2024 Robert Maxwell Lecture : Working Together

Revived last year, the lecture is now named after the architect, educator and critic Robert Maxwell. Last year’s lecture was given by Jeremy Dixon and Ed Jones. In his introduction, Keith Williams explained the continuity in inviting Sheila and John to speak, as they were taught by Bob Maxwell and Ed Jones as students at University College Dublin in the 1970s. Sheila and John both worked for James Stirling, Bob’s fellow student and close friend at the Liverpool School of architecture, for whom O’Donnell and Tuomey are now making an extension, reordering the existing buildings to cohese the School into a whole. Describing how Bob Maxwell had helped draw James Stirling’s thesis project at Liverpool, John referred to both as mentors and ‘borrowed uncles’. He also talked of his and Sheila’s friendship with Bob, including dinner at their house after teaching together, and lunch at the Athenaum, Bob’s club

O’Donnell and Tuomey presented several of their extraordinary range of current projects. For those of us familiar with their practice since its start, it was exciting to see how themes developed in their nascent works such as the Irish Film Centre, have evolved in both the grand and small, into a rich oeuvre. With an image of their studio, John commenced by explaining the importance of collaboration to them, referring to their oYice, and to clients and practitioners, some in the room, including consultants, artists and craftspeople. John introduced three ‘principles’ appearing in their designs: civic threshold as a reciprocal response to context, movement and pause, and physical presence of a building. In multiple ways, these ‘topics’ were drawn into their project descriptions, giving a structure and consistency to their explanations whilst revealing the rich variation in the resulting work. O’Donnell and Tuomey have remained true to these topics, together with the central ideas of collaboration and crafting of something small or a large building, or of place from the start of their practice. A practice which is distinguished by its model making and fine drawings, including analytical urban studies, meticulously made plans of great clarity, sketches referencing other fields, and propositional watercolour images conveying spatial and atmospheric intention. In their talk, watercolours and sketches were often juxtaposed with photographs, clearly explaining the essence of the buildings through the design principles and intended character.

Speaking lyrically and with clarity, John and Sheila laid before us several projects of their considerable recent production. John started appropriately, with the Liverpool School of Architecture where they have reworked the existing building space and added a significant new building whose folded form, inflects to capture exterior space and respond to the nearby Catholic Cathdral. He showed a tantalising first view, taken in the previous days, of the thirty by thirty meter clear span top floor studio, its concrete table visible, awaiting the installation of the timber trusses. What a dream of a work space, lucky Liverpool students!

In presenting the Central European University Budapest, speaking of their delightful immersion in a new city, and showing a watercolour plan of their site in Pest, Sheila explained a first strategy picking up a route from the Danube to the Cathedral. Making a new building and remodelling the old block, with the strategic move to knock through the existing party walls, they have made a new place of covered courtyards, socialising spaces between the main volumes of the library and lecture halls.

The lecture continued with a group of substantial projects in east London, commencing with their Stratford Waterfront East Bank masterplan with Allies and Morrison. The scheme contains three of O’Donnell & Tuomey’s building projects: The Prow, a residential tower in collaboration with Howells, and two of the East Bank’s cultural buildings: Sadlers Wells and the V&A Museum. Sadlers Wells appears as a hefty rectangular brick form, the V&A appears as a skeletal form wrapped in an overcoat. In each, we were treated to very recent site photographs of the near complete exteriors. In each case their designs were informed by representational techniques from diYerent disciplines. For Sadlers Wells they looked at choreographers’ drawings to think about how the building’s spatial forms could express movement: looser components such as the foyer wrap around the dance studios and auditorium. Whilst the brick form references local industrial buildings, it continues O’Donnell and Tuomey’s interest in the material, shown in earlier projects such as the Lyric theatre Belfast, and with works by James Stirling, and in this case, ancient Roman brickwork. Explaining the new V&A’s identity in terms of figure and garment, John referenced the underlying structure of a Balenciaga ‘frock’ as recorded by X-ray. This lead to the building’s development as a bone structure clad in a free form overcoat with a space between. Its exterior ‘jacket’ consists of line drawn precast concrete panels, the design drawings, a craft in themselves, reminiscent of tailors’ cutting patterns.

Two of their latest projects in Ireland demonstrate their commitment to their principle of making urban projects which contribute to the city. Sheila described one of three social housing schemes in Dublin where they have been considering what makes a neighbourhood, reinstating a street dividing a site to form two residential urban blocks. John followed with the Culture House in Swords, embracing the castle and the city wall to form a new urban plaza, as a centre for the town.

As an exquisite plate of petit fours at the end of the grand banquet of projects laid before us, John presented ‘Three Rambling Houses’ encapsulating their approach in the smallest of all the communal work they showed. They have been made in collaboration with Joseph Walsh a master carpenter, furniture maker, sculptor with whom they have worked for many years, as a gathering space on his family farm in County Cork. It consists of three parts: the Passage House, a timber framed pavilion with a large thatched roof, John described as referencing old Irish village Rambling houses open to everyone, Stone Vessel, a building made entirely from stone with blacksmithed copper and bronze lanterns, and Theatre in the Hedge, a hill in a field to house an auditorium and a circular stage in the hedge’s thickets. With buildings made using local skills and local materials, the three took us to a root of O’Donnell & Tuomey’s work, to the art and craft of architecture, and the connection of eye to hand. The project and its telling compelled us to want to visit with a mind’s eye image of an Architecture Club gathering there!

Watch the full lecture here or in full screen on YouTube:
Running time 1hr 39min