Clancy Moore Architects

Emmett Scanlon: How long have you worked together?

Andrew Clancy + Colm Moore: We have been working together in various capacities, both within another office and undertaking competitions in collaboration with friends, for almost ten years now. We formally established our own practice, Clancy Moore, four years ago.

ES: When you began your practice, how did you go about figuring out how you would work together?

AC + CM: I suppose we established our practice based on conversation. When we began we were both living in different cities, Andrew in Paris and Colm between London and Dublin. So the practice became a conversation between us both and in some ways those two cities. Our working process developed from this dialogue. Every project begins with a conversation, sometimes vague, sometimes specific or detailed. We try to develop a sketch quickly to focus this discussion, a sort of conversation piece. This sketch now generally takes the form of a crude model, something direct and inarguable. These cruder studies are distilled and tested against the plan repeatedly as we move through the project stages.

For us it took time to learn how to work as a partnership and also to develop a way to work, as this is inextricably linked to your practice, the nature of the work you wish to produce. We think this idea of method, process and practice is often overlooked in architecture education.

ES: You are one of many practices set up in the last ten years in Ireland. There are a lot of architects working in Dublin and across Ireland in small, independent practices as a result. Has it been a good time to set up a practice here?

AC + CM: Famously we have, in Ireland, constructed more in the last ten years than we have in the history of the state, yet the last ten years have also seen a lot of construction but very little architecture. Interestingly, a good many of the practices established in the last decade are actually of the generation ahead of us. When we began university, for most architects graduation meant emigration. However we emerged from study into a privileged situation, which meant that for the first time, graduate architects were fully absorbed into the industry of construction. The downside of this position meant that few in our generation had the time to be critical. We learned a great deal very quickly during this time, but had little space to develop an independent attitude or agenda.