sculptural work in wood to commission, exploiting its characteristics to maximum visual effect in a modern version of art nouveau.
He has done a great deal of work for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth and Lismore Castle (the Duke has been a great supporter of the crafts), and commissions for the National Gallery of Ireland and the Metropolitan Museum.
At some point, Walsh started working on collaborative projects with O’Donnell + Tuomey who — unlike the majority of their British equivalents — have a strong interest in the craft of making. Maybe this was instilled at University College, Dublin where the teaching of Shane de Blacam encouraged an interest in materials and construction amongst his pupils in the 1970s; or because they have a house in Connemara which may have given them an interest in rural crafts; or because the status and importance of the hand-made and of indigenous rural traditions are more respected in Ireland. One of their early projects was the GMIT Furniture College at Letterfrack and, in their Glucksman Gallery attached to University College, Cork, they experimented with bent wood, paying close attention to the relationship between the building and surrounding trees.
in 2010, they began the conversations with Walsh which led to the construction of Falling Dansu, first shown in an exhibition called MATERIALpoetry, a collaboration on making a wall-mounted bureau desk in which to store not only papers and pens, but small-scale works of art.In 2012, they worked together on a freeform wooden structure called Wood Vessel shown at the Venice Biennale. It was an experiment in the abstract, sculptural qualities of wood.
In 2022, they came up with the idea of constructing an abstract, freeform barn structure in the open fields near Walsh’s big workshop (actually, workshop is possibly the wrong word for an operation which employs about 20 people, many of them working using mechanical tools like in an 18th century factory). O’Donnell + Tuomey did the initial sketch, but the craftsmen were encouraged to invent the way they interpreted the sketch.
The structure Passage House is made of wood and thatched, to demonstrate craft skills. You might think that it is a modern version of a garden folly in that it is functionless, but it has an essential seriousness to it which is different from a folly.
It is more in the spirit of the Abbé Laugier’s 18th century celebration of the primitive hut, or perhaps it is a cross between a small-scale barn with the symbolic overtones of a wigwam.
It was this building which caught the imagination of the audience at the Athenaeum, because it is so radically different in character from most contemporary buildings, with no discernible purpose other than somewhere to shelter from an Irish storm.
In practice, it is much smaller than I had expected (photography can be so treacherous), but it still feels programmatic in demonstrating the importance of modern craft techniques to the ways that buildings are, or should, be constructed now.
Immediately next door to it is a second folly, Stone Vessel, hand built by local stone masons, but with an area outside it built by a team from Japan. It is another shrine to the beauty of materials and traditional ways of working.
There is a third structure, less obvious, called Hedge Theatre: somewhere for people who come to Walsh’s summer schools on making to sit and enjoy folk music. This trio of buildings may be small-scale, but they are a manifesto of the importance of craft in building — the contribution of hand skills, the use of local materials, the pleasures of timber, thatch and stone, the belief that it is important to value the skills of the maker.
These virtues are, of course, essentially Ruskinian; but it is still impressive that two architects who worked for James Stirling should be making such an effort to re-establish an interest amongst architects in the value of craft.
