O’DONNELL + TUOMEY — TRANSFORMATION OF AN INSTITUTION: The Furniture College, Letterfrack

interview by Shane O’Toole

ISBN 978 0946846 597     108 pages (paperback)    22 x 16 cm     80 illus

This book was published to coincide with O’Donnell + Tuomey representing Irish architecture at the Venice Biennale 9th International Architecture Exhibition. The architects’ installation in the Arsenale’s Artiglierie told the story of the past, present and future of the site at Letterfrack through the metamorphic reworking of their award-winning Furniture College. Ireland’s Pavilion recasts elements of this project to suggest characteristics of confinement and release, closed institutions and frameworks for change. This project of redemption shown at Venice is told here through photographs, drawings and the words of the architects.

EXTRACTS

"Some buildings have savage histories that can leave a place in need of a kind of architectural exorcism, a project of redemption. The poeple of Letterfrack, an isolated Atlantic community, are reimagining their village and the institution at its heart. A 19th-century hamlet, where life was overshadowed for much of the last century by a repressive industrial school, is being imaginatively transformed to secure its future in the new millennium. Three centuries, three different visions of community. — from ‘Transformation of an Institution’ by Shane O’Toole I remember the day when the timber frame went up in Connemara, before it was yet a building but when it was most definitely the largest structure that had been built west of the Twelve Bens since the pier in Roundstone. There was huge excitement at community level at the power of this dinosaur skeleton that had been put up on a platform of concrete beside the old industrial school. Now, that was before it was a functioning machine hall, before the students moved in, before you could see the north light was going to come. We’re just talking about the imminent presence of a bone structure and something about the potential that it seemed to promise. We began to thing, ‘why can’t structures be more bony?’ Uo to then, we’d always been working with mass and with surface. Something of our installation in Venice retains the kind of unfinished, but all-possible feeling that a bone structure gives you."

— John Tuomey, from the interview with Shane O’Toole