For three generations, an elegant white room overlooking Dublin’s premier square has been the cockpit of Irish architecture. But the personalities of the two men who succeeded each other in the art-filled front room on the first floor of 19 Merrion Square could hardly have been more different.
Michael Scott, the late actor turned architect and champion of the arts, was a small, energetic extrovert. A ladies’ man and party animal, he was a legendary figure about town. His dramatic life and unrivalled cultural influence form the subject of a frank documentary directed by his daughter, Ciarin Scott, which will be broadcast on RTE1 on Tuesday.
As he approaches 80, Ronnie Tallon remains a handsome and imposing figure. He is still one of the tallest men in the room, even if his frame is bent slightly to one side. The small stoop and sloped shoulders create an elegantly self-deprecating pose, one that helps put others at ease. He exudes an aura of calm, speaking quietly and deliberately, sometimes hesitating before completing a sentence.
The leading architect in Ireland is good company. He laughs easily and can make others laugh. He is, however, an intensely private man. He is rarely seen where architects gather. “I don’t play golf and I’m not a guy who likes lying in the sun,” he says. He prefers to live quietly in a serene wooded setting at the end of a narrow lane in Foxrock.
The last survivor of STW’s three founders, Tallon’s legacy is grossly underappreciated, particularly when compared with his former partners.
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Scott, who retired in 1975, the year in which he was awarded architecture’s greatest international accolade, the Riba gold medal, for work carried out by STW, is best remembered for Geragh, his house at Sandycove, as well as for the short-lived Irish pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the Busaras bus terminal, possibly our greatest 20th-century building.
Robin Walker, who worked with Le Corbusier in Paris and studied under Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, followed Scott into retirement in 1982, when he was not yet 60. Fifteen years after his death, he is still widely revered for the philosophical rigour he brought to designing and teaching.
Tallon, on the other hand, remains something of an unknown quantity, an enigma even, to most of his professional colleagues. How can this be when one is talking about the most prolific and significant figure in Irish architectural history; the only architect ever to win two RIAI gold medals, both awarded before he was 40? The reason is simple. Publishing is often as much a part of architectural practice as building. Tallon has never lectured, never written and never spoken publicly about his work. His reputation has suffered for it.
“I’m not a good communicator, never was,” he says. “I don’t lecture and I don’t teach. Robin was a different sort. He had a very clear mind, a very analytical mind. He would go to the root of every problem and follow it through. He gave so much of his time to teaching. Maybe it was because he was searching for direction himself.
“He was a (Le) Corb(usier) man when I first met him, devoted to Corb. I often wondered why he was attracted to Chicago when he was such a Corb man. But he was. Maybe he was questioning in his own mind and wanted to see another approach. I was more the practical guy, I suppose. I concentrated solely on making buildings.”
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Gandon Editions have catalogued STW’s architecture in a monumental new book that documents the partnership’s work in 400 dense, large-format pages and more than 1,300 illustrations. Ten years in the making, Scott Tallon Walker Architects: 100 Buildings and Projects, 1960-2005 exudes the same solid build quality that characterises STW’s output, but sometimes overwhelms the poetic elegance of Tallon’s best work.
The selection is weighted towards the recent past — the Tallon era — which is predictable, as architects always like to believe that their next building will be their best. There are some surprising omissions among the 100 designs featured in the book, including the dilapidated GEC/ECCO factory in Dundalk, which won Tallon his first RIAI gold medal; Walker’s extraordinary family home in St Mary’s Lane, Ballsbridge; and two early projects in Dublin — the industrial estate at Pottery Road, Deansgrange, and the Central Remedial Clinic in Clontarf — that defined Tallon’s approach to expandible buildings and led to his greatest masterpiece, the Carroll’s cigarette factory in Dundalk.
Three of Walker’s finest buildings — Bord Failte at Baggot Street bridge, the recently demolished National Bank in Suffolk Street and the science block at St Columba’s College, Rathfarnham — merit only a single page each.
Balance is provided through essays by the critic Deyan Sudjic and architect Arthur Gibney. Tallon’s reflections on his lengthy career are covered in an interview we did for the book.
Seen from this distance, STW’s early work seems to be nothing less than the physical manifestation of Lemass and Whitaker’s plan for economic expansion. Almost in parallel with the announcement that Ireland was to become part of the modern world, startling fragments of that new world suddenly began appearing in different parts of the country.
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“In the early 1960s there was a great feeling of confidence,” says Tallon. “People expected, or at least they weren’t shocked, if you came up with proposals that were very much of the future, as they saw it. They supported it.”
STW’s determination to create a fresh identity for the republic helped usher that new Ireland into being. Architecture, for once, was able to play a part in catapulting a small, mainly rural nation into the age of the service economy.
Tallon still works three days a week in the office he joined 50 years ago this week. “Architecture is a way of life,” he says. “When you’ve worked at it as long as I have and when you’ve made an almost total commitment in your life to it, to the exclusion of everything else, it becomes hard to give it up. It’s hard to be disinterested.”
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Scott Tallon Walker Architects: 100 Buildings and Projects, 1960-2005, Gandon Editions, €75. Arts Lives: Michael Scott — A Changing Man, RTE1, 10.15pm, Tuesday