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- Brian O’Connor
Brian
O’Connor
SCHEMA
Shannon is the touchstone for my work especially the Drumgeely apartment complex and the Shannon Free Zone, with their residential and commercial buildings. The network of officious, sober buildings and boardrooms hint at potential social development. Ambition and aspiration is translated through glass and concrete in a simple modernist design.
The Drumgeely apartment complex is a high rise anomaly in the Irish countryside. It is an optimistic precedent and a possible blueprint for a future
of nuclear planning that facilitates sustainable infrastructural development. Despite the politics inherent in the architecture there is an inherent aesthetic appeal in their tactile minimalism that sits well in their surroundings. The relationship of the blocks to each other; with their random aspects dispels any monotony and softens their brutal appearance. The use of colour with the predominance of dull muddied colour was dictated by the photos that were taken in typical Irish light. There was something giving in being honest to the abject beauty of the photos.
Shapes and stark silhouette against a dramatic azure sky threw up interesting results. The small scale across numerous panels subconsciously seeks to deflate preconceptions of brutalism and megalomania that come with socialist architecture.