ONA Blog

View Excerpts of the Program

About the Architect

Duncan’s comments

For more information please view: ‘About the House’ programme 3

Read More

Thank you to everybody for the support and help which contributed to us getting this award.

The Limerick Leader and Limerick Chronicle have both published features on the 2 Limerick projects that made the RIAI awards shortlist – Redeveloped Milk Market and O’Neill Architecture’s ‘Extension To The Rear’ project.

Read More

It’s 8pm mid summer. All is quite, the workmen have gone home. I am alone in the new space. There is movement behind the curved wall; kids playing on the square, people and cars passing occasionally. Already I get the sense of protection the curved wall will offer although for now I hear the sounds. There is a big distraction through the sun rays glowing in the space. It’s exciting. As architects we design these spaces, we imagine what they will look like and feel like, we anticipate the effects of light throughout the day, we consider the views and carefully select the materials. The process is a long one and for a long time it is in our imagination. So we create it and we own it. Until such time when it is built. And even during that process it is still ours until just about now. This evening it still feels like mine even though I know from now on I’ll be handing it over.

The foundations are in, the wall is going up and its beginning to attract attention!

1st week on-site. Willie McGrath (man with hard-hat) of McGrath Construction built the houses of this estate 10 years ago. A passer-by stated ‘you built the place now you’re taking it apart!’

I remember our journeys by boat to Dromineer situated on the shores of Lough Derg in North Tipperary. Note the Castle visible in the background!

Three decades on it is almost entirely taken over by ivy. This is partially because a fence was put around the structure preventing the ivy from being kept down by the grazing of animals.

Read More

Presently our waste goes into landfill sites. Thank you to Michael of North Tipperary County Council Landfill who gave me a guided tour.

I learnt that the waste gets filled and wrapped in thick membrane material which is welded together. When full it gets closed up and a layer of earth is spread over it.
But the story doesn’t end here.

Read More

The ability to design requires abstraction. It requires that you remove yourself from associations. For example, below is a series of watercolours painted in Georgia O’Keefee Country in New Mexico featured in my book Placing Architecture. They describe a progression, from left to right, of my letting go of what I understood the canyon edge to be until reaching the point when I began to paint purely what I saw.

Read More