Irish make big impression at Venice Biennale

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Archiseek / Ireland / News / 2004 / September 16 2004: Irish make big impression at Venice Biennale

O'Donnell and Tuomey's transformation of Letterfrack Industrial School was the Irish entry at this year's Venice Biennale, which opened last Friday. Exhibiting architecture has never been easy. Showing it on a world stage, such as the Venice Biennale, represents an even bigger challenge; it simply can't be done effectively by pinning drawings to a wall and placing a model of the project out front. You also have to get with the theme, which this year's curator, Swiss-born architect Prof Kurt Forster, designated as metamorphosis, trendily shortened to "Metamorph". So what better project to represent Ireland than O'Donnell and Tuomey's transformation of Letterfrack Industrial School? The partly-realised plan to turn it into a furniture college was chosen by Shane O'Toole, Irish commissioner for this year's biennale, because he was struck by the fact that "some buildings have savage histories that can leave a place in need of a kind of architectural exorcism, a project of redemption".

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