John Tuomey

Scaffold

Architect John Tuomey discusses his memoir, Middle Quarter, tracing his journey from a childhood spent on Irish construction sites to becoming

Key takeaways

• Tuomey's memoir was sparked by a COVID-19 lockdown email from his sister asking about their childhood home.
• His upbringing moving every two years across Ireland provided him with a unique, foundational respect for builders and site work.

Main topics

• Architectural Memoir
• Childhood on Construction Sites

Notable quotes

I would just say it's storytelling.

Conclusion

A deeply reflective episode that highlights how personal history and s

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This episode of Scaffold is supported by Velux. That's right, the roof window people. But here's what I didn't know. They've been researching daylight and indoor climate for over 80 years, and they publish that research for free. Guides on designing with daylight, building performance, healthy indoor spaces. It's all useful stuff, whether you ever buy a window or not. And it's all available at velux.com forward slash design. Go have a look. Speaker 1 (0:34) Good evening, everyone. Thanks for being here. It's great to see so many people out on such a beautiful summer's evening. I'm Matthew Blunderfield, a producer at the Architecture Foundation, and this is a special installment of our Architecture on Stage series here at the Barbican, where we're recording an episode of Scaffold, the AF's podcast, with my guest tonight, John Toomey. Toomey needs little introduction in this room, so I'll keep this short. He was born in Tralee in 1954, grew up in Dundalk, studied architecture at UCD, and on graduating went on to London to work at James Sterling's. In 1988, he founded O'Donnell and Toomey with Sheila O'Donnell, who's here with us tonight, a practice that has given us the Irish Film Institute and the Gallery of Photography and Temple Bar, the Glucksman and Cork. the Lyric in Belfast, the Saas-Rieh-Hawke Student Center at the LSE, and the V &A East Museum in London, amongst many others. He's made six appearances at the Venice Biennale, is the inaugural professor of architectural design at UCD, and in 2015, jointly with Sheila, has won both the RIBA Royal Gold Medal and the Brunner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, each given for a lifetime's work. Speaker 1 (2:00) But we're here tonight to talk about John's writing. Speaker 1 (2:05) First Quarter, which is the first installment of his memoir, took us from a childhood spent moving from town to town around Ireland as far as the founding of the practice in prose that owed as much to poetry and drama and a literary tradition as it does to architecture writing. Middle Quarter, which is the piece we're going to be discussing at length tonight, picks up the story from there. So please join me in welcoming John Toomey. Speaker 1 (2:42) So John I wanted to start by asking... Where the impulse to write this kind of memoir began? I mean, we're all familiar with the architectural monograph. This is usually the site, the repository of a practice. Very rarely do architects write a literary memoir. Speaker 3 (3:05) I mean, I guess I have been writing. across my life about the projects that Sheila and I do and I've been writing. Speaker 3 (3:17) you know, as a professor for projects and student motivations. Speaker 3 (3:22) But you will remember that we had a lockdown and I come from a family of five siblings with a difference in age of about 10 years. And I got an email in the middle of a dark night during the dark ages of the COVID when we were all trapped in our houses. I got an email from my younger sister, youngest sister, asking... what it was like in the ten years before she was born. You know, what was it like moving house? What was it like living in the country? Because she's attached to the last living spot where my parents settled. So I started, you know, writing her an email. Speaker 3 (4:11) without any plan in mind. And I wrote... Speaker 3 (4:16) I don't remember, can't remember the house where I was born. You know that rhyme, I remember, I remember the house where I was born. Anyway, when I started writing that sentence, I just felt enjoying myself. I just continued and without realising it, I'd started to write a memoir. There was no other prompt. Speaker 3 (4:40) You call it a literary... I'm just a storyteller, I think. I like... telling my own version of what happens, which isn't always everybody else's recollection. So I think I like shaping. things into stories, which Speaker 2 (5:00) I think Speaker 3 (5:01) everybody does. But that's what I wouldn't say it's a literary memoir, I would just say it's storytelling. Speaker 1 (5:09) I think it's a memoir that's very good at noticing little things. I mean, especially the first installment. There are all kinds of tender and also banal, but... ultimately profoundly meaningful anecdotes that I think start to paint a picture about not only who you are, but where you're from and who your family is as well. Very intimate moments that kind of expose little cruelties of people around you, as well as the kind of tenderness that abounded in your childhood. I don't want to turn this into a kind of psychoanalysis on stage, so I want to focus more on environments, And very formative people. Chief amongst them was your father. Speaker 3 (5:54) Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:55) An engineer by training who was working across Ireland. And during your childhood, you seemed to spend a lot of time in the shadow of his projects, moving around from site to site. Tell us more about that experience. Yeah. Speaker 3 (6:10) My father was a civil engineer, a site engineer, working for a construction company called John Paulder. now a large