It’s one of London’s largest cultural urban-design projects since the rebuilding of the South Bank, by the Thames, after the second World War.
Incorporating dance and music studios, a museum, a university campus, housing and social spaces, East Bank, at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, is an entirely new urban quarter in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. Behind the design is the Irish practice O’Donnell+Tuomey.
It started with a newspaper article just over a decade ago. “We were on the Tube to Heathrow,” Sheila O’Donnell says, who with John Tuomey was completing the practice’s Saw Swee Hock Student Centre for the London School of Economics, a building that would go on to be named London building of the year by the Royal Institute of British Architects, or Riba, and win many other awards.
“I was reading the Evening Standard, looking for puzzles to keep us going on the plane. And there was an article about getting ‘set for the Olympicopolis’.”
RM Block
The plan was to bring a branch of Sadler’s Wells dance theatre, an outpost of the Victoria & Albert Museum, music studios for the BBC, a building for the London College of Fashion and a campus for University College London, together with housing, to part of the former site of the 2012 Olympics, between Hackney and Stratford, about 10km northeast of Trafalgar Square.
“I thought, ‘That’s got to be our next project. It’s universities, it’s theatrical performance, it’s a museum. Those are all our things’. And John said, ‘You know everyone in the world will be going for that?’”
Tuomey was right, but O’Donnell’s instinct was on the money too. With award-winning projects including the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, the Glucksman Gallery in Cork, the Photographer’s Gallery in London and university buildings around the world, they certainly had the credentials. “It was a big deal,” Tuomey says, with characteristic understatement.
Like many exceptionally successful people, the pair are remarkably low key. Tuomey adds, as if it were a minor detail, that “we had just won the Gold Medal”, referring to Riba’s highest award.
Despite Ireland’s small population, Irish architects have been making huge waves internationally. Around the East Bank quarter, the Olympic Park itself includes two bridges by Heneghan Peng, whose vast Grand Egyptian Museum, in Giza, is due to open in November; while in 2020 Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell’s Grafton Architects won architecture’s highest accolade, the Pritzker Prize.
Perhaps it helps that we sit, more comfortably than many, between input from both Europe and the United States, and that our cultural history facilitates listening, conversation and negotiation.
The call for project proposals specified that practices of different size and experience team up; O’Donnell+Tuomey put together a trio of partners with Allies and Morrison, which is based in London, and Arquitecturia Camps Felip, a practice in the Spanish city of Girona.
We are speaking by Zoom; the couple are in their new studio, at the bottom of their Dublin garden. The studio is brick, like many of their buildings. “It is an amazing material, the scale of the human hand,” O’Donnell says. “We are partial,” Tuomey says, deadpan.
Light filters in, picking up artworks on a ledge behind them. Over to the right is a desk where O’Donnell works on an occasional series of watercolours, which Tuomey is encouraging her to exhibit. She is unconvinced. “I do them as a process rather than a product,” she says.
Process matters, as does constantly exploring new references, new contexts. They have recently returned from Joseph Walsh’s Making In seminar, in Co Cork, at which they heard Zita Cobb of Shorefast, a Canadian charity that aims to help local communities thrive in a global economy. “It’s not a revolution we need,” she said, according to Tuomey, “it’s a miracle.”
Cobb defined a miracle as “the small shift that changes a situation. She felt it was more realistic to aim for a miracle than a revolution. People don’t intend to be doing the wrong thing,” Tuomey says. “They don’t mean to be doing damage. But we passionately feel that the designation of urban development into monofunctional zones is completely the wrong way to see liveable cites.”
Tuomey once told me of a rule of thumb in architecture: a practice works best with up to 20 people; any more and you’re scaling up to hundreds. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground. Today he qualifies that by saying that things can be a little more fluid, and although O’Donnell+Tuomey are currently in the mid-20s bracket, partnering with much larger but still like-minded firms gives them access to projects at the scale of Olympic Park, where alongside the winning master plan their own projects include Sadler’s Wells East, V&A East and the Prow, a 27-storey residential block that will provide some of the 700 homes being created on the site.
