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If you haven’t been to architect Mies Van Der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno, this exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square will give you all the impetus you need to get there. While we can assess, gain understanding, and measure remotely, most architects and historians will argue that the truest understanding of a built artefact arises from a visit. We cannot fully get a sense of acoustics, natural lighting, ventilation, or innocuous details without experiencing a space first-hand. This exhibition does not aim to recreate the experience of visiting Villa Tugendhat, but does something else, managing to present a forensic telling of the background, history, construction, and restoration of the house: a dissection that can be objectively presented at some distance from the artefact itself.
This exhibition is not just about a building; it is about the concepts, lives lived, and legacies connected to that building. For almost a century, the Villa Tugendhat has captured a collective architectural imagination. Take, for example, the catalogue of the seminal 1932 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition in New York. Its cover features a black-and-white photograph of the Tugendhat House, at that time a mere two years old. With hundreds of celebrated works to choose from, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock were making a statement by foregrounding Mies’ structure, which they saw as the direction of modernity.
While the building’s white walls, chrome-finished steel structure, extensive glass, lavish stone, and technical devices were all striking for 1930, they alone have not gifted its enduring presence. More important still is its demonstration of the new concept of theatrical living in open-plan, adaptable spaces: not just the house, but the idea of the house. With its seemingly experimental, avant-garde ambitions, this exhibition reminds us of art historian Justus Bier’s provocation: ‘Can the Villa Tugendhat be lived in?’
I found it enjoyable to ponder this question within a restored late eighteenth-century home in Dublin. We read of Tugendhat’s interiors flooded with daylight from its glazed facades just as the low winter’s sun penetrates the portrait sash windows of no. 45 Merrion Square. We are invited to imagine the flowing living spaces of Mies’ open-plan design as we pass from lofty room to room in the piano nobile of the former Georgian home. One couldn’t imagine such different ideas on dwelling.
The content can be explored at a number of depths: the time-pressed observer can cast their eyes over the beautiful drawings and photographs, the custom furniture on loan; someone invested in history can spend time understanding the Tugendhat family and the remarkable episodes this building lived through; and a practitioner or academic interested in the restoration of modern structures can read an in-depth overview of the scientific and faithful remaking of the house.
German designer Lily Reich has been largely sidelined in the popular history of Mies’ European career – a contribution that is gradually being reclaimed – and while she does gain credit in this overview, it is still not abundantly clear where in the interiors and furniture she has full or even equal authorship to Mies. However, one antidote to the often-overzealous cult of Mies is the well-balanced attention given to the building’s clients: Fritz and Grete Tugendhat. They were not bystanders to his genius, but engaged and fluent, creative and conscious in their direction. Their life stories are tragic, including a desperate flight from persecution to Venezuela, and while Grete returned to visit in the 1960s, Fritz never saw their home again.
The intriguing black-and-white photographs of the Villa’s wartime and post-war occupation provide a complex and rounded portrait of this structure, particularly its afterlife as a dance school and, later, a children’s physiotherapy centre. An Irish audience might draw comparisons with the familiar turbulent history of Eileen Grey’s E1027, built concurrently to Tugendhat in 1928. Photographer Miloš Budík’s photograph of a group of young women in the physiotherapy centre, taken in 1956, is particularly captivating: an accidental, temporary use distils some of the most promising aspects of modern architecture: light, airiness, reflection, ventilation, to create a humanistic space for living.
The Villa Tugendhat exhibition – presented by the Embassy of the Czech Republic and the Villa Tugendhat – is free to enter and runs at the Irish Architectural Archive from 22 January to 10 April 2026.
the write-up is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2026.
Cloistered in a thicket of suburbia just beyond the Dodder, Richview opened its doors on Friday 22 May for Outside In, the UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy’s annual end-of-year exhibition. The exhibition was opened by State Architect Conor Sreenan, following an alumni tour, an industry tour, and the finale of the student curator-led panel discussion series, Wasters, under its inevitably escalated title: Absolute Wasters.
Chaired by Professor Hugh Campbell, the Absolute Wasters panel brought together five so-called wasters, though of course they were anything but: Tanad Aaron, Ciarán Cuffe, Jane Larmour, Ste Murray and Orla O’Kane. Each speaker having followed a rich and varied pathway through and beyond architecture, and each was invited to present a single image or slide connected to a moment where wasted time, wasted effort, or apparent distraction had later proved creatively valuable.
