O'Donnell and Tuomey at the Photographers' Gallery

AJ editor Kieran Long interviewed John Tuomey and Sheila O'Donnell after the presentation of their new project for The Photographers' Gallery in London on 4 December. This is an extended version of the interview that appeared in the AJ on 13 December 2007.

Kieran Long: So what's new, what's coming up?

John Tuomey: Well we have a new social housing project that's taking shape on site. That's an interesting project actually..

KL: When's that completed?

Sheila O'Donnell: It's meant to be June but it won't be– it'll be July, August, September..

KL: And where is that? 

SO'D: It's in The Liberties in the centre of Dublin. It's Dublin City Council social housing, what used to be called low-rise, high-density housing.

KL: Are there still opportunities to do much housing? There's (already) a lot of interesting housing happening in Dublin.

JT: Not a lot for us. We are doing two social housing projects – one is on site, and the other is in design, but we're also doing a really interesting apartment building for a private developer. So we're doing three housing projects, one on site and two on the drawing boards. On site we also have a community centre in the Docklands, made in concrete, and that's quite a nice building. That finishes in the summer as well, in June so I suppose that means July. Before the builders go on holiday at the end of July and that's pretty well 'it', end of the year; they like to get everything finished before then really.

KL: Ah, so in the Docklands – whereabouts in the Docklands is it?

JT: It's a great location – the Docklands is a big redevelopment area and just about one or two layers back from the commercial frontage of the Docklands – there's a sector, bound by the railway tracks, which used to be dockers' housing, I suppose – and it's called East Wall. There's about 1,800 two-storey houses there, lived in by ex-dockers, I suppose, and it's a very strongly established community. And Docklands Development Authority has a relationship (with them) – a kind of community programme to keep contact and develop the new neighbourhood so as part of their policy they are building this community centre. It's going to be a very nice building I think. It's built around gardens for children and old people and sports and drama. And it has a little tower.

SO'D: Very small, just one room up on the tower. But the clients – who are the local guys – were saying "We want our building to be high, we want it to stand out against all this commercial development in the Docklands and we want it to be high!". So we said, what's the brief – a childrens' day care centre, an old people's day centre and a sports hall – and we were thinking it doesn't really sound like it wants to be all that high! So we said they all had to go on the ground floor. But then we came to the idea of the tower and they're very happy with that – it's six storeys but it looks higher because it's only one room – and the rest is courtyard building.

KL: It's interesting what you were saying about the gallery and the thing about the ground floor, because the old Photographers' Gallery hardly has any frontage or any engagement with the street at all. Are they all sick of being in the middle of the city blocks?

JT: Actually the old Photographers' Gallery is a really nice place. And of the two buildings, one of them has the narrowest frontage, just a passageway and a window it must  be only two or three metres wide  - and then with the other one, you have to go through an entrance way in the old building to get to this hall at the back where the café is… so yeah, both cases are very indirect with the street. And of course for them it means they're up and down the street at all times.

KL: They won't know themselves when they're so on view!

JT: And they'll all be in the same building as each other.

SO'D: They'll probably start fighting! Whereas people got on perfectly well before when they had to go downstairs and onto the street. It's actually quite a nice arrangement, to come out on the street and in again. Of course it is obviously inconvenient but there's something about it..

JT: I think what makes it interesting for us is that we've obviously done new cultural buildings before but they're usually allied to a new cultural organisation; you're writing the brief as well as designing the building!

KL: So for example, the one in Dublin – was there a Photography Gallery before in Dublin?

SO'D: There was actually - they did exist!

JT: They were a very small outfit and they were very disorganised – they had no 'history' as such… and with the film centre, there was no such thing, we had to write the brief. There was no university art galleries… and there was no museum so with each on we're starting from scratch.
With the Photographers' Gallery – they're completely organised – they have departments! It's about 35 people and they all know exactly what they're doing and they're very motivated about what they're doing; so in way, the animal exists, but it has no house. It's not a new institution, it's a new building for a very well organised institution.

KL: And you were saying it sort of mirrors your lives or your engagement with London, but did you visit it, do you remember it.

