Archinect - News

$150,000 Jane & Kevin Roche Scholarship Fund launched to support architecture students

2022-07-11T18:33:00-04:00

A scholarship fund honoring the legacy of the late Kevin Roche has been established by the Connecticut Architecture Foundation (CAF) in coordination with the local firm Svigals + Partners and in time for what would have been the Pritzker winner’s 100th birthday this year. Roche’s children, who were behind the decision to repurpose their father’s heirlooms, said the establishment’s purpose was to “[make] the Pritzker work for the betterment of architecture in a new way, refocusing its lens from the most heralded to the least.”

The fund will begin rewarding money to students with at least two years of completed study in an undergraduate architecture program, or to those holding acceptance letters from accredited graduate programs in the subject, starting next year.

In a live event hosted in New Haven at Yale School of Architecture by Dean Deborah Berke, recent Pritzker laureates Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Ireland-based Grafton Architects presented a short video tribute, a...

O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects founders honored with RIAI Gold Medal for Belfast's Lyric Theatre

2021-12-15T19:26:00-05:00

Following news this morning about the topping out of one of the firm’s highest-profile projects in recent memory, Dublin-based O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects has been awarded the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland’s Gold Medal for their 2012 Lyric Theatre project in Belfast.

Featuring a brilliant CLT auditorium, the building is sited on a slope along the River Lagan and is defined by a distinctive irregular shape and time-tested materials that respond to the area's contrasting brick streetscape and lush green parkland which surrounds the 54,100-square-foot structure on either side.

The Lyric Theatre by O Donnell + Tuomey. Photo: Dennis Gilbert

The RIAI’s Peter Hynes commended the theater as a “deeply considered and exquisitely crafted building which responds to and engages with its physical and cultural contexts and enriches both,” adding that “it combines the welcome of arrival with the drama of movement and the surprise of discovery on many levels. It integrates public funct...

Irish Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale will explore important role of markets for rural communities

2018-04-13T13:48:00-04:00

The Irish Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, opening May 26th, will explore the importance of the rural marketplace. Once the economic and social hubs of the countryside, many of these marketplaces have seen their roles diminished as rural regions experience accelerating change. Focusing on small towns with a population less that 5,000 people, the exhibition "aims to reassert the declining rural market square as a public place of social, political and cultural exchange, central to community cohesion."

Irish Pavilion © Mark Wickham

Curated by a team of six young Irish architects and designers, Free Market will "act as a real market square, offering an engaging place to meet, to pause, to interact with the exhibits and openly exchange ideas. Evoking the character of the market space through the use of texture, proportion, color and sound, the pavilion will also include architectural models and drawings describing both the historic and contemporary conditions of these t...

Sheila O'Donnell + John Tuomey win 2015 RIBA Gold Medal for Architecture

2014-09-24T13:30:00-04:00

Irish architects Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey have been named the 2015 recipients of the prestigious RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. Awarded since 1848 and personally approved by Her Majesty the Queen, the Gold Medal recognizes a lifetime's work of an architecturally influential person or group.

After training at the University College Dublin, O'Donnell and Tuomey previously worked together at Stirling Wilford Associates and Colquhoun & Miller in London. They then co-founded their practice O'Donnell + Tuomey Architects in Dublin in 1988.

Taking part in "Group 91 Architects" in the early '90s, the husband and wife pair first gained recognition for their first permanent building, the Irish Film Institute (1991). Since then, O'Donnell and Tuomey have built private homes, schools, public housing, and community buildings -- many of their projects crafted in the couple's signature style of smartly arranged brick and sharp-lined geometric forms.

O’Donnell + Tuomey have been shortl...