Timber Extension, Shandon, Phibsborough is clad with its surface-mounted flush glazing. Flush panelled plywood cladding is used above and below the glazing. Internally the doubled and splinted timber portal frames are stained black.
Category Archives: News
A2 Architects and De Blacam & Meagher Architects feature in Time + Architecture, the international architecture magazine in China. ‘The Subtle Zeitgeist’ highlights the differences between two generations of contemporary Irish architects.
A new three-storey lift core is added to the Main Hall of Limerick’s Social Welfare Office, Dominick Street. Designed in collaboration with OPW Limerick, the new lift core is clad in gloss green mosaic
A2 Architects’ 1916 Glasnevin Centenary Chapel competition entry commemorates in particular the 232 people who died during the 1916 Rising and who are buried in a mass grave on the site in St. Paul’s Cemetery. The Chapel is to be for all denominations and will primarily accommodate ceremonies held before a cremation.
A semicircular Main Piazza generated by the movement of mourners and visitors embraces both the existing 1916 Monument and the proposed Centenary Chapel. On approach the Chapel rises as a cylindrical centerpiece from the baseline of a sweeping oak-beamed canopy that cantilevers from a repeating screen of vertical stone piers. A car-parking area providing the required 17no. car spaces is located to the other side of this sweeping canopy screen. The Chapel’s outward image, not unlike that of a lantern, emerges as a witness to the Chapel as a place of commemoration, contemplation and celebration.
Sketch design for a new longhouse on Sky Road, Clifden, Co.Galway is approved. The house is oriented on a north-south axis with sea views facing due west and mountain views of the Twelve Bens facing due east. The pitched roof is to be slated in large Liscannor stone slabs.
A2 Architects, on behalf of The Office of Public Works Limerick, have recently completed the refurbishment of the Entrance Hall to the Social Welfare Office, Dominic Street, Limerick with the addition of a new INTREO Suite. Work involved a new stone tiled floor, new maple joinery fittings and new lighting. Existing mosaic to columns and a feature bowed wall behind the new INTREO reception desk was retained.
The new tiled floor is a new ‘welcome mat’ to what is a very important public institution in Limerick City. The building caters for over 3000 visiting members of the public on a weekly basis so an attractive entrance lobby that was well-designed and well-lit was essential. The alternating black and white stone tiles are boldly laid as an angled grid akin to Borromini’s chapel of San Carlo Alla Quattro Fontana in Rome. The tile pattern also aspires to be a new inlaid miniature grid into the Newtown Pery grid of Limerick City where this project is located.
‘Bench for Networking’, designed in collaboration with John Gerrard Artist for ‘Everyday Experience’ at The Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin is yet another latent overlay on an already significant historic military site. Sited in an extreme corner of The Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, a former home for pensioner soldiers designed in 1680 by William Robinson, State Surveyor General, the work originally derives from a set of found landscape markings in the Gobi Desert in China. These markings, scored by the Chinese military, are for purposes unknown however are likely focussing devices for spy satellites, thus placing them within a wider dynamic of surveillance and international competition. The markings measure 1.5km by 1km and were visited by John Gerrard in 2012.
What appears at first as monolithic and cast is in fact a precise, shell-like assembly of cement board bonded onto a plywood substrate supported by a softwood timber stud carcass that is embedded with a concealed wireless router. The bench is deceptively light so that it is transportable and so that it can function as a networking arena in any corner of any room of any building. The bench’s protruding, closed outer edge into the room is somewhat defensive, almost disruptive; one must negotiate its map-like form. The positioning of the bench also proposes that it can potentially extend through the walls and cross-penetrate other rooms and outdoor areas in future iterations.