JT: Well I was talking to Brett Rogers (director of the Photographers' Gallery) last night and Brett showed that photo in her presentation, the kind of hippy type in 1971 with the PG logo overlapping with the 70s graphics. But I was a streetsweeper in Covent Garden  when I was a student. And I remember that gallery.
And then I came back when we were doing the gallery of photography, we were designing the gallery in about 1992 – twenty years later. And I studied it quite closely for the dimensions of spaces and for the way of storing and exhibiting work, and I got some quite helpful advice, just about walls and how to hang on walls. But I remember it was the same guy on the café from when we went for our interview, there he was! I said "I've met you before". He operates from the smallest space, it's under the stairs – it's amazing to think he's still there – and he's in a very small space in the new building as well.

KL: I was really interested in what you were saying about – I think Brett showed a picture – in a way it's going from a building that's more like a house to one that you're referring to as a house but it's a fairly grand sort of house – what is it about putting photography in a house or house-like space?

JT: Well, the concept of the house is because it contains or gives space to all the living functions. For example, having put the gallery on the ground floor, then other aspects like administration would have been consigned to the attic. The value in the house concept for us is that you can give room to each part of it that will make them feel like many parts of one whole, as if all the members of the family have their part to play, in the organisation of the rooms.
It's really a building of some big rooms and some small rooms squeezed in between the big ones.
They've got a Print Sales gallery – that's quite different to the display galleries - and they've got a book shop, which has a very particular culture about it. And you're trying to give a place to each one of those in the composition and the expression of the overall building. So that walking around the building you can sort of name the rooms of the house as you experience them. Because we've been to other multi-storey galleries – I'm thinking of the Dia Gallery in New York. It's a beautiful building but you've got the narrow stairs and each stair you come off through a lobby, out into the gallery, and then you have to go back into the stairs to go up to the next floor, and at no point do you realise all the activities.

KL: So how is this one different from that?

JT: Well, because we have no doors. The whole fire and safety thing is separated into one core, and that means, as you move through our building, from the moment you come in the front door, there are no more doors in the building – every space is connected to the next. Unless you go into an office. But as you walk round as a visiting member of the public, you don't ever have to push through a lobby – or 'leave' the space.

SO'D: The stairs aren't a continuous set of stairs that go up the whole building – because the fire stairs are dealt with behind walls, the way you move is via stairs that wind their way through the building, so each flight of stairs exists in its own right and is maybe (like) a certain kind of house where you can hang around on the stairs or where the stairs are part of the space. But then from one space you can always see into the next and so maybe from one flight you can see into another room, and from one room up to another one, and then you maybe go back down in the lift or take the stairs down back to where you came from: in a way, you have to explore the building because you can't just go in and keep going up or down, the flights are not one above another.

 

KL: You've talked a lot about looking between rooms, but what's the experience of looking out? It looks to me as if there are these moments when you are presented with
views of things in a rather measured way. What do you see?

JT: Well, what's nice is, because there's an existing height, we were able to stand up at least half the height and see what you could see, and we were trying to focus – well we were fascinated by the split in the street, because it is pretty remarkable, and it faces north, so you know you're going to get a shaft of light. So, one of the windows looks directly at that. And then another window at the first gallery level, where the gallery is pulled out like a drawer in the building, will look down the street toward Great Marlborough Street, meaning that if you're passing on Great Marlborough Street, you can see people in the gallery, up high above, and you'll think people will be looking up and wondering what's going on here, you know, you'll be drawn up to the bay window of that projection. So each time the building turns a corner, or overhangs a corner, we're trying to make it active within the building and from outside the building.

KL: And is there a moment where you pop up above…?

JT: Yeah, as you cross the middle gallery level and as you climb up to the top gallery, there's a picture window at the top of the stairs, outside the gallery, between the gallery and the stairs, as Shelia was saying like a resting place or something, and from there you see right down across, out to Oxford Street and over to Tavistock Square and over to the other side – Tavistock Place. So the idea is that the galleries are controlled and contained but the stairs look in to each other or look out at the city.
 
