Sheila O’Donnell, “Conversations with Place”

Event Description:

Every inhabited place is defined by and read through its buildings and constructed landscapes. This talk will address recent work completed with John Tuomey. Our work is deeply engaged with place. It shapes how we respond to each site’s particular characteristics and how we make places within our buildings.

We converse with place in a number of different ways. These include representations of place and memories of places which may be or may not be accurate. Place is more than a physical phenomenon. It includes aspects of time, culture, climate, ethos, essence, and society. We talk about our buildings being designed from the ground up and from the inside out. In that context, I think of both “ground” and “inside” as aspects of “place.” When everything is “in its place,” everything is all right. It’s good.

We’re not looking for the abstract perfection of an ideal form. Instead, our designs are derived through careful study of site constraints through a process of closely noticing local conditions. The idea is to arrive at a form that speaks back to and makes new sense of its situation, to approach a deeper sort of simplicity by accepting the complicated origins that make up the shape of things.

Speaker:

Sheila O’Donnell founded O’Donnell + Tuomey with John Tuomey in Dublin in 1988. They have designed cultural, social, and educational buildings in Ireland, the UK, and Europe. Winners of more than 120 awards, recent buildings include the LSE Student Centre in London, Central European University CEU Budapest, Glucksman Gallery Cork, Timberyard Housing Dublin, Lyric Theatre Belfast, and the Photographers’ Gallery London. A new museum for the V&A and a dance theatre and academy for Sadler’s Wells in East London will be completed in 2024. They have exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale six times. In 2015 O’Donnell + Tuomey received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Brunner Prize, both awarded in recognition of a lifetime’s work in architecture.

O’Donnell was a practice professor in architecture at University College Dublin until 2019. She has taught and lectured widely in Europe, Japan, and the US. In 2019, she was named Architect of the Year by the Women in Architecture Awards for CEU Budapest and elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. O’Donnell’s watercolor work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy. She is an elected member of Aosdána, the affiliation of Irish artists.

0:00 Welcome by Sarah Rafson
02:27 Introduction by Grace La
08:18 Lecture by Sheila O'Donnell
01:11:33 Q+A