construction company in Ireland. But he was in it at the beginning. Speaker 3 (6:25) directly after he left college. He joined that company. So he was their key man on large-scale projects, infrastructural projects like town drainage scheme or... or a factory or actually sets of factories. Speaker 2 (6:43) And each project took about two Speaker 3 (6:44) years. So we would live adjacent to the site, you know, in the local town where the construction was happening. And then the project would finish and we'd move house to another part of the country, north, south. North again, south, you know, we just crossed the country diagonally. every two years until I was 10. Speaker 3 (7:12) So yeah, I grew up on his. building sites at a time when you could be a child on a building site, climbing the scaffold and up the ladders and under Speaker 2 (7:25) the desk in the site office. Speaker 3 (7:28) So I kind of feel... Actually, in my professional life, I kind of feel fond of builders, which isn't what every architect thinks about builders. I feel sorry for the builder, if you know what I mean. out in the wet and the cold and all that. so Speaker 3 (7:47) watching him work, learning to draw with him, doing land surveying with him, watching the measure of his work. walking behind him holding a chain across windy fields. He also was a silent figure, so he didn't go in for... half as much talking as I would. Speaker 1 (8:09) You recount, though, in the first book about how, despite the fact he was not a very talkative person, he still furnished your home with kind of evidence of architecture. Beyond his own practice as an engineer, there were stacks and stacks of A.D. Yeah, Speaker 3 (8:27) outside his office door. He subscribed to Architecture Design Magazine. architectural design in the 60s. from about 60. Speaker 3 (8:39) 4 to 68 or something 63 to 68 so you know when I would come to Stitts after school to wait in his office I could read the ID Speaker 3 (8:52) So when I was... Speaker 3 (8:56) 13, 14, I was reading Speaker 3 (9:01) Frampton's reviews of Starling's new buildings. And Speaker 1 (9:05) Kenneth Frampton is somewhere in the audience tonight. Speaker 3 (9:08) I've been hanging around Frampton all my life. But, you know, I was living in a town which had no cinema. You know, I was living in small places and reading the Architectural Design magazine. I'm reading Alvin Boyarsky, you know, reviewing. Speaker 3 (9:26) the Starlings History Faculty at Cambridge. So when I came to college, Speaker 3 (9:31) I was already immersed in London. practice probably and in the culture of that you know in that aspect I don't think my father read them I think he must have got an offer to subscribe to it or something he must be the only site engineer in Ireland who had a regular subscription to AG magazine or maybe he wanted to feed my you know I mean, they were there for me to read. And luckily, I still have. you know, still have some of them. Speaker 1 (10:09) Let's talk about college now, University College Dublin. As I was preparing for this conversation, I heard about this moment in the history of the college where it was on the brink of losing its certification. And there is this period called the Flying Circus where it was a kind of all-hands-on-deck emergency to get the brightest minds to come in and overhaul the program. This was... immediately before you became part of the school as a student. Yeah. But presumably, it fundamentally changed what you were about to learn. Can you talk about this moment? Speaker 3 (10:47) Do you know? If you ever read... cartoons when you were a boy. Do you know that cartoon where the door has just closed and there's a whoosh behind it and a little cloud? The Flying Circus had just flown when we arrived. I was 17 when I came to Dublin and into the studios at UCD. The Flying Circus were still buzzing around fourth and fifth year. But we were never taught directly by Edward Jones or Mike Gold or... Finaletics and more. or the Scots guys, you know, Macmillan and Medstein. But they had a huge influence because they rocked the school. And actually they drove out the devils that were there before. So the school felt scoured. Speaker 3 (11:47) and ready, you know? We miss them, but... you know Speaker 3 (11:54) And we had an amazing thing that we didn't understand at the time. Sorry, we understood it deeply, but we didn't know what it meant. Is that our first year tutor was Shane de Blakam. who was not, he was 10 years older than us maybe at the time, but he was just back from Louis Kahn's office. I mean, like, just back that morning, you feel like we were his first contact with Dublin on his return. He had been studying with Cannes at Pennsylvania and then worked with Cannes on the British Art Centre in Yale. Did the working drawings for that building, or some of them. So when Shane, you know, when we met Shane, I'm talking because I met Sheila when we were in first year, so I'm saying we, but when our generation met his, when he came into the studio, it was like truth had arrived, you know, in the studio because he's such, he had such commitment to what he had learned, what he had gleaned. from the studio of Louis Kahn. But he didn't talk about Louis Kahn. I don't think, Sheila might correct my storytelling here, but I don't think he ever really mentioned him. He just talked about the principles, which were fundamental principles, if you like. So we have this amazing episode of having a fervent... um evangelical tutor. And I remember there was no other structure evident in the school because the flying circus had flown. So it was a great feeling of beginning again, beginning, you know. Speaker 1 (13:29) There was one member of that circus, that so-called circus, that you did have some contact with. It was Ed Jones. Ed