KL: So for the galleries space, they wanted certain ..

SO'D: They ideally wanted three galleries of 200 square metres; we had to say, well, the site's only 200 square metres. So we worked most closely with then on every dimension of the gallery, and I think then we came up with the idea of pulling the drawer out. So while we couldn't get galleries of 200 square metres, by doing that, and by keeping the lift down one end, we were able to get a gallery which is eleven metres squared, which is bigger than the site, so it's a feeling of getting the maximum.
But we did walk around with Brett and some of the other people in other London galleries saying okay, this one's exactly the same size, that one's a bit longer and thinner.. And because with height, we were working within an overall maximum height for the site of 30 metres, we were always having to recalculate how high everything was, to maximise the heights of the galleries but also to make sure that everything had the amount of space that it needed. It really is shoehorned in as a building and sometimes if a room doesn't have a very high ceiling, at least if it interlocks with another room it gives you some kind of release.

KL: The medium is obviously very 2D and on the wall but the spaces are quite large. Does that seem strange to you?

JT: I think a lot of the contemporary photographic artists at the moment use projection – and sound, there's an exhibition there at the moment uses a lot of sound. I think that the artists want to be in control of the space, how they hang in the space and what the distance between things are. But the architect wants to make sure that the gallery goer always sees something else.. the curatorial control is very dictatorial at the moment, as you know, so we're trying to fulfil those requirements, but also it's a public building in the city and that's important too.

KL: But this kind of question of metres of wall relative to metres of floor seems to me quite interesting because it's a photographers' gallery, I mean how many people do they expect?

JT: Well, they have 500,000 people a year visit the gallery, it's an absolutely enormous number of people. Bigger galleries often don't expect that number of people – I think photography is just very accessible and watching them in the gallery, a lot of people come in and go out quite a lot, people come and see one show and not the other one – because they're in two separate buildings. So the whole theory is that people will be drawn through, maybe they'll take the lift up and walk down.

SO'D: I think they do feel that they're working in a very changing art form as well, and there is a hugely increased emphasis on work that is projected and very big scale projections. So I think one of the reasons for wanting the big space was to be able to project work that is large and to be able to stand back from that.. and I suppose that kind of feeling that who knows where photography is going to go, as we move through the digital stuff, in to projection.

JT: And some of those guys - when you think of Cartier-Bresson photos being small - but a Gursky photo is the size of a wall, these are huge pieces of work. Which worried us a bit because everything has to fit in the lift!

KL: How big is the lift?

JT: It's about as big as this room, it's quite big..

SO'D: It's a big as we could both afford and fit.

KL: And how does it work – does it come right down to the ground floor with access from the street? Does it load from the street?

JT: The front reception is also a loading bay – everything doubles up.

KL: That part of town has backs of theatres and a sense of lots of large things, out of scale, being delivered.. so making a front door in those conditions must have been difficult. There aren't many front doors, a lot of the buildings are very anonymous.

JT: Exactly – and closed

KL: Tell me about the character of it - sitting on the corner there it feels like a site that shifts, and it has this red colour – what is it that you were thinking of when you were doing that?

JT: Well, at ground level from the street point of view the most important thing was trying to increase the apparent dimension of the site, because the corner's very tight and the building is pressed quite close on to the corner. So what we did was a sort of exchange of volume where we undercut the ground floor to expand the pavement, more than double the width at the point where the space is at its most precious, we have taken it off the gallery and given it back to the street.
And then in compensating we pulled the upper gallery out – so you push it in here and pull it out there and that gave us a bigger gallery upstairs, but significantly that gave us a bigger pressure downstairs. And because we've used the lift shaft as the structure, there's absolutely no structure at all along the front elevation.
So unlike most other buildings there's no measure of columns or support, it's completely transparent on the floor, only glass to glass connection. So you can see through to the back of the café - which is what Brett calls her Democracy Wall – her 'Wall for All'. And she's going to have changing exhibitions on that wall, so from the street, you'll see across people, to the 'Wall for All'. So, theoretically there's no division on the ground floor, theoretically it's an underskirt. But it has to be divided because it's a café. But the pavement is wide enough to allow people to stop, collect themselves and go in to the front, which is a gallery space itself – a small gallery.

