All posts by a2 architects

A2 Architects’ 1916 Glasnevin Centenary Chapel competition entry commemorates in particular the 232 people who died during the 1916 Rising and who are buried in a mass grave on the site in St. Paul’s Cemetery. The Chapel is to be for all denominations and will primarily accommodate ceremonies held before a cremation.

A semicircular Main Piazza generated by the movement of mourners and visitors embraces both the existing 1916 Monument and the proposed Centenary Chapel. On approach the Chapel rises as a cylindrical centerpiece from the baseline of a sweeping oak-beamed canopy that cantilevers from a repeating screen of vertical stone piers. A car-parking area providing the required 17no. car spaces is located to the other side of this sweeping canopy screen. The Chapel’s outward image, not unlike that of a lantern, emerges as a witness to the Chapel as a place of commemoration, contemplation and celebration.

Sketch design for a new longhouse on Sky Road, Clifden, Co.Galway is approved. The house is oriented on a north-south axis with sea views facing due west and  mountain views of the Twelve Bens facing due east. The pitched roof is to be slated in large Liscannor stone slabs.

A2 Architects, on behalf of The Office of Public Works Limerick, have recently completed the refurbishment of the Entrance Hall to the Social Welfare Office, Dominic Street, Limerick with the addition of a new INTREO Suite. Work involved a new stone tiled floor, new maple joinery fittings and new lighting. Existing mosaic to columns and a feature bowed wall behind the new INTREO reception desk was retained.

The new tiled floor is a new ‘welcome mat’ to what is a very important public institution in Limerick City. The building caters for over 3000 visiting members of the public on a weekly basis so an attractive entrance lobby that was well-designed and well-lit was essential. The alternating black and white stone tiles are boldly laid as an angled grid akin to Borromini’s chapel of San Carlo Alla Quattro Fontana in Rome. The tile pattern also aspires to be a new inlaid miniature grid into the Newtown Pery grid of Limerick City where this project is located.

‘Bench for Networking’, designed in collaboration with John Gerrard Artist for ‘Everyday Experience’ at The Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin is yet another latent overlay on an already significant historic military site. Sited in an extreme corner of The Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, a former home for pensioner soldiers designed in 1680 by William Robinson, State Surveyor General, the work originally derives from a set of found landscape markings in the Gobi Desert in China. These markings, scored by the Chinese military, are for purposes unknown however are likely focussing devices for spy satellites, thus placing them within a wider dynamic of surveillance and international competition. The markings measure 1.5km by 1km and were visited by John Gerrard in 2012.

What appears at first as monolithic and cast is in fact a precise, shell-like assembly of cement board bonded onto a plywood substrate supported by a softwood timber stud carcass that is embedded with a concealed wireless router. The bench is deceptively light so that it is transportable and so that it can function as a networking arena in any corner of any room of any building. The bench’s protruding, closed outer edge into the room is somewhat defensive, almost disruptive; one must negotiate its map-like form. The positioning of the bench also proposes that it can potentially extend through the walls and cross-penetrate other rooms and outdoor areas in future iterations.

Beach House, Pearl Beach, Australia by A2 is finally photographed to our delight.

Tullamore Community Arts Centre is issued for tender.

In collaboration with Upstart and Dublin City Council this Summer, A2 Architects have master-planned a Pop-Up Park for Dublin City Centre. From 22nd August ‘Granby Park’ will transform a vacant site on Dominick Street Lower. An A2-designed education hub/dining area/exhibition space will be housed within a 20x20m repeating multi-bay layout of partially covered aluminium poly-tunnels on a jigsaw-like platform of painted ply sheeting. The sheeting is arranged loosely so as to allow for pockets of intensive planting. The Park will be open to the public from this coming 22nd August. For more information go to www.granbypark.com

Construction of A2’s pin-wheeled garden pavilion in Lawrence Road, Dublin also nears completion

Raymund Ryan, Architecture Curator at Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh writes about Pulp Press (Kistefos) 2013 in Architecture Ireland, ‘New art venues such as Kistefos are evolving from the known sculpture park paradigm, where discreet objects are set in fields of grass, to a more hybrid condition that is conscious of both context and of new media and that is keen to instigate engaged critical exploration. Pulp Press certainly nudges Kistefos in that direction. With echoes of chapels, grottoes and gazebos from long ago, it represents a new vector for Irish visual culture. Modest in dimension yet full of potential, it scrambles our preconceptions of time itself.’

John Gerrard’s Pulp Press Pavilion opens at Kistefos, Norway. Pulp Press (Kistefos) 2013 is an ambitious site-specific commission by Irish artist John Gerrard. A pioneering artist operating in the area of simulation, Dublin-born Gerrard uses technologies more conventionally employed by the military and gaming industries. His installation Pulp Press is located in a 100m2 poured concrete pavilion designed in collaboration with A2 Architects for the Kistefos Museum – one of Scandinavia’s largest parks of contemporary sculpture. The museum occupies the grounds of a 19th century paper mill in Jevnaker, an hour north of Oslo, Norway. The new pavilion sits along the edge of the river Rands which powers the work by hydro-electrics – the very same river that gave rise to the original factory in 1889.

A2 are appointed to refurbish and extend an impressive Victorian house of remarkable quality on Park Avenue, Sandymount.

A2’s Lucky Lane Housing also played host this month to the Editor of A10 magazine Indira Van’t Klooster for an interview with A2 Architects.