Between high-class domestic work and arts-related public projects lies something of an architectural wasteland

It’s the shortest volume of New Irish Architecture for many years, with just 11 awards or special mentions listed, and may also mark “the last hurrah, at least for a while, of exceptional public and cultural buildings”, in the words of the award-winning architect Keith Williams, one of the assessors for this year’s Architectural Association of Ireland Awards.

Chosen from 76 entries, the latest New Irish Architecture inevitably includes O’Donnell + Tuomey’s new Lyric Theatre in Belfast. It’s a prime example of the cutural genre, according to the Warsaw-born critic Joseph Rykwert, another assessor for the awards. It’s evocative, he writes, of Säynätsalo Town Hall, in Finland, by the legendary architect Alvar Aalto. Although, “it hasn’t got the ease of Säynätsalo”.

According to Williams, the foyer is “slightly like a 1970s university common room” and “rather unfriendly”. He also found it “somewhat unwelcoming as a building” and was “puzzled by the very sharp rake of the auditorium: it seems excessive”.

It was denied the Downes Medal, despite strong support from other members of the jury, notably Michael McGarry, professor of architecture at Queen’s University, Belfast. For him, the Lyric is “a great building, extraordinarily well executed”, with that “sense of edginess” so appropriate for a theatre.

McCullough Mulvin’s Long Room Hub at Trinity College, Dublin was given a special mention instead of an award after the jury concluded that its asymmetrical elevation was “harsh”, when it should be, according to Williams, “sitting there quietly in a good-mannered way, coming to the elegant dinner party that is Trinity”.

Donaghy + Dimond’s extension to a split-level house in Portobello was described as “very clever”, particularly for its timber box-beam doubling as a valley gutter.

McGarry liked LiD Architecture’s “matter-of-fact robust response” to an existing house in Co Leitrim: “Gable wall whipped away and the new room added – no angst.”

A villa-style house on the site of a ruined farmyard in Co Wexford, with a centrally located rooflight, won Steve Larkin Architects an award. “I think it’s unpretentious, very elegant, and extremely well-executed. It’s what you imagine all good houses would be,” writes McGarry. There was also high praise for the “beautiful” drawings.

According to arts consultant Ruairí Ó Cuív, the Lyric was “without doubt the jewel in this year’s awards”. Among “the plethora of extensions and small-scale domestic dwellings” submitted in the wash of the “tsunami” that hit the property sector, he writes, the Lyric was one of the few major public buildings to consider

Overall, Williams wrote, the entries for this year’s Architectural Association Awards unsurprisingly reflected Ireland’s economic situation, with a “tendency to look at the existing building stock and sweat those assets” through “transformational projects” in the residential sector.

Architect Noel Brady, who was also on the jury, questioned “the iconography of contemporary houses. A number of them have raised the kitchen to an altar-like state, with a pristine island placed underneath the rooflight – symmetrical, white, enveloped in light” – as exemplified by Aughey O’Flaherty’s Mount Anville house.

The house, which won an award, has a free-standing kitchen unit “absolutely like an altar”, Williams writes. “All it needs is some purple cloth!” However, Ó Cuív, the jury’s “distinguished non-architect”, thought the flat-roofed house was “so elegant” and he liked “the way the brick walls seem to wrap around everything”.

In general, Brady felt that much of the domestic work “appears too self-serving, showing little of the reality of the domestic life that must engage with these perfect spaces”. Or, as McGarry put it: “The messiness of domesticity isn’t hinted at at all [in] showroom livingrooms, showroom kitchens and showroom bathrooms.”

Between the “pinnacles” of high-class domestic work and usually arts-related public projects that tend to feature in the awards, Brady saw “a hollow valley that is especially worrying, because it appears that there is little or no traction for architecture amongst the remaining 90 per cent of the built environment”.

London-based Williams, best-known here for his Athlone Civic Centre, expressed concern that “persistent downward pressure on budgets, and low-fee, safety-first procurement systems seem to have resulted in some public infrastructure, health and housing projects falling rather short of what should be achievable”.

This was problematic for architects “tasked with the creation of the next wave of buildings, since a plethora of construction done on the cheap must serve the country badly in the long run. Whether this can be politically resolved remains to be seen . . . but it will be Ireland’s loss in the end if its best homegrown talent moves overseas.”

The selected schemes will be previewed this weekend at the Light House Cinema, in Smithfield, Dublin. The fully illustrated New Irish Architecture – AAI Awards 2012, edited by John O’Regan and Nicola Dearey, is published by Gandon Editions, €20.