Shane de Blacam: 'To become an architect you need to know how buildings evolved'

Born in 1945 and raised in Blackrock in Dublin, Shane de Blacam FRIAI, is speaking before addressing the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland annual conference, which took place over two days this week at the RDS.

Over 2,000 attendees gathered to hear de Blacam as well other speakers, Sydney City Architect Bridget Smyth, Mayor of Limerick John Moran, John Pawson CBE, Teresa Novais and writer Roddy Doyle.

Ireland’s largest architectural and built environment gathering had Cities as its theme and de Blacam turned the spotlight on Cork and Dublin’s buildings and the importance of materials in his lecture.

Because materials and the “making” of buildings are what matter to this architect. “Drawing is actually thinking. It is working things out. An architect draws in anticipation of making a building,” he says.

“A poet said about writing a line of poetry: ‘A line will take us hours maybe: Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.’ We could say the same about drawing. If a building doesn’t seem a ‘moment’s thought’, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

The multi-award winner has through almost half a century of his practice designed some of the most distinguished public spaces across Ireland. His oeuvre features libraries, churches and third-level constructions, including Munster Technological University in Cork and the dining hall at Trinity College Dublin.

De Blacam is also the recipient of the 2023 Royal Academy Architecture Prize which recognises his work as “a reminder of the power of craftsmanship to create spaces where we can come together for stillness and reflection”.

Shane de Blacam has a panoramic worldview of design. He’s rubbed shoulders with Le Corbusier, while Louis Kahn was not only a teacher but a personal friend.

He was educated in Blackrock College before going on to study architecture at UCD (1963-68). At 19, he spent the summer with an engineer uncle in Michigan, United States, where, at weekends, he slipped behind the wheel of a sleek 1949 Buick Roadmaster to set off on an odyssey to glimpse buildings by renowned American architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.

De Blacam completed his bachelor’s in architecture at University College Dublin and received a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.

He worked in London with the British firm Chamberlain, Powell and Bon, and then with Louis I. Kahn in Philadelphia.

During graduate school in Philadelphia in the studio course taught by the modernist Louis Kahn and the engineer Robert Le Ricolais, he took courses in city planning and landscape architecture.

“When I was at the University of Pennsylvania I took studio course in structural engineering and landscape architecture. There was a very important professor there, Ian McHarg, who published a book ‘Design with Nature’ [1969],” says the architect. “He had a class on a Friday for an hour and he invited very important politicians, writers, poets and landscape and city planners but fundamentally he was interested in design with nature. Charles Darwin was his hero. It still endures and is the gospel for a lot of the green politics and architecture of our generation and the protection of the climate.”

Meanwhile, De Blacam became friends with Lou Kahn and his family: “I moonlighted in his office at night while attending the university by day. Under his direction I did drawings for bits of the lecture theatre at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth,” he says. Kahn spotted his talent and employed him to work on the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and then to be his assistant in the design of Yale’s Paul Mellon Center for British Art and British Studies. “On graduation, I joined the office fulltime and spent the next two years as assistant to the project architect,” says de Blacam.

In 1972, he returned to Ireland as a first-year master at the School of Architecture, University College Dublin, and co-founded De Blacam and Meagher Architects in 1976 with his late business partner John Meagher. “I enjoyed a number of years teaching and made friends with John Meagher through teaching. We set about starting our own office through competitions.

De Blacam “loved every moment” of university teaching but as time passed became “increasingly conflicted”, he says. “I knew that every moment out of the office was less attention to what I felt was most important. I jumped,” says de Blacam.

Major projects include the brick edifice for Cork Institute of Technology (now Munster Technological University), Firhouse Church, Trinity College Dublin’s dining hall, and the Samuel Beckett Theatre.

As soon as De Blacam and Meagher established their practice they entered the Diocese of Dublin competition for Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, Firhouse. Their first project (unbuilt) was the Taoiseach’s House and Guesthouse international architecture competition in 1979.

Does he have a favourite among his creations? “Probably the building that made our reputation was in Trinity College — the work restoring the dining hall after a catastrophic fire in 1984, the restoration in the dining hall and the adjoining atrium and senior common room bar,” he says.

The house they never built was funnily enough a pivotal moment in their career and a major reason the firm was appointed for the Trinity gig, he says: “Our entry [for the Taoiseach’s House] sort of laid out an agenda of what our priorities were.

“You could foresee in that competition the buildings we would build afterwards. That competition was hugely important. We were in second place Our entry marked our territory. The Taoiseach’s House was very important.”

The architects collaborated with artists like Seán Scully for the main entrance at the University of Limerick with the pair of 35-metre-high timber posts and thick black-and-white wall in stone (1996).

Among many accolades De Blacam and Meagher Architects has received are the RIAI Gold Medal and five Silver Medals for Architecture and Conservation, including the RIAI Gandon Medal and the Europa Nostra Silver Medal.

Growing up in Dublin, the cityscape inspired him, he says. “Buildings like Marsh’s Library, St Patrick’s Cathedral and the Long Room at Trinity [College] had a profound impact on my career as an architect,” he adds. And despite being on first-name terms with the most famous names of the past century, de Blacam regards buildings as his most significant teacher: “Architecture is not a science. “The only way you can become an architect is to know an awful lot about architecture and how buildings evolved.”

What is his attitude to designing for the residential sphere? The man hailed for his civic creations says firmly: “All architects have major oeuvre in private houses, every single one of them. It’s sort of a mistake to think private houses are not important to the architect. It’s desperately important that they’re well done. You could write the history of modern architecture in domestic houses.”

He is currently working on a number of libraries for Wicklow County Council. “In the office, there’s a range of work in which I have interest also schools, commercial, houses and apartments,” he says.

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