Valerie Mulvin
Practice: Mc Cullough Mulvin Architects
Established: 1986
City: Dublin
Country: Ireland
www.mcculloughmulvin.com
[email protected]
Valerie Mulvin is the co-founder of McCullough Mulvin Architects, a design-based architecture practice in Dublin. Projects include the Long Room Hub and Ussher Library, both in Trinity College Dublin; Cork Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Unit; Waterford City Library; the Source Arts Centre and Library Thurles - cultural buildings, libraries, schools; working to define a new public realm in a changing society, dealing with Ireland's diffuse light and stark materiality, exploring the potential for ordinary monumentality, forming architecture outside and around the brief. The practice has an interest in making a layered architecture which reflects a specific response to site and place and forming modern interventions in existing buildings.
Their work has received many national and international awards and is extended by publication, teaching and research and has been exhibited in the UK, Germany, Spain, Poland, at the Prague Quadrennial in 2007, the Lisbon Triennial in 2007, and the Venice Biennale in 2008.
Mc Cullough Mulvin Architects
Source Arts Centre and Library, Thurles
This is a new cultural building on a riverside site with a folded zinc roof enclosing an exhibition space, 250-seat theatre with full flying and rigging, and a library. The cranked plan volumes master the bend in the river and enclose alternatively extroverted and introverted space with walls of monolithic concrete cut with large rooflights. Large glass doors open the entrance, foyer and cafe to the river.
| Who are your role models who inspire you? | Le Corbusier, Eileen Grey, Samuel Beckett. |
| If you could change one thing in our profession, what would it be? | Perception of the architect: the architect should be seen as a person of vision and ideas, an intellectual leader rather than a technical facilitator, creating a sense of place and bringing beauty to ordinary things. |
| What do you find most rewarding in your area of work? | Making buildings and spaces for people. |