POLISHED CONVERSATION

摘要

We have a phrase we use a lot about architecture - that if you chip away at it, it should stay the same', say Clancy Moore. That the clod that has come away should expose only more earth; that the building should be true, should sustain the life it harbours; that the work itself is steeped in the conditions of its construction. Such a thing is an entire ethos: a quiet poetics of architecture. Andrew Clancy and Colm Moore founded their studio 'sometime between 2007 and 2009', building their practice on a shared conversation. Conversation is given great weight in the work, as a means - those relationships with clients and makers having 'trust as the only currency' - and also as tension, as reference, as a site of knowledge. The work itself is dense with it; 'great thought in small things', as Clancy wrote in AR June 2019, when assessing the possibility of a canon in Irish architecture. And many such small things they are; surviving both a recession and Ireland's throttling culture of procurement off the back of projects elsewhere unwanted, they have clambered on through small gains over house extensions. 'A great deal of our country's collective architectural endeavour with all of its social and civic richness is bizarrely constructed in the rear gardens of suburban houses', they explain.