O'Donnell + Tuomey

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O'Donnell + Tuomey

Multi-award-winning international architectural design practice based in Dublin, Ireland. Founded in 1988 by Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey.

O’Donnell + Tuomey, established by Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey in 1988, has been involved with urban design, cultural and educational buildings, houses and housing projects in Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and Hungary. They were members of Group 91, framework planners for the regeneration of Temple Bar, Dublin’s cultural quarter, where they were architects for three buildings: Irish Film I

nstitute, National Photography Archive and Gallery of Photography. Other cultural buildings include Glucksman Gallery in Cork, An Gaeláras Irish Language Cultural Centre in Derry, Lyric Theatre in Belfast and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. They have built schools and colleges in Dublin, Cork, Connemara and the Netherlands. They have completed educational projects for University College Cork, University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, and the London School of Economics. They are currently in the first phase of construction for the Central European University in Budapest. Winners of more than 100 national and international awards for their work across the past twenty-seven years; they have been seven times winners of the AAI Downes Medal; five times finalists for the Mies Van der Rohe Award for European Architecture in 1997, 1999, 2003, 2011 and 2015; five times shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 1999, 2005, 2011, 2012 and 2014; and won the RIAI Gold Medal in 2005. Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey are the 2015 recipients of the Royal Gold Medal, the world’s most prestigious award in architecture. They were selected to represent Ireland in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2004 and a group show “The Lives of Spaces” in 2008. In 2012 their installation ‘Vessel’ was part of the International show in the Arsenale. Publications include 'O’Donnell + Tuomey Selected Works' published by Princeton Architectural Press in New York in 2006 and 'Space for Architecture: the work of O’Donnell + Tuomey', published by Artifice books in London in 2014.

Address

20a Camden Row
Dublin

Website

http://www.odonnell-tuomey.ie/

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Our Story

O’Donnell+Tuomey was founded in Dublin in 1988 by Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey. The practice began with two public commissions arising from their cultural and social engagement: the Irish Film Institute and Ranelagh Multidenominational School. Both buildings have since been extended by us in a continuing relationship with the original clients.

We are a studio-based practice. We are committed to the craft and culture of architecture. We are focused on urban design, cultural, social and educational projects at home and abroad. We have completed schools and colleges, theatres and cinemas, community centres and social housing, art galleries and libraries in Ireland, the UK and on the European mainland. We have designed masterplans in cities, and university campuses. We do not specialise in any building type. Rather we are specialists in taking a brief, in understanding the nature of sites and the needs of users. We approach each project with a fresh and open mind. Our buildings do not look the same; each is a specific response to its brief and its physical and social context.

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. They are both practice professors in UCD and 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 120 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 East dance theatre in London’s East Bank, and a new central library for DIT in Dublin.

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.