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Archaeology of the air. O'Donnell+Tuomey, architecture |
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 Kester Rattenbury "Archaeology of the air. O'Donnell+Tuomey, architecture" Navado Press, Trieste 2004 pp. 96, €22,00 buy the book online! |
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italiano]
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Kester
Rattenbury's book, Archaeology of The Air, on the work of architects
O'Donnell and Tuomey seems to be as much about the work of this famous
firm of Irish architects as it is about the limitations of written language
and images to capture the nature of architectural experience. In fact,
in the first sentences of the book, the author confronts her frustration
with the incapacity of text to render the qualities of a conversation
she recorded with the architects on a previous occasion. It follows
a similar discussion of the inability of photographs to render the architectural
experience. The author speaks of spaces that are un-photographable,
not because they cannot produce graceful images but because of the perceived
distance between image and actual experience. In the book's format,
use of several photographic techniques, and writing style, the author
attempts to counter these limitations. It is for this reason that the
book's form and structure can hardly be separated from its subject in
particular or from the issue of translation in general. The book, in
fact, invites one to develop a technical critique by reconsidering the
mechanisms used in architectural criticism to address the challenges
of translation between architectural experience and images and between
the spoken and written word. |
[18mar2005] | ||
 Howth house. Preliminary sketches. O'Donnell and Tuomey are at the forefront of a generation of architects in Ireland. They are part of the generation that grew up intellectually and culturally with a sense of cohesion around a strong commitment to urban ideas and civil values of the city and its architecture, as well as with a strong sense of cultural identity. Clear evidence of this can be found in the Temple Bar project, which proposed a unique strategy for the redevelopment and regeneration of Dublin's historic center. Instead of a single master plan with a consistent and unified architectural form, the project provides an armature through which diverse groups of architects with different visions could intervene while respecting a general concept. Such a strategy allowed for the creation of new public spaces and networks within the existing urban fabric of the historic center of Dublin. Although the project had a clear and strong strategy, it was not predicated on a unified architectural intervention. Instead each architect was able to develop a specific site with his/her own client and conditions. O'Donnell and Tuomey's projects for the Gallery of Photography and the National Photographic Archive (as well as the public square between them) were key elements in the development of the overall plan. In fact, their project for the Irish Film Center of 1992 both preceded and, in many ways, anticipated the nature of intervention of the more ambitious Temple Bar project. The influence of Aldo Rossi's writings is clear, not so much in the specificity of the architectural forms as in the way that the city is understood and transformed. It is interesting to note that there are two countries in Europe where Rossi's influence has had a profound effect, Ireland and Spain. In both cases, Rossi's ideas about the city and its architecture were transformed into complex cultural and theoretical considerations about the city and urbanity. |
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 Howth house. Project geometry.  Howth house. External view. The house is facing North, towards the Howth's bay. O'Donnell and Tuomey's work has certainly expanded both in terms of the scale and sophistication. As Kester Rattenbury points out, their work is one of maturity and quality. It has a strong formal presence but has not simply become a style. Their work inspires but cannot be copied. Each project seems to be a precise reflection of the issues raised by site, culture, and social context as much as they are speculations about architecture as a discipline. Their work is an example of what Kester Rattenbury calls the vatic and the civil dimensions in architecture. They combine the exploration of different forms of engagement with the city and with the specificity of site and culture while at the same time maintaining a sense of exploration and discovery that has value in the interiority of their work and research.  Howth house. Interior. Archaeology of The Air, published by Navado press, coincides with the architect's participation in the 2004 Venice Biennale. The book presents us with five recently built projects. One quickly gathers, however, that the book's focus is two private houses (Hudson and Howth). The three other projects–the Social Housing in Galbally, the Ranelagh Multi-denominational school, and the furniture college at Letterfrack–serve as points of reference for O'Donnell and Tuomey's work and expand upon the themes developed in the houses. For it is in the presentation of the houses that we best understand Kester Rattenbury's intentions and interests. Hers is not a book about architectural theory, nor does it try to position the work of the architects in today's architectural debates. Instead it is an intense and intimate journey through the process of constructing these two homes, in which construction is understood in its material, social, and intellectual senses. Rattenbury not only deals with the architects' conception of the work or with issues of site and program. She also takes the reader into the client's mindset, exploring the relation between client and architect and the struggles with local authorities who cannot accept that a modern building can offer a positive relation to both site and context. Rattenbury proposes not one but several journeys that together construct a new form of viewing and understanding O'Donnell and Tuomey's work. The text of the essay is complemented with quotations from letters by clients as well as with statements made by the architects themselves. There are also different narratives and complementary forms of representation. The black and white photographs are invariably concerned with empty space, the building under construction, empty architecture full of materiality, light, and form. The ones in color are more conventional, nicely composed, well done, and ready for publication in any architectural magazine. The informal shots look as if they were taken from a family album, casual moments of life at the house or school when the family is resting or the kids are been picked up from school by their parents. Of course, there are also plans and model views of the projects, and a significant portion of the book is dedicated to the architects' sketches, which act as a sort of window into the way they work through the project. But it is through the text that one gains a sense of the book's purpose. The first sentence (lost in translation) expresses concern for the limits imposed by the very medium of written text to either translate the experience of the building or convey the quality of spoken language–words spoken between architects and clients over dinner or while travelling, words that evaporate once an attempt is made to put them into the written form. The author is particularly sensitive to the limits and dangers of consuming or reducing architecture to texts or images. In summary, the book's format is a courageous and successful attempt to address the formal limitations of the medium of architectural critique, the distances between the time of conception and construction.  Letterfrack furniture college. Design sketch.  Ranelagh school. View of the street. In some respects, Rattenbury's book is a collage of fragments–different texts (the author's, the architect's and the clients') and different forms of representations (a range of photographic techniques, the architects' sketches, plans, etc.). The interesting thing, however, is that together these modes accumulate (Umberto Eco describes rhetoric as based on bands of redundancy) to late this introduce such a complex idea, providing a view of the work that would be unavailable through any one of the mediums alone. One can not but think of Walter Benjamin well-known text on the task of the translator, when he says that any translation is a new creation, this is not only true for translation between languages but as is the case here between architecture and text, between experience and rhetoric. I look forward to more books by Kester Rattenbury as her line of exploration in architectural criticism and representation is a promising one (see her book about the reception of architecture in media). As for the work of O'Donnell and Tuomey, I declare my respect and admiration for their work and look forward to seeing their practice grow and continue to surprise us with new projects. Francisco Sanin fesanin@syr.fi.it |
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