Curated for the momentary threshold between study and practice, intellect and action, optimism and ambition, the panel began with former Green Party MEP and current co-chair of the European Greens Ciarán Cuffe. Cuffe appeared before Evelyn Hofer’s Dublin Sky (1966), an image of the city as seen from O’Connell Bridge House, the Liffey axial carving through Dublin below as smoke rose from the chimneys of the gap-toothed quays. The image demonstrated how much Dublin has changed, and also conveyed how Cuffe's position as a student of architecture was developed in response to Dublin's urban condition.
Cuffe recalled climbing the UCD water tower to hang a bow tie around its collar, and his creation of some kind of floating temple-like contraption in the lake on campus: alla Aldo Rossi Irlandese? What was this all about? Being a waster, maybe, yet the career that followed continued in that same counter-current, through political action, public engagement, campaigning and elected membership of the European parliament.
Interdisciplinary artist Tanad Aaron reflected on a formative moment for the Forerunner collective, being confronted by waste in their own practice, through the dismantling or moreover demolishing their first exhibition in the Project Arts Centre. Thereafter the group were forced to reconsider their approach and change how they consider their work not only relative to its potential for reappropriation beyond its present purpose, but in its ability to provoke paradigms of excess, waste and notions of permanence and impermanence.
Orla O’Kane, winner of the 2024 RIAI Emerging Award and former AAI President, mapped her multifaceted relationship with architecture through a matrix images on culture, community, conversation and construction. Yet she also spoke of confronting practical realities to realise design’s potential to deliver improvements to people’s everyday lives. Identifying that when an expense which appears as minor waste on a large project’s spreadsheet can represent a quiet design victory in her work, which when multiplied across a project can butterfly into architectural improvements of substance for the many.
Photographer, actor, filmmaker and UCD architecture graduate Ste Murray also sensibly refused the idea that ‘waster’ could ever be compressed into a single presentation slide. Through an enrapturing spoken word delivery, Ste proclaimed a philosophy of creative freedom, as a well-led creative life should be all-encompassing. His appetite for genre-defying prolific practice unveiled through an anecdote of his poster exclaiming 'MORE' that hung above his bed in his college years.
Resurfacing the materiality of practice, Jane Larmour of ALWA Architects embraced the inspiration found in the beauty of stones collected by her children on trips to the beach. She reflected on the unbuilt, and how the ideas aren’t wasted but in due course often reappear in her work through models and watercolours, exalting all experience as an education, achieved through a patient accumulation of varied ways of seeing.
As Orla’s multiple images and Ste’s rejection of the single-slide premise made clear, the conversation was never going to behave entirely by the prescribed rules. To write about it now is also slightly strange, having been behind the curtain of the exhibition’s organisation and having my own thesis on display. Through this contradiction, the review inevitably inverts itself, writing about Outside In becomes a way of reflecting from the inside out.
To peek as a student from behind the curtain, what emerges from the show is not a sense of assertive, self-anointed certainty, cast in perfect models of concrete and stone. Instead, the creations are quick, cheap, fast, fragile and alive. Each expresses an idea frozen in motion: an iteration, a proposition, a piece of thinking not yet cut perfectly clean. That is the distinct richness of the student exhibition. Every material work has been critically considered, but each has also been pushed against the tightest budget towards the broadest ambitions. These range from the hemp-farming regeneration of post-industrial Welsh landscapes to community-led care for elderly through housing embroidered into the urban fabric and weaving history of Dublin’s Liberties. All of this work is diligently conceived, then plotted, stuck, traced, reprinted, cut, glued, held, moved and hung before, with a shared sigh of relief, being exposed to all.
Celebrating the work of almost 350 students across the school, who exhibited across the Richview campus, the show included work from the Undergraduate and Master’s in Architecture programmes, the MSc in Urban Design and Planning, the MSc in Environmental Policy, and the MSc in Architecture, Urbanism and Climate Action. Students are prepared by a devoted teaching staff to be ethical, skilled and thoughtful future practitioners, positioned to adapt to the changing building profession and construction ecosystem, as they embrace climate resilience, imagining and designing together for a post-carbon future. The show’s initiative aims to bridge academia, practice, industry, and decision-makers, fostering a dynamic space for exchange, collaboration, and innovation.
Across drawings, models, material experiments, photography, film and podcasts, the exhibition and panel opened a window into how future practitioners can and are beginning to redefine the role of architecture, planning and environmental policy in a rapidly changing world. There is no single thesis here, no neat school-wide position, but rather a productive mess of approaches: careful, critical, sometimes unruly, and often full of hope.