Jones, yeah. Speaker 3 (13:38) There was a kind of a desert in our second part of our time at college. I wouldn't even call it our education. There was a kind of a blank period when... Because we were a bit troublesome as students, I think. and we didn't have that much time for the people who were running the studio. So I was doing my thesis project. You know, in those days, that was the thing, that your thesis project was the thing. And the teaching staff had no... Speaker 3 (14:12) real interest except maybe disapproval for what I was doing. And Ed Jones, I think, was on a visit, maybe to do a lecture, and he walked into the review. Speaker 3 (14:23) picked it out and spoke directly to me about my drawings, which was an amazing feeling of being, you know, blessed or something. And then when I came to London... months later I just looked him up because he had been kind enough to be interested in the work. and he had no work in his office and I had my nine drawings, you know, reduced to postcard size and he said, send them into Starling and, you know, Starling was a... a distant hero. You know, Starling was on another plane from us humans. So it never occurred to me to do that. And I said, no. And he said, send those drawings in to Sterling. So I did and put them in an envelope and wrote a little letter. And I was working. I'd just started working in an office I wasn't enjoying. Speaker 3 (15:23) At the end of my first week, I posted that letter on this Friday. And then at the end of my first week, the following Friday, my first week in the office. the people in Speaker 2 (15:32) the office are going out for a pint and I thought, what am Speaker 3 (15:34) I doing here? Where are my drawings? I've sent my only drawings away, so I can't even go for an interview anywhere. So I rang Starling's office at six o'clock on a Friday when my colleagues in the new office had gone to the pub. And this woman answered the phone and I said, would you mind sending me my drawings back because I need them? And she said, oh, we answer every letter. If you send a portfolio, there will be an answer. And I said, well, I didn't get one. And she said, well, then it must be because your drawings must be on Mr. Starling's desk. Hold the line. And then I was sitting and then he said, hello. And I said, oh, and he said, nice drawings actually, when can you start? And I said, well, he said, Monday. And I said, and I went down to the pub where my new colleagues are drinking and I said, I'm off. Speaker 3 (16:36) My new employer didn't think that was funny. And anyway, next Monday I started with Jim and stayed there. That was it. Yeah, that was it. Speaker 1 (16:46) Let's talk more about your time working at Stirlings. This is at the beginning of the Stats Gallery. Yeah. Speaker 3 (16:55) What Speaker 1 (16:55) did you learn about design? Speaker 3 (16:58) The way we worked in the engine room was that he would get an invitation to do something and he might have a starting idea and he would say, try that out. And then he would come down at lunchtime and say, no, no, try it the other way around. So by the end of the day, you might have drawn... three schemes up, you know, like fast plan elevation, X-centimetric. And then he would take them home over the weekend and then he would come back and say, no, let's try this. So week by week, you just drew schemes, you know, and learned, I mean, you learn to put projects together out of briefs and try things out and then abandon that and then try something else. And So what I learned, I think, was how to start. Speaker 3 (17:54) analytically and then how to make subjective, how to decide which direction to go. Speaker 3 (18:00) But I'm not, I wouldn't say I learned to work the way he worked. But I did learn about tenacity, that the only way to get things done is, and a crucial function of the architect, is to hold on to the thought and stand for the thought, you know. I mean... Speaker 3 (18:26) Buildings are, there might be one or two or, you know, if you're lucky, three ideas in a building. And they might take, if you're lucky, five years to execute. But it is the architect who keeps reminding. Speaker 3 (18:41) everybody in the room, you know, of the one or two or three ideas that it is, you know. And Starling was very good at that, at just holding on. Speaker 3 (18:57) When we won the Stuttgart competition, which we won without any engineering advice or any... just drawing, actually recycling ideas that he'd done in other German competitions. We won it and he had appointed Arabs as his engineers, but Arabs had done no work. Speaker 3 (19:18) So he rang Arab. So it just finished the Pompidou Centre for Rogers in Paris. And he said, I want a big gallery in Stuttgart. And they said, oh, that's wonderful news. We'll send you around the A team. Speaker 3 (19:32) And they came around, the A team came into the office. They must have been very disappointed in the state of the office. because they'd just finished the Pompidou Centre and we were in a basement. Anyway, they told him everything was wrong. He had thought you could bring the services down through the thickness of the walls. He thought the roofs could be transparent. He thought we had no plant room in the building. So the aid team said, don't worry, we'll take this away. We'll get rid of that. We'll get rid of that. We know what to do. And Starling sat through the whole meeting just... And I was amazed that he didn't say anything at all. He didn't object to what they said. He just didn't respond. So they left the room. Speaker 3 (20:24) And I said, what Speaker 2 (20:25) was that? Speaker 3 (20:27) And he just picked up the phone, rang Arabs again and said, could you send us around the B team? Which Speaker 2 (20:35) was just brilliant, you Speaker 3 (20:36) know. Speaker