When the architect Lorcan O’Herlihy visited Ireland last year, he couldn’t help but draw parallels between Dublin and his home city, Los Angeles.
“I counted 55 cranes on the horizon. And that was just through one window in the Jurys hotel,” says the Dublin-born artist and designer. Like Los Angeles, he concluded, Dublin city had changed. Now the Irish capital might be able to learn from the west coast city.
When O’Herlihy left at the age of 15 in the 1970s, Dublin was erecting the sort of buildings it would tear down just two decades later to create more room in Europe’s newest boom town.
The track record of housing in Los Angeles, meanwhile, with its emphasis on low-rise, wide-footprint suburban piles, inspired the term “Los Angelisation” as a loose synonym for urban sprawl. Like Dublin, the city of angels today is adopting a new building language, and O’Herlihy is among its most articulate speakers. LOHA, his architectural firm in Culver City, has shifted its attention from single-family, space-consuming pads to “multi-family” housing, an American term for apartment buildings that can house up to 40 families.
“LA has similar issues to Dublin,” says O’Herlihy. “LA was known as the horizontal city, there was so much land that people could spread out. Cities such as New York and Boston were comparatively vertical. But there’s been a significant shift.
“The cost of petrol is going up and there’s been a huge influx of people, so the car is becoming problematic. You grind to a halt moving through cities. So innovative architecture here is developing a new typology: multi- family housing.”
Los Angeles is gradually edging away from its cliff-top villa roots and embracing the urban living that New York and many European cities have traded on for centuries. And in LA, where even a journey to the supermarket can involve a round trip on a freeway, the market for urban-led architecture is rising in line with petrol prices. The city operates medium-density practices in housing. Outside the downtown area, four storeys — 45ft — is the maximum height.
“That scale is still one that’s engaging and people now like to live that way. They like to come out of their apartment or flat in the morning and be able to stroll down the street to get a coffee and breakfast or to go to a supermarket, as opposed to sitting in the car and taking the freeway to get anywhere,” he says.
O’Herlihy’s houses are considered among the most innovative in modern American architecture and have been applauded both at home and internat- ionally. He lectured for two years at the Architectural Association in London and has has been a guest lecturer in several countries. He was also one of the architects to make a submission for the controversial U2 tower in Dublin.
He may be at the forefront in his field, but O’Herlihy’s family is firmly rooted in Hollywood showbusiness, leading the designer to call himself “the odd man out”. Born in Dublin in 1959, O’Herlihy is the son of the Oscar-nominated actor Dan O’Herlihy, who died in February last year. With the Abbey theatre, an Oscar nomination and star turns in The Dead, RoboCop and Twin Peaks among his achievements, Dan O’Herlihy had also studied architecture at University College Dublin before taking to the stage. Lorcan is also a nephew of Michael O’Herlihy, the television director, his brother Gavan is an actor and he even married into showbusiness — his wife is the actress Cornelia Hayes O’Herlihy, also a native of Dublin.
The single-family houses on which O’Herlihy made his name are simple, rectangular forms, and in a nod to modernist works such as the post-war case-study houses, blur the boundaries of interior and exterior living spaces.
But it is the home that O’Herlihy and Hayes share that best demonstrates the architect’s beliefs about how people can inhabit cities. The Vertical House, on a busy street in Venice, California, built in 2002, is an urban in-fill project with a difference. Whereas building norms tell us to seal off houses to the sides that face our neighbours, the Vertical House is punctured on all four facades by a total of 96 2ft-wide windows.
“The thing about urban in-fill is that there’s no view, and houses are automatically stitched into the surrounding structures, in a way,” he says. “The Vertical House carries the idea of the fragmented view you get in urban in-fill, with vignettes of light created using these small windows,” he says. The windows are made both of translucent and coloured glass, and are staggered upwards in a non-linear pattern on the exterior. From the outside, it’s difficult to discern where the entry points are.
The exterior is made of recycled cement board, shipped in 4ft x 8ft panels, but cut in half to make 2ft modules, creating the vertical lines on the facade. O’Herlihy used all the space he could below and placed the garden on the roof. The ground floor is a car port and a studio. A staircase that runs all the way up the three-level building leads to two bedrooms and two bathrooms on the first floor, and the open-plan living accommodation on the top level. Everything has been pulled away from the exterior walls and there are no corridors. At the top level, a central core houses the kitchen, separated on two sides from the rest of the living space.
O’Herlihy admits his home doesn’t even resemble a house (“it appears as this black box on the street”) and in the press it has even been likened to a neo-plasticist painting — Piet Mondrian’s 1942 work, Broadway Boogie-Woogie. The architect, who is also an artist, is pleased with the comparison.
“I like being influenced by cross- disciplines. Colour is an architectural material in itself. I’ve used colour here in a sophisticated way. Predominantly, it’s a dark coffee-bean shade, and there are yellows, blues and greens in the glazing. The sun lifts these little strips of colour and sends them inside the building and along the walls and floors,” he says.
Were the Vertical House ever transplanted to a city street in Dublin, it’s certain tongues would wag, passers-by would stop and stare and planning departments would take their phones off the hook. But in Venice, neighbours wrote to the architect expressing their support for his work.
This, O’Herlihy says, is the best thing about being an LA-based architect. There, the innovative can treat the city as a blank canvas for the imagination. Planning stipulations about context, such as those widely imposed in Ireland, he says, can be detrimental.
“There’s lots of innovative stuff going on in Ireland, but it is harder. There is this desire in planning departments to have things fit in with the surrounds. But fitting in is not necessarily the right approach when you’re talking about using architecture to inspire.
“There are no set criteria in LA as to what a house should look like, once you address zoning issues.”
O’Herlihy mentions John Tuomey, architect of the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in University College Cork, and Tom de Paor, young architect of the year 2003, as among those he admires in Ireland.
“Architecture there is innovative and progressive, yet with very established connections to the past. You can see that in materials chosen and in the nature of the architecture. That’s where it is so strong — there’s an overall international viewpoint, but it’s also very uniquely Irish. But I’m amazed how they get so much done in the rain.”
www.loharchitects.com
