Creating Ireland's new identity - Irish Architectural News

Carrolls, Dundalk

No architectural practice in Ireland has been around for so long and built as much as the firm founded by Michael Scott. So it is entirely appropriate that President McAleese will launch a sumptuous book celebrating the firm's work over the past 45 years in one of its major buildings - the O'Reilly Hall in UCD - tomorrow evening. As architecture critic Deyan Sudjic notes in his introduction, it was the confidence of Scott Tallon Walker's original partners - Michael Scott, Ronnie Tallon and Robin Walker - and the determination of their generation to create a new approach to the country's identity that helped usher the "new Ireland" into being. "Architecture, for once, has been able to play a part in catapulting a small, predominantly rural nation, still shrugging off the debilitating impact of centuries of colonialism, into the age of the service economy," he writes in the 400-page, large format volume Scott Tallon Walker Architects - 100 buildings and projects, 1960-2005. Of course, as the book acknowledges, Michael Scott had been blazing a trail for contemporary architecture since the 1930s with such forward-looking projects as Portlaoise Hospital, the Irish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, his own iconic house in Sandycove, and Busáras in Dublin. But it is really about what happened later.

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