Projects

The centre was conceived as a big house to be explored and discovered by visitors as they move between floors. At the centre of this house is a staircase, which ties together the different spaces on half landings, providing a simple, open and legible layout that is equally inviting to a first time visitor as to one intimately familiar with the building. This quality was key to the design. A public building should be regarded as streetscape in the territorial sense, an extension of the public realm. So in this case the stairs become a street, a meeting place, a means to break down the threshold between art and its audience, while also providing the primary service and ventilation conduit for the centre. It forms the physical and metaphorical heart and face of the building.

A vibrant inner city parish needed space for meetings, language classes, children's play and other support accommodation, as well as a clearer link between the interior and the space outside. The project builds itself about the entrance to the church. The form is manipulated such that the intervention recedes from those entering the church, drawing them into the plan before becoming readable as an addition. As a facilitating structure it has added a layer of flexibility to the church.

This work comprises of the reordering and extension of a 19th-century country house in Kerry. Situated on the edge of a lake, the house stands on a man-made hill at the centre of an elaborately planted romantic landscape. Upon commencement of the design the architects reinstated the pure original form of the dwelling. A strategy of elaborating the threshold between the reception rooms of the house and the garden was adopted by wrapping the house in a notional forest of columns, creating deep verandas to the south and west of the main living spaces and a series of indoor and outdoor garden rooms for eating and entertaining.