“One of the biggest problems facing our profession is access to projects,” Tuomey says. He’s talking about procurement rules that exclude small or newer practices. “When you’re faced with a wall you look for a gap. We’re trying to get the work done. It’s what we’ve been trained to do all our lives.”
Allies and Morrison, he says, “were incredibly gracious. We had four people working for us who were physically in Allies and Morrison, so we didn’t have to set up a separate office.”
Tuomey describes their own ethos as more like that of a theatre company, scaling up as necessary to produce a project, then going dark, before starting over with the core team each time.
“It does give you these periods of side panic,” he says. “You realise, during the dark bit, we’ve been so busy doing the project that we might have forgotten to look for a new one, but somehow it has always happened: a new one arrives.”
Logistics aside, what can we learn from the London project? O’Donnell suggests first looking closer to home. O’Donnell+Tuomey played a key role in Group 91, the now-stellar collective of architects responsible for the cultural makeover of Temple Bar, in Dublin city centre, in the 1990s.
“It is a sensibility about making civic space,” Tuomey says. “Making buildings that open their foyers to civic space.”
“Temple Bar is very admired in British architecture and urban-design fields,” O’Donnell continues. (The pair have a habit of sharing ideas, finishing sentences, coming in to emphasise one another’s points, but always with a wry generosity.) “Here,” she says, “we get more of the conversation about the pubs and the bad behaviour, but people looking from a distance see a very successful urban development and the integration of cultural space into the city.”
She is touching on a vital point: we cannot blame architecture and urban design for the failures of social policy or for a culture that promotes individualism over collective responsibility. She goes on to cite the idea of the difference between “parachutes and mushrooms” when it comes to building in a new place. Do you land or do you grow?
She describes in-depth work by Sadler’s Wells with local communities, many of which have their roots in immigrant populations. This inflected the design for their building – which, like V&A East, opened earlier this year – with welcoming public spaces and a community dance floor in the middle of the foyer.
Architecture is only part of the solution, although it can play a significant role. Tuomey tells the story of digging a garden pond with his engineer father. “I was a student, and it was back-breaking work. The day came when we went to the pet shop to buy the fish. We brought them ceremonially to our perfectly made pond, and they just went in and swam off. And I remember my father saying to me, ‘Not a word of thank you’. They treated it like they’d always lived there. And I think about that every time we open a public building and I see audiences going in, and people using it as if they always have.”
This, he is implying, happens when you get the architecture right. “That,” he says, “is the beauty of it.”
Another problem O’Donnell identifies in our urban planning is that in Ireland we tend to think in terms of the city centre “and then everything else is a suburb. People have this fixed idea to build two-storey houses with front and back gardens, instead of taking the villages that are around Dublin and saying these are centres that should have urban connections.”
By this she means a greater density of housing, schools, colleges, libraries, cultural centres and public-transport infrastructure. These all need to exist alongside the default shopping centres that we often think are adequate anchors for what ultimately become spread-out satellite communities rather than vibrant cells in a connected city.
London works because it is a network of villages – densely populated ones, but villages nonetheless.
On the positive side, the team are currently working on Swords Cultural Quarter, which aims to knit in at least some of these elements, but there is still more to it.
“We need a strategic change in policy,” O’Donnell says. “The Department of Housing, who have to approve every project a local authority does, will not fund anything except a room that is part of someone’s home. They will not fund a community room, they will not fund a creche and they won’t fund anything cultural.
“So you design a project, you have community rooms in it, you have facilities for kids, it goes to them and it all gets knocked out. Whatever the Department of Housing are in charge of should include what it means to live in a place, how you move through the landscape, encounter your neighbours. I think if we defined housing as being how people live, it could be quite different.”
Against current moves to lower design standards yet again, this could be at least part of the miracle we need in Ireland.
Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey speak at Cities, Towns, Neighbourhoods, a Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland conference at the RDS, in Dublin, on Wednesday, October 8th, and Thursday, October 9th. Participants in other talks and discussions include Andrew Clancy, Francine Houben, Dorothy Cross, Valerie Mulvin and José Manuel Toral. O’Donnell+Tuomey’s studio opens to the public as part of Open House Dublin, which runs from Saturday, October 11th, to Sunday, October 19th
