As the National Gallery of Ireland gets set to mark its 170th birthday this month, we revisit Jeannette Farrell’s 2016 interview with architect Orla O’Kane on the Millennium Wing.
“Just so indulgent – all that light from above.”
“Dublin’s a really interesting place, it really is. And I find it more interesting the longer I’m away,” so says Orla O’Kane a London-based Irish architect who left Ireland ten years ago. “You go to other cities and you realise that Dublin is not like other European capital cities, because it was a provincial town until 1922. And so we don’t have any of these big imperial gestures that define Paris, for example, or civic or religious ones, either.”
Instead, O’Kane explains, what we do have is a city, domestic in scale and in relative ambition where the civic nestles up against the residential as a collection of private estates that butt up against each other; “I’m sure you would find it elsewhere in the world” observes O’Kane, “but for me it’s unique to Dublin. What really gives the city its character and identity is the predominance of that domestic typology that kind of conceals these cultural institutions behind it.”
By way of a perfect example is her favourite building: Benson and Forsyth’s Millennium Wing of the National Gallery of Ireland which was completed in 2002 and opened to unprecedented numbers of gallery visitors. “There’s very little available space in Dublin because so much of it was bought up on speculation. So now, the civic architecture is sort of in between homes or they have been built around them. That whole block – the corners are just Georgian terraced houses so right next to the gallery on the other side you have red brick homes,” she says.
Built to very tight spatial restrictions, the new wing was originally due to have a little more leg-room with the two Regency townhouses next door slated for demolition at a time in 1996 when, O’Kane notes, “the council weren’t feeling particularly protective of the historic landscape of Dublin”.
An unexpected appeal against the decision, however, left the buildings standing and the architects a rumoured single weekend in which to review their scheme.
The result of such a squeeze, is “part of what makes it feel like a living room for the city”, where the residential rear with their curved walls – “which is really amazing because you never see that” – protrudes into the gallery’s winter garden.
While O’Kane offers that the building might now be deeply unfashionable in architectural circles being, as it is, “very ’90s, all that beige and rusty red”, there is also much to love. With its façade built of Portland stone, an ode to the city’s grandest buildings, it is “completely different from anything around and that’s how you should interfere with a historic landscape; you should never try to recreate it.”
Perhaps most importantly for O’Kane it offers an elegant space in which to hide from the rain; ‘most of my memories of being in that space involve sheltering from the rain beside about five other people and I love that it’s so accessible that you can do that. There’s that kind of threshold space so you can chose to only experience it on that small scale. The sequence is amazing; you go through these doors and then you have what the architects have called a “decompression space” which is just this little cube that sits inside the kind of a glorified lobby but it’s a very defined volume.”
And then of course there’s the quadruple height space in which everything sits and is, as O’Kane concludes, ‘just so indulgent – all that light from above. It’s only really common in cathedrals and we’re not going to be building many more of those I don’t think…’
Orla O’Kane – National Gallery of Ireland, Millennium Wing
Architects: Benson & Forsyth
Orla O’Kane is a graduate of the UCD School of Architecture. After working in the education sector, and following a stint on the 2012 Olympics, she founded London based OOK Architects, working primarily on conservation, residential and cultural projects. She is also the founder of Insert-Name-Here Workshop & Studios, a social enterprise providing affordable workspace for designers and makers.
Words: Jeannette Farrell
