Born: January 30th, 1944
Died: November 15th, 2025
Brian O’Connell, who has died aged 81, was one of Ireland’s leading architects and one of the first from his profession to be credited as a conservation architect.
Highly skilled in his main calling, he was also an able lawyer and mediator. As an architect, he left his mark on many buildings and medical facilities across Ireland. At a personal level, he was intelligent and calm, with a gift for storytelling.
RM Block
“He had a great skill set,” according to Sean Mahon, his business partner of long standing.
“He was a unique character in so many different ways, with an ability to see through problems and find solutions. He was called on for advice, as a colleague and a friend, by so many of his peers. He never turned away a request for help.”
O’Connell was born in Dublin in 1944. He was one of seven children to father Con, a surgeon and consultant at the Eye and Ear Hospital, and mother Marie-Therese, and was the only boy in the family.
His early life was spent in Whitehall before the family decamped to Rathgar on Dublin’s southside. There, the young Brian attended Miss Carr’s primary school before going on to Gonzaga College in Ranelagh, then only in its third year of existence.
He loved secondary school, developing a lifelong affection for the college and he recently attended its 75th anniversary black-tie dinner.
After Gonzaga, O’Connell went to University College Dublin, graduating in 1968 with a first-class honours degree. A believer in lifelong education, he obtained no fewer than three degrees.
The first was in architecture from UCD, despite the family background being in medicine, a career choice he avoided consciously. Eleven years later, he got a first-class law degree from UCD and the King’s Inns, and was called to the Bar, a second string to his bow which he deployed, despite eschewing a full-blown legal career, to good effect as an architect.
His final degree was a master’s in building and urban conservation, which he obtained from UCD in 2012.
O’Connell’s architectural career began in 1968 when he joined Tom Kennedy’s TP Kennedy and Partners, becoming a partner himself in 1974 and staying with the practice as it evolved and expanded, until forming his own firm, Brian O’Connell Associates. It was the forerunner of O’Connell Mahon Architects, a firm in which he remained centrally involved until his death.
Reflecting in later life as to why he didn’t gravitate to either medicine or law, O’Connell recalled being asked in fifth year, by the rector of Gonzaga, Fr John Hughes, what he wanted to do. Medicine didn’t appeal to him; and a full-time career in law or engineering didn’t appeal to him either.
But architecture was about people.
“An architect must engage with what people do,” he told Irish Life and Lore in a January 2020 recorded interview. “Everything they do has to have a framework within which to do it. And architecture seemed to me to be the expression, or formalisation, of that framework, which covers all human activity. And if you look at that as the shell that covers all humanity, what appeared to me was, it kind of gave you access to the way people are and the way they live and I suppose there’s no greater investigation than simply investigating the world as it is.”
A “slightly sceptical” Fr Hughes responded to O’Connell’s thoughtful enthusiasm by getting him a schoolboy work placement position with the architects Andrew Devane, then overseeing the building of the school chapel.
Working one day helping measure up a convent in the morning and a pub in the afternoon, O’Connell felt he was doing something that gave him “access to the whole of the human condition”, as he told Fr Hughes.
Inspired by the fusion within architecture of the aesthetic, the intellectual and a practical and hands-on approach, O’Connell had found his tribe and the rest was history.
Working at TP Kennedy introduced him to hospital architecture, a field that would eventually come to dominate his work. O’Connell was involved with no fewer than 30 projects across Ireland, including the national children’s hospital, the National Rehabilitation Hospital and the National Maternity Hospital, as well as numerous others elsewhere in Dublin, Cork, Tipperary, Derry, Limerick, Offaly, Kerry, Galway, Mayo, Wexford, Louth and Clare.
In parallel with professional success came professional recognition. He was president of the Architects Association of Ireland in 1972 and became a member of the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland in 1975, a fellow in 1987, and served as president from 1990 to 1991. He represented Ireland as a founder member of the Architects Council of Europe (Ace).
Architecture journalist and author Frank McDonald says O’Connell was held in high esteem by his colleagues.
“He was tremendously well-regarded by his colleagues and part of that was not just as an architect but as a lawyer also,” said McDonald. His knowledge of the law was “deployed to good effect, especially when he was president of the institute”, McDonald added.
As a conservation architect – and in that, he was “well ahead of his time”, according to McDonald – projects included Thomas Ivory’s Blue Coat School in Dublin, Gandon’s Registry of Deeds, Cassel’s Rotunda Hospital, Johnson’s house and offices at 64 Eccles Street.
“As a colleague, friend and mentor, we’ll really miss him,” Sean Mahon said this week.
Following his death after a long illness, he was remembered in numerous tributes posted on RIP.ie, with friends repeatedly describing him with words such as clever, generous, civilised, a mentor, professional, warm, compassionate and erudite.
In 1970, Brian O’Connell married Ann (neé McCormack) from Cork. They had two daughters – Claire and Katherine – who remember their family home as being filled with books and storytelling, with an emphasis on education, hard work and kindness.
Holidays, whether road-tripping around Europe or to Mweenish Island in Connemara, were peppered with diversions to churches and other notable buildings for random photos of “railings, window sills and close-ups of cornices”, as Claire recalled in a eulogy to her father.
One of his last projects was building a library in an extension to the practice to house part of his vast collection of books. It was opened in April by his good friend, the writer John Banville.
Brian O’Connell, who was predeceased by his sisters Mai and Karin, is survived by his wife Ann, by Claire and Katherine; and by his sisters Hilda, Margaret, Isolde and Grace, his sons-in-law Fearghal and Max, and his grandchildren, Niamh and Leo.
