The Irish Times

What Niall McCullough and Valerie Mulvin have been trying to do is to give Irish architecture "balls", according to Dutch architect Wiel Arets. But then, Arets is a big fan; he was on the jury that awarded them the AAI's Downes Medal in 1996. That was for the Black Church Print Studio in Temple Bar, one of the fruits of Group 91's framework plan for Dublin's "cultural quarter". And indeed, as Arets says, it was the Temple Bar project that gave McCullough Mulvin an international reputation. In his foreword to a book on their work over the past decade, he makes the very interesting point about architecture being such a "personal phenomenon" that there are very few architectural couples who establish a lifelong intellectual partnership.