On architect Shane O’ Toole

One thousand seven hundred and sixteen words for a man of architecture. 

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The following was read as a tribute to Shane O’ Toole at his book launch online on 22 February 2022. Only minor edits have been made to this text, which was written to be read aloud. 

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Down from my shelf I take a book. It can be impossible being an architect – or wonderful – either way, after a time, you look for architecture everywhere and in everything. And so, it is with books. The book I now hold is but a span of my hand; I can hold it like a flat black, brick. Embossed in silver into a thick tight tactile cover, my fingers slide and hop between each of the distinct and imperfect shapes that wrap front and back, counting, gathering those ninety-nine tesserae of the title toward me. This is the new book of architecture by Ireland’s Shane O’Toole. 

First, and perhaps most obvious to this architect looking for architecture everywhere, is the design and assembly of this book’s cover: tesserae resemble a floor, a floor of silver tiles laid side by side. They are ‘specials’, crafted, slightly different, of real individual value and intrigue yes – yet somehow, as things, they realise their true useful potential only when placed side by side. 

Inside too, this book is just like that, a series of individual, beautifully paced essays, particular, distinct, each focused on a moment or a building, or an event or an individual who have played some part in the recent history and cultural production of architecture in Ireland and beyond. With all ninety-nine stories gathered here from previous outings in newspapers, books, speeches, blogs, and more, O’Toole’s work finds robust strength in its own numbers. Organised in time, from earliest to latest – from an essay about drawing in 1989 to O’Toole’s recent dedication to architect John Meagher in 2021 – the effect of the gathering of this collection is not to insist a forced singular, reductive voice or didactic point of view, but rather the drawing of a map of recent architecture in and of Ireland.

These are the kind of essays you do not read in order. I expect each of us will chart our own course through, resting to engage again with the familiar (‘Apocalypse Now’ on architecture post Celtic Tiger from 2009) or the forgotten (‘Rebuilding the Republic’ from 2011 when O’ Toole assembled a recent history of Irish architecture from the annals of the AAI Awards). Moving through the works in this way, readers are invited to make and remake their own connections, to live and relive history, not as something consigned to the static, past, but something which continues to have influence on our evolving, contingent architectural present. 

I also see this cover like a black wall with a series of shuffling silver gelatin portraits lightly pinned upon it. These are portraits without pictures though, no photographs, or drawings or sketches accompany the essays in the book. For a book on architecture in 2021 this is brave; I suspect pragmatic too. But to make a book without images is to ignite the imagination in another way. It commends these reviews and views of architecture to a narrative where the mind is active and engaged. The reader is not only reading, but they are also participating, getting a glimpse of how Shane O’Toole reads his world, joins his dots, draws his lines. 

The silver on the cover too, reminds me of a mirror, but not the shiny front face, but the back, behind the glass, where the magic happens. Shane O’Toole is standing behind each story, and, as he holds each mirrored tesserae toward us, he is inviting us to look into the frame his words provide and to see ourselves, individually, collectively, reflected back. But this is not vanity, or some beauty parade, as these silver tiles also act as looking glasses, each essay a device through which we are also asked to examine, to scrutinise and to take responsibility and to take the criticism.

Here is revealed a true role of a critic, not simply to review, or to confirm what they like, or they don’t, to list what is hot and what’s not.  Rather a critics mission, as Michael Sorkin, has said, is to ‘help vet the instigation of the social and formal parameters of building’. Writing, working alone, as is the life of a critic, Shane O’Toole’s labour has not been to write a hit, but to write an essay, and another and another, and another more. In architecture, he has been a critic of worth because he has been regularly concerned not only with the event, but with its causes, its effects, even when such events may have been mostly forgotten. 

I suspect too, that taken together, for the author, this collection is an act of resistance against a contemporary culture in which essential writing and criticism are often not commissioned or are too easily forgotten or discarded as editors bow down to the thrall of the novel and the new, or are forced to sate our click-click appetite with the binary and the bilge. Instead, in this book we find no broken links, but page after page of words, printed on paper so thin you see the next story is headed your way before you can even turn the page. It is then I realise that these cover tesserae are not just a floor but a rug, unfurled, laid out, a place made, a device repeatedly employed by O’Toole to invite architecture to attend, and to be attended to, especially the buildings, and the architects, which at times, got no attention elsewhere. 