Absolute Wasters was held on May 22nd 2026 in the Planning and Environmental Policy Building in the UCD Schoolof Architecture, Richview. Outside In ran in Richview from May 22nd until June 19th.
Peter O’Grady reviews 'Absolute Wasters', a panel discussion between Tanad Aaron, Ciarán Cuffe, Jane Larmour, Ste Murray and Orla O’Kane. The discussion was chaired by Professor Hugh Campbell and organised by UCD student curators. The event was held on Friday May 22nd as part of the opening night of 'Outside In', the UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy’s annual end-of-year exhibition.
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Conversation Club, a lecture series presented by The Office of Public Works (OPW) in partnership with the National Library of Ireland (NLI), is founded on a deceptively-simple premise: public conversations with architects.
Architects are typically well equipped to talk about their work to public audiences, yet the notion of public conversation has a deeper resonance here. Unique in its presentation by public bodies, the lecture series signals a new wave of public-sector support behind the value of design in the built environment, and champions the architects on the ground promoting it. It is perhaps counter to narratives presented in recent times, touting design as a frivolous expense, specifically with regards to the prioritisation of ‘cost and efficiency over design standards’ [1], as if these ambitions are somehow opposed.
While founded on a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) basis, the lectures are free, and open to anyone, offering architects an opportunity to state their case in support of design thinking and advocate for the profession at-large.
On this particular evening it was REIR Studio’s turn to take to the stand at the Joly Theatre in the NLI. REIR are a relatively new architectural practice in contrast to their peers in the series, which include the likes of ABK Architects and Donaghy + Dimond Architects, as well as international practices Galmstrup and Duncan McCauley.
Conor Sreenan, State Architect with the OPW and host for the evening, described the practice as part of the ‘jilted generation’ - a generation of architects who graduated out of the 2008 recession, finding themselves increasingly locked out of larger-scale and public works projects.
However, as demonstrated through the depth and variety of projects on display, REIR appear to be outliers in this regard, with substantial experience in public work. Formed in early 2020 by Mandy Channon and Colin MacSuibhne, in the early formation of the practice REIR found themselves with time on their hands. They dedicated this time to the tedious application process for small works projects in Ireland - public projects that notably do not require minimum turnovers to be considered. With a success rate of about 1 in 10 applications, REIR eventually found themselves with a respectable amount of educational commissions. Of the nine projects presented, seven were educational projects - a growing body of work that inspired a palpable sense of optimism in the room.
Many of the commissions were for Special Educational Needs (SEN) classrooms for schools scattered across the country. These projects often involved careful intervention into an existing fabric of playspaces and mid-century buildings - many of which were Basil Boyd-Barrett schools [2].
It is apparent that existing structures and contexts play a vital role in the practice’s approach. A series of carefully-articulated survey and demolition drawings are presented at the fore of each project, evidencing an almost surgical interventionist approach that extends beyond the refurbishment of buildings themselves, manifesting in a broader ethos of repair.
REIR’s projects demonstrate an uncanny ability to find opportunities and to unlock value on constrained and challenging sites, be it from a spatial or budgetary perspective - often both. Their work always looks for alternative ways ‘in’ to a project; to find novel means of solving the problem, and to challenge the brief wherever possible. This approach is as intelligent as it is pragmatic, showcasing a deep understanding of what it takes to make architecture happen.
On the residential side, this manifests in challenging clients' preconceptions of what the desired outcome looks like. By focusing on the ambitions - growing family, more space, connection to the garden - rather than the desired material outcomes - ‘an extension’ - REIR can begin to explore ways to open-up a project, figuratively and literally.
A bungalow in Greystones is cast upon the projector: red lines indicate the points of incision, domestic acupuncture. Walls and rooms are removed to make space for a generous open-plan kitchen-living-dining area, enabled predominantly by a single bay window, provided here in lieu of extension, to establish a renewed connection to the cascading garden beyond. Ultimately, it was through working-with, rather than adding-on, that unlocked the project. The vaulted ceilings that sail overhead serve as a reminder of what we can do with what we already have.
Similarly, a cottage in Dundrum is presented as a reaction to as-found conditions; a stone wall extending inside to outside, a novel crank in the plan, and a cherry blossom in the garden. The two-storey brick-faced extension is perhaps most notable for its a double-height void, viewed initially by the clients as ‘wasted space’ within such a tight footprint - it has proven to be a much-loved feature of the extension, particularly by the family’s newest arrival. It features a clerestory window to introduce dynamic light and unexpected views of the cherry blossom that provides seemingly endless entertainment.