KL: It's interesting, that question of threshold in a place like Soho where it's very intense, not always pleasant – you think of something like the Soho Theatre which is a bit too direct, it has to remove itself behind layers glass and it doesn't engage with the street even though it's glass.

JT: Last night I went to the cinema at the Curzon, on Shaftesbury Avenue – and it's a amazing because there's a bar there, and then you go down and then there's another bar there; there was a whole party there and it was great that you can come off the street! And spiralling down to the cinema I thought, it's kind of the opposite to our building – but you can work a building like that, on a street where you want to get off the street.

SO'D: It's also another reason for lifting the galleries up, just that sense that you need a sense of destination, that maybe the street environment is not the best for looking at very focused exhibitions. I think we were always very interested in having the sense of the backs of buildings and a warehouse atmosphere, where you get big areas of solid and big areas of glass and I think we were interested in getting that character, that sort of slightly industrial feel.
I know we've talked about it being like a house but it doesn't have the character of a house in terms of its external expression on the street. The scales needed were different, we were interested in things like delivery doors to theatres and backs of things, the backstreet atmosphere.. so the big surfaces of red came from trying to think what we could do that in a way had a strong clear ringing presence to the building but somehow wouldn't be out of  place with the context.

KL: Tell me about that colour, how did you come to it?

JT: We saw it in Venice really. When we were doing the biennale we hung around in Venice quite a lot because we had to find the site first and do a lot of negotiations because Ireland doesn't have it's own pavilion. So that year, we were there in February, off season walking round – just the quality of the polished plaster, even in the grey light and in narrow streets – those polished plaster surfaces feel so luxuriant and so rich. The reality of our project is that it's a budget-restricted project – we don't have money for hugely expensive materials, and we have adopted quite an elaborate structural system in order to clear all those spaces. It's a lightweight building because we need a steel frame that can make those cantilevers, so we have to have a lightweight cladding – and yet we wanted a richness of surface. So we just started thinking about it and remembering the Venetian materials, and those pigments.. So we have brick dust and then there's marble dust. And we're gonna play with those pigments until we have the lustre and depth that we want.

KL: Who's going to make it and build it?

JT: Well, because of the planning permission here in Westminster, it's so rigorous, we had to bring samples of the real material – I mean, cooking it up in a pot! So we have specialist suppliers  for that. But it's interesting, in Ireland you get planning permission for the design of the building, but here in Westminster you have detailed demonstration, of things like maintainability, sustainability, length of life, what could be done to replace it. So you have to do a lot of that stuff.

KL: So do you have a contract?..

SO'D: For the building? No, it's not at that stage yet. But we have been talking to specialist providers of that material to find out exactly how it works. But the thing about what the material would be is a really interesting discussion, particularly, as John says, it was lightweight steel structure and what can we clad it in and what are the references – because some of the references are the things like theatres and warehouses and backstreet but we also quite like one of the existing buildings that that has a black-tiled façade and the way those tiles have a slight lustre to them.. and a sense that in a way that building fits in quite well on the street that its in but it's not – I don't know when it was done, maybe when they opened the gallery but maybe earlier, it's a bit deco-ish – but quite plain.. In some way I think we were also interested in that sense of a façade that has a sort of solidity, but in that case the tiles, which aren't like brick or masonry, it's just slightly different. We were trying to refer to that in some way, trying to make something that had a kind of intensity but feels like a stretched surface.

JT: Because it was going to be steel or tiled or rendered – it's all about surface really.

SO'D: Yeah steel was the other one we thought about – sheet steel and it would have been the kind of clanky steel, not the powder coated,

JT: And because the building is in different parts, and we wanted to give it expression, we have joints between the building – and that suits the render too, because it has rules, because it's a lime-based product and  you can use a panel of a certain size but it needs to move, it needs to breathe. It suited the expression of the building in parts, like in panels. And actually the planning permission also controls all those joint lines, which is very interesting. The great value of such a detailed planning permission is that it safeguards the designer, against any value engineering.