In his praise for the sister book to this one, 101 Hosannahs for Architecture, Hugh Campbell considered words to describe Shane O’Toole. He wrote: ‘He is variously: critic, historian, advocate, reader, confessor, champion, campaigner, visionary’. I would like to add one more, helpfully omitted on that list: architect. You see, Shane O’Toole is one of Ireland’s greatest architects. Architecture is not only found in buildings and an architect can reasonably tend to architecture in many ways. That is perhaps, a debate for another day, but let us agree here that certainly architects like to be part of the action when things get built. And O’Toole has been part of the action when much of Ireland has been built.

Of course, he designed and built things too: a stage to welcome the Pope and a theatre where children perform and learn. But I think that over the decades Shane O’ Toole has been busy building foundations upon which I and others who desired to write about architecture have been inspired to stand. And in as much as the ninety-nine tesserae stand side-by-side and together and on this cover, there is also space between them, gaps, cracks, which I think reflect the space he has both made and created for others to step into by giving writing about architecture a good name, here and abroad. 

Shane O’Toole is utterly unique in that he has enough knowledge of the world of architecture off the island to be truly credible in demanding better from those architects still on it. And such is Shane’s skill at noticing, linking, and grounding the work from here in some larger, conversation in architecture beyond the island, that he has been a welcome, relentless advocate and ally for Irish architecture in many rooms far from home. 

But these gaps on the cover too offer some sense of the real and present cracks in our own critical infrastructure here in Ireland. These essays must not be confined to some nostalgic history. By coming out together in this volume, they make apparent the fact that today there is no critic in a national newspaper in Ireland tending to the social or cultural aspects of contemporary architecture.

Today architecture, despite some kinds of success, feels cut adrift as a social and cultural force. It is a topic explicitly addressed in his essay from 2021, ‘Identity Check’, written first for the Architectural Review, in which Shane puts down in black and white that the critical culture of Irish architecture is in peril, reminding the profession of the failure to advocate for itself, pleading that that ‘the threat to the lifeblood of the profession must be faced down in both parts of the island if the new-found global reputation of Irish architecture is to survive let alone prosper’. 

 The subtitle of this book is ‘An elegy of fragments from life in the field’. Although this book charts the unique and remarkable story of this little island north and south, its architectural ambition and success, our wonderful capacity as a people to be unusually comfortable leading at the centre of it all, while enjoying getting away with being peripheral to proceedings, these essays remind us that a culture of architecture is a fragile thing. Many of the essays from this thirty-three-year period, those that touch on how architects get to do work; of the rather bizarre rejection of the public realm; of quality; of the need of political leadership and policies with teeth; of the need for local and national champions and architects who themselves advocate for each other; these are issues of those days, but also of my day, of yours, of this day. 

In 2020, Shane O’ Toole was invited to write a letter of advice to a young architect, as part of a series in the Architectural Review. The advice read: 

‘Choose your apprenticeship(s) with care; 

But choose your friends with more. You will advance through life together. 

Make colleagues of artists of different stripes; 

And of dead architects who will become your whispering shadows from history. 

Read widely on architecture; 

But even more fiction and poetry. 

Keep a sketchbook in your pocket. 

But don’t just draw your work. Write it too. You will be surprised at what you discover. 

Travel far and wide, but slowly. 

And smile as much and as often as you can. Kindness goes a long way’. 

In this piece too, Shane cites Gio Ponti who declared all that is needed is to “Love Architecture’. I have no doubt that Shane O’Toole has loved it for four decades. 

But love is fickle, fleeting, dramatic, corruptible. More than love, as per his own advice, Shane, in his practice, with words as his medium, has shown architecture some real kindness. And he was right, kindness does go a long way. Just look – and read – how far we’ve come. 

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