It is moments like these that seem to define many of REIR’s projects; a framed view of the landscape between schoolyard canopies, the joy of students racing down oversized ramps. Their work evokes a celebration of the everyday, as achieved through an understanding of practical realities, an ethos that extends across both their residential and educational output.
There is a sense of refinement throughout the projects; of learning and developing both details and systems of working. Projects are consciously adopted to dovetail with anticipated lapses in stage approvals (to which payments are often deferred). Details resolved in one project carry forward to the next, economies in design make space for architecture - deceptively simple geometries, figures and details are deployed as a mechanism of unlocking value elsewhere in a project in a bid to make the ordinary exceptional.
REIR’s work demonstrates a deep understanding of people and an ability to respectfully push back, to challenge convention, and ultimately, to find solutions people didn’t even know they wanted. This is not a case of the architect imposing their vision on the unsuspecting public; it is about having the tools to facilitate a meaningful conversation, to develop a mutual understanding and go beyond expectations in order to define the core ambitions of the work. This is the art of the brief.
The value of this particular skillset has been described by many architects over time, but perhaps it is the late Peter Aldington, the uncompromising and visionary British architect, who best described the humanity and empathy it demands in an essay about briefs:
‘The brief is the means by which the designer may come to understand the difficulties, disciplines and customs of a way of life … It is based firmly on existing functions and patterns of life as well as future needs …
The brief is a combined ‘exploration’ carried out by architect and client together. The architect learns about the difficulties, problems and desires of his client. The client learns of pressures outside his own requirement which will also influence the building design. It is essential to achieve this deep mutual understanding at a very early stage in the association before design work starts.
The initial process of briefing is not easy for either client or architect … The clue to producing a good brief, and consequently a good working design, is - simply - investigatory interest and enthusiasm’.
- Peter Aldington on briefs [3].
There is often limited room to exercise this skill in public works projects, but in a particularly impactful anecdote, REIR recalled a project where the initial brief outlined a location for SEN classrooms that would ultimately segregate these classrooms from the rest of the school and invariably produce a sense of separation for the students that required additional assistance. In observing this, REIR advocated for the restoration of an existing building and repositioning of the proposed classrooms to a more equitable location. It was recognised that this move would ultimately result in increased costs - a hard sell in a public works project where margins are squeezed, yet the necessity was understood and the move received public support. This was undoubtedly a commercial risk to both the project and the practice that arose on the subject of principles, and might be one that a more world-weary practice would be unlikely to take.
It is often espoused that your ethics become your reputation, and seeing the capacity for REIR to go from strength to strength with this spirit should be a call to arms for more architects to do the same.
‘To make a building well assumes an understanding of people - to build otherwise is degrading.
Materials and people; understand them - then build.’
- Peter Aldington (1933-2026)
REIR’s lecture concluded with an engaging conversation that spanned procurement issues, the inevitable appropriation of buildings once handed over, and the value in intermediaries and advocates in the design process.
On its ninth rendition, Conversation Club has solidified its footing as a valuable new contribution to the architectural calendar, seamlessly relevant alongside long-established fixtures by the likes of the IAF and the AAI - providing a distinctively public space to discuss and engage with our built environment and those involved in its making.
As the lights flickered on in the Joly Theatre, there was a sense of hope for the future. This was REIR Studio’s first public lecture of their work. It will not be the last.
Gary Hamilton reviews a lecture by REIR Studio, part of the 'Conversation Club' lecture series presented by the Office of Public Works in partnership with the National Library of Ireland. The lecture was held on Wednesday May 13th in the Joly Theatre of the National Library of Ireland.
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On the afternoon of 9 May, the Hunting Room in the conference suite at Castletown House in Celbridge, Co. Kildare was full of people who had forsaken the rare sunshine to hear architectural and social historian Adrian Tinniswood give an illustrated lecture on his latest book, The Houses of Guinness: The Lives, Homes and Fortunes of the Great Brewing Dynasty. The book was published by Scala in November 2025 to coincide with the release of the Netflix historical drama series House of Guinness, and it is as rich in entertaining anecdotes and visual opulence as any production company could possibly desire. The same was true of the lecture, which was amply illustrated with photographs of the various houses under discussion.