KL: Well, there are lots of architects who have come out of processing something with Westminster, who wouldn't be as positive as you!

JT: We had no restrictive conditions; the only conditions we have, apart from the normal statutory services conditions – is that we build it exactly as we present it.

SO'D: Tell me how you feel about doing a major public building here in London. You say you have projecst of a similar scale in Ireland you've done urban projects in Dublin – and your work of course is associated with the emergence of a generation of Irish architecture – so how do you think it's altered what you do here, does it make a difference?

JT: I think that's why we started our presentation with the John Berger book, Ways of Seeing, because I think now that we're working outside of our home base, like in Britain, or in Holland, or even in Northern Ireland, which is a different place, what we've found is maybe what we've developed in our approach to place is a way of seeing and we're trying to keep that approach with us as we move.
So I don't think we think of ourselves as only Irish architects.. that through our earlier researches concentrated on looking for an Irish architecture, we've found an approach that loves to move and look at different places.
A lot of architects' ideas seem to us to be hermetically sealed within the discipline of architecture – sometimes you get the feeling that architecture is just talking to itself, or concerned with itself, whereas I think we are interested in the idea of crossing boundaries between art and architecture and between architecture and culture, between architecture and matters of public interest. So something about the stories and narratives of how ideas are generated – we think that should be translatable and transferable.
Because if we both like the cinema and reading books, why wouldn't people who read books and the cinema also get interested in architecture? So we are trying to broaden it.

KL: It was interesting in your presentation how you talked about the way your building represents itself to the street.  There are certain sorts of level of terminology which it is quite rare here, to hear, you know just a slight sort of dislocation for instance between your discourse in saying, you know it's about this to the street and something else inside and that's fine but you know that would be very rare to hear a British architect talk about it – I wouldn't like to characterise that as a specifically Irish thing, but it is something different for us.

JT: It was very interesting that, in the planning procedure of Westminster Council, you had to 'legitimate' or 'place' or explain the context, the relationship you were building to context because, it is a conservation-minded local authority. What was interesting there is that we were trying to describe this relationship to context by way of analogy, this geological, tectonic shift, which actually, everyone was really interested in. We presented it as an idea, not about the height of the building next door, or the material of the building next door or, you know, because we were told, well, context might mean mansard rule and stone facades, you know, it might mean that in Westminster's language if you like.  But when we explained it more conceptually, all those people in the planning office were terribly interested in that.

KL: Probably refreshed!

JT: So, that reading is also part of the translation if you know what I mean.  It helps everyone understand… The important thing is the building is intended to be part of the permanence of the place. So, we are not building a building on a corner, we are building that corner, of that place, so that's the anchor, or the hold that we were looking for.  So that establishes a myth, or, whatever character that day, that actually sustains the project.

KL: Yes, yes.

SO'D: But I do think that in relation to this business about moving from one place to another, I think we, maybe we are at the stage where we have done a number of projects and some of them have been quite hard and difficult in parts... But I think we are very aware now of the things that drive the way we work – as sense of place and use, and use in really the broadest sense of use.  And use might enliven and lend character to an architectural concept and that somehow, the buildings might in some way embody something of the character of their use. 
I suppose we are very interested in the idea of character, building character.  And I think knowing London already obviously helps, and feeling,,, I suppose its really the only other place we have lived in apart from Dublin, like a homecoming in a way.  It was such an important time in our careers, the time that we spent in London so we have a very strong connection with it.

JT: We grew up in the cultural environment of English rchitecture because a lot of the people who taught us in school, or taught at Dublin when we were students came from London and a lot of our reading and a lot of our connections as students were… I mean we were completely caught up with English Brutalism when we were students.  And then we came to London to work and we were completely out of date because no-one was…[laughs] We were trying to look for the Brutalists! That's why we were drinking in the York Minster and the French House because that's where Reyner Banham in his book, he describes them all being there you know. But by the time we got to the York Minster they'd all gone home for their tea! [laughs mobile rings]. Excuse me that's the office..

KL: I have to get going… Thank you so much.