Studio Practice

Our work goes beyond the design of buildings to include things; furniture, fittings, lights, landscape elements, installations and exhibitions. We have collaborated with makers and artists, with builders and craftspeople. We have a craft-based approach to architecture with extensive use of physical models, sketches, paintings and mock-ups.

Teaching, lecturing and writing are an integral part of our critical practice. Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey take time to write and reflect on the theory and practice of architecture. Both were both Professors at UCD where they taught for 40 years and they regularly teach and examine in schools in the US, UK and Europe.

We have exhibited six times in the Venice Biennale, making installations which advance our research into aspects of architecture- materials, form, construction, space- as well as its overlap with other art forms.

We have received over 140 national and international awards for our completed buildings. Our work has been widely published and exhibited. Ten monographs are currently in print.

Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey were awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2015, given for a lifetime’s work. In the same year they received the Brunner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, given for significant contribution to architecture as an art.

We keep the practice at a size that allows both of the founding directors to be closely involved in every project at every stage of development. Each project is led by one director with the support of a co-director and a team of architects. In 2018 we appointed 3 co-directors: Willie Carey, Jeana Gearty and Mark Grehan. As well as our Dublin base we now have studios in Cork and London.

We are now developing our competition-winning designs for the V&A East Museum and Sadler’s Wells dance theatre in London’s East Bank, an Academic Hub and Library for TU Dublin, a new School of Architecture for Liverpool University, new Cultural Quarter in Swords and a range of housing projects for Dublin City Council.

Our practice has an international reputation for its engagement with complex urban situations and sensitive landscapes. Much of our work has involved the meaningful integration of new structures into historically significant contexts, often involving the radical transformation of existing buildings. A strategic understanding of place and a careful interpretation of context allows an architecture to emerge, an architecture which can unlock the latent potential of the situation.

We intend our buildings to feel ‘strangely familiar’ – original in their concept, contemporary in their expression, but belonging to the deeper background of their place.

We aspire to an architecture of useful beauty.

Our Team