GMIT Furniture College Letterfrack
Galway
The context is a former industrial school at the edge of Letterfrack village. The project is a development strategy for the site, including new buildings and the refurbishment of the former industrial school to accommodate a furniture college, workshops, radio station and administration for a wide range of community-let projects. The client is Connemara West, a community-owned development organisation in a disadvantaged area in County Galway.
It was important that the campus should have a contemporary, forward-looking identity, that the new use and new architecture would combine to transform the obsolete nineteenth-century institutional building into an open educational resource for the 21st century.
- American Academy of Arts and Letters 2015 Awards: O’Donnell + Tuomey
Dublin, 29 Oct – 9 Nov 2015 - New Irish Architecture – Rebuilding the Republic
Leuven, Belgium - The European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Award 2003 Exhibition - Vienna
Vienna, Austria
The symmetry has been shifted and the axis of approach is changed into a curved line in the landscape. A new entry forecourt opens up the closed form of the courtyard plan like a folded-out chair of different forms. The structural systems of the different buildings have been designed in response to their contrasting functional requirements and their place in the sequence of the construction programme.
The external materials of the buildings relate to the colours and textures of the landscape: Irish green oak, terne-coated stainless steel, concrete and sand-pigmented render are designed to weather naturally and to register the passage of time.
Publications:
- AV Monographs, 2016
- Irish Architecture, The RIAI Annual Review, Vol. 2, RIAI, Sandra Andrea O’Connell (Editor)
- RIBA Journal, May 2011, Handover #1:, Hugh Pearman on O’Donnell + Tuomey, Hugh Pearman PDF
- Ways of Working, 2010
- Connemara, The last pool of darkness, Tim Robinson PDF
- Looking at European Architecture, A Critical View, I. Murray, Ch. Pourtois
- O’Donnell + Tuomey: Selected Works, 2006
- Space, Architecture for Art, Circa, Gemma Tipton (Editor) PDF
- Architecture, Craft and Culture, 2004
- Transformation of an Institution, 2004
- Archaeology of the Air, 2004
- New Irish Architecture 17, AAI Awards 2002, Gandon Editions
- Irish Arts Review, Vol 19 No 2 2002, Redemption in Letterfrack, Shane O’Toole PDF
- Archi 8, April 2001, Abbotstown, Kenneth Frampton
- Irish Architect, Vol 169 2001, Furniture College Letterfrack, Shane O’Toole
- 1 April 2001 2001, Shane O’Toole
- RIBA Journal, March 2001 2001, Tom de Paor
- Profile, 1997