First opening their doors for business in Dublin in 1988, O’Donnell + Tuomey design high quality one-off buildings for a wide range of clients and building types.
Almost all of their buildings have received awards, with the workload in recent years being focused on arts and educational buildings, including university buildings, schools, theatres, cinemas, galleries, museums and libraries.
Much of that work has been carried out within the curtilage of historic protected structures and sensitive landscapes.
In 2008, the practice opened a second office in Cork where it is working on projects for the University College Cork and a number of community schemes.
O’Donnell + Tuomey have become experts at taking a brief, understanding the nature of a site and the needs of the users.
They approach each project with a fresh and open mind, thriving on the challenge of responding to the particular requirements of each new project. Indeed, they are ‘specialists in non specialisation’.
The LSE aspires to have the “best Student Building in the UK”. It is seeking a sustainable and exemplary world class Students’ Centre at the heart of its central London campus. The intention is to create a unique and beautiful contemporary building that is inspired by its context.
In order to attract and retain the very best students and staff, the LSE brief is to create exemplary facilities for them. The School aims to create a central meeting hub for student facilities and activities.
The building will promote a sense of ownership and identity that provides an efficient and enjoyable service for students. The New Student Union incorporates a number of complementary student services including the Students’ Union, café and pub, events space, prayer and advice facilities, media centre, gym and accommodation and careers offices.
The building sits comfortably within its context but is also a point of reference within the campus. It is to be innovative and inspirational to users and the passing public as a civic piece of architecture at the forefront of ‘Contemporary Westminster’.
The architectural intention for the design of the building is to create an active Student Union, the appearance and contemporary character of which should be inviting, welcoming and even provoking to its users. O’Donnell + Tuomey’s aspiration is for a democratic, everyday, unusual architecture of useful beauty.
The design is a winner of an international competition and is currently under construction, due to be finished in 2013. Other projects include the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, where the client’s brief was for a new theatre designed to best current practice in contemporary building. The architectural design was developed to embody the functional, cultural and social aspirations of the project.
The practice’s design concept responds to client’s brief and site conditions by housing each of the three principal functional elements of the building within its own distinctive brick box, with the public circulation spaces and staircase wrapping around the fixed forms of the theatre, studio and rehearsal, standing on the site like rocks in a stream. The Lyric is sited on a sloping, irregular site between the characteristic grid pattern of the surrounding Belfast brick streetscape and the Serpentine Parkland setting of the River Lagan.
The philosophy of the practice has led to a number of one-off different designs, a series of buildings tailor-made to suit specific sites and circumstances. However, O’Donnell + Tuomey have always thought of the work as a single project, a sustained investigation into the place-making significance of form. The practice refers to cinema, topography and the traditions of architecture for inspiration and it is their policy to have both partners directly involved in the design of each building project.
O’Donnell + Tuomey are currently working on a number of projects outside Dublin and Ireland and travel to meetings in London, Northern Ireland, Amersfoort and Delft on a regular basis. The practice has been involved with urban design, educational and cultural buildings, houses and housing projects in Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. It has represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. Partners Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey both teach at University College Dublin and lecture internationally.