Professor of British Cultural History at the University of Buckingham, Adjunct Professor of History at Maynooth University, and author of 19 previous books, Tinniswood is adept at conveying the human side of architectural history to a broad audience. He delivered the talk with great verbal and visual storytelling, and more than a touch of humour, as when stating that by 1852 Benjamin Lee Guinness had already doubled the size of St Anne's in Clontarf and owned a house in Mayfair, but 'that was not enough, so he bought a little weekend shooting lodge' — a photograph of the sprawling Ashford Castle appearing on screen with perfect comic timing.
Drawing on Tinniswood's extensive research for the book, the lecture was wide ranging in its coverage of the family's various characters from the 1750s to the 1960s, with examples of their substantial philanthropic works alongside the growing list of house purchases and renovations. The talk was held together by the refrain, 'but that wasn't big enough', which became a running joke as Tinniswood narrated how successive generations of the Guinness family acquired and extended house after house in Dublin, London, and the Irish and English countrysides. While men such as Edward Cecil Guinness, first Lord Iveagh, extended their political influence by strategically purchasing properties well located for socialising with the likes of the Viceroy in Ireland (hence the purchase of Farmleigh) or British royalty (Elveden Hall being near Sandringham) [1], daily household management and the burden of entertaining typically fell to the lady of the house. Tinniswood related that Edward Cecil's wife, Adelaide, burst into tears when presented with the deeds to yet another house in the 1870s or '80s — more work [2]. By contrast, Oonagh Guinness embraced the freedom of having her own house — Luggala, a Gothic revival castle in the Wicklow Hills — to host celebrity parties in the 1950s and '60s, with all that entailed (the work fell to her butler) [3].
The architectural styles of the many houses owned by successive Guinnesses varied considerably. Beginning with the Georgian era, examples include, amongst others, the comparatively modest Beaumont House, still standing in the hospital grounds in Dublin; 80 St Stephen's Green (aka Iveagh House), a Dublin townhouse designed by Richard Castle in the 1730s, which has served as offices for the Department of Foreign Affairs since it was given to the state by Rupert Guinness, second Earl of Iveagh in 1939; and Castletown House, the 1720s Palladian palazzo whose façade was designed by Alessandro Galilei with interiors potentially by Edward Lovett Pearce [4].
Less predictable styles include 1860s Indo-Saracenic revival interiors at Elveden Hall in Suffolk, commissioned by former owner Duleep Singh, the exiled Maharajah of the Sikh Empire; a 1930s faux medieval manor at Bailiffscourt in Sussex, compiled by an antique dealer from salvaged historic materials; Jacobethan mishmashes; skilful mid-twentieth-century imitation Georgian and Gothic interiors at Luttrellstown Castle, Co. Dublin by Felix Harbord; and several whimsical follies [5].
It was particularly appropriate that this public lecture was held at Castletown House, the subject of the final chapter of Tinniswood s book. Castletown was purchased by Desmond and Mariga Guinness in 1967 in order to preserve and open it to the public. The earliest and finest example of the Palladian style in Ireland, Castletown had fallen into dereliction but has been painstakingly restored in stages by Desmond and Mariga Guinness and the Irish Georgian Society, The Castletown Foundation, and the Office of Public Works [6].
Tinniswood brought his talk to a close by summarising prevailing attitudes to Irish country houses in the 1950s and '60s and Desmond Guinness's leading role in changing that perception and founding the conservation movement in Ireland. At a time when big houses were seen as colonial relics, fit for demolition in a modern republic, Desmond Guinness re-established the Irish Georgian Society and argued for the preservation of historic houses on the basis that they are good for the economy and tourism and worth enjoying as things of beauty — the French Revolution did not demolish Versailles, after all [7].
Of course, we are now additionally motivated by the environmental imperative to conserve and adapt built heritage. Yet the place of specific typologies within broader cultural politics and the inherent value of beauty (however subjective or demographically influenced its perception) remain important considerations.
Informative, engaging, and gently provocative, the talk was an excellent example of public history and was well received by those present. For the full story, the book is a very worthwhile read. In concluding his lecture, Tinniswood echoed his tongue-in-cheek opening, 'Guinness is good for you,' by stating, 'Ireland would be a greyer place without Desmond Guinness. And the world would be a greyer place without the Guinnesses.'
Felicity Maxwell reviews an illustrated lecture by Adrian Tinniswood, author of 'The Houses of Guinness: The Lives, Homes and Fortunes of the Great Brewing Dynasty'. The lecture took place in the Hunting Room of Castletown House, on May 9th, 2026, and was presented by the Office of Public Works (OPW) in association with The Castletown Foundation.
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