Praised for ‘integrity of purpose’ and its focus on ‘timeless architectural universals’, the Irish exhibition of de Blacam and Meagher’s work has had an impact at the Venice Biennale

IT IS FASCINATING to watch visitors leafing through sheets of paper stacked on oak pallets in the Oratory of St Gall on a small campo not far from Piazza San Marco – an extraordinary archive of drawings, photographs and writings on the work of de Blacam and Meagher Architects that can be bundled into a roll and taken away.

It is dim inside the small neoclassical Chiesa di San Gallo, offering some relief from the hot sun and locust-like swarm of day trippers in Venice. Golden letters of brass inlaid in marble spell out “IRLANDA” on the threshold, for this is Ireland’s national contribution to the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

The Venice Biennale – alternating between architecture (in even-numbered years) and art (odd-numbered) – is a swirling marketplace of often avant-garde ideas. Ireland first showed at the architecture biennale in 2000, when Tom de Paor made his mark with a corbelled pavilion made from bales of peat briquettes. Later, in 2004, O’Donnell and Tuomey’s Letterfrack Furniture College, reinventing a site with a savage history, really raised the bar.

“People Meet in Architecture” is this year’s fairly loose theme, curated by Kazuyo Sejima, an award-winning Japanese architect. “The idea is to help people relate to architecture, help architecture relate to people and help people relate to themselves,” she explained. What visitors will make of it all is anybody’s guess.

Some countries, such as Denmark, are making serious points about how the public can become more involved in urban design. Others, such as Italy, are presenting visions of the future as imagined by their architects, while yet more have put on dazzling sensory displays using multimedia technology – basically to entertain the masses.

Among the national pavilions that are permanent buildings in the Giardini, the French are using their neoclassical villa for big-screen presentations on Le Grand Paris – the ambitious scheme, supported by President Nicolas Sarkozy, to reintegrate Paris and its poorer suburbs – against the backdrop of endlessly moving traffic on the Périphérique.

The Dutch exhibition, Vacant NL, highlights the number of unused buildings in the Netherlands and calls on the government there to make them available for innovative new uses, going for “quality instead of democracy”. Provocatively, it points out that the Dutch pavilion in Venice is vacant for eight months every year.

Britain has turned its pavilion into what’s intended to be a talking shop on the links between London and Venice, best exemplified by John Ruskin’s championship of “La Serenissima” in the 19th century. Oddly, it has been renamed Villa Frankenstein, apparently a reference to Ruskin’s detestation of pseudo-Venetian Gothic buildings in London.

Visitors with invitations to the biennale preview last weekend could also eavesdrop on conversations between “starchitects” such as Frank Gehry and Dutch-born Rem Koolhaas (who picked up the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement), held in an air-conditioned, bubble-like tent. Other early visitors included Norman Foster and his wife, the publisher and one-time sex therapist Elena Ochoa.

There are several interactive opportunities. In the Polish pavilion you can climb (one at a time) stacks of wire boxes under a neon sign saying “Jump at your own risk”.

Or you can poke your head up through the floor of a house in the Japanese pavilion, whose slogan this year is: “Urban public spaces are authoritarian devices for suppressing people.”

The installation at the Arsenale of the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is the most memorable. In a blacked-out room, water is sprayed from spinning suspended tubes, the drops illuminated by strobe lighting. Or you can walk up a curving ramp in another room through a fog generated by Transsolar, which specialises in climate engineering.

What impressed the jury, however, was Bahrain’s “exceptionally humble yet compelling response” to the biennale’s theme: a group of three ramshackle, open-sided fishermen’s huts, built from recycled timber, that “reclaim the sea as a form of public space”, but not in a Dubai sort of way. It won the Golden Lion for best national effort.

Some would say that this accolade should have gone to Portugal, which has an engaging multimedia exhibition in Ca’ Foscari, on the bend of the Grand Canal. Four very different houses by some leading Portuguese architects, including Manuel Aires Mateus, are illustrated not only in drawings, photographs and text but also in fictional films.

Of de Blacam and Meagher, as Ireland’s more academic entry is titled, would have been visited by the jury, as were all the others in the Giardini, the Arsenale and numerous other locations throughout Venice. Curated by a team of young architects led by Tom de Paor, its genesis was fraught with some tension over the choices that were made.

De Paor is also exhibiting at the biennale's main pavilion in the Giardini with a curious piece called 4am, featuring folds of unbleached linen draped inside a lavender-scented softwood frame containing a mysterious block of polished Kilkenny limestone at its base, two open-tread staircases and a single lamp made from blue Murano glass.

Visitors unfamiliar with the work of Albrecht Dürer are unlikely to get the message that it’s actually a meditation on melancholia. The linen might have been more diaphanous, rather than tent-like. It’s located in a relatively small room at the back of the pavilion and not well lit, either, so many will probably pass it by with just a glance – which is a pity.

The de Blacam and Meagher exhibition has been well received in Venice. Commissioned by the Irish Architecture Foundation and sponsored by the telecoms billionaire Denis O’Brien (a friend and client) and the chartered surveyor Seán Davin, with support from the Arts Council, Culture Ireland and the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, it is a substantial show of the architects’ work.

Among the projects on display are Trinity College Dublin’s restored dining hall and atrium (including a re-creation of Adolf Loos’s Kärtner Bar in Vienna), the Chapel of Reconciliation in Knock, the Wooden Building in Temple Bar and the Louis Kahn-inspired library and other facilities at Cork Institute of Technology, where millions of bricks must have been used to realise a single-minded vision.

The historian Roy Foster, in his essay for the exhibition’s archive, writes that the leitmotifs of de Blacam and Meagher’s work, particularly in Dublin, are “the masterly introduction of light, the texture of appropriate materials (brick, hardwood, pre-patinated copper) a use of space and volume at once imaginative and respectful of their surroundings”.

According to the architectural historian Edward McParland, there is “an integrity of purpose” that characterises their architecture. “If I call it classical I mean neither Doric nor Ionic nor Corinthian; nor do I mean what passes for the classical in postmodernism. I mean a preoccupation with timeless architectural universals.”

Praise indeed. In an interview with Shane O’Toole, both Shane de Blacam and John Meagher, who have been partners in practice since 1976, admit that they don’t go back to their buildings. “Because I’m terrified of them,” is de Blacam’s reason, while Meagher says emphatically: “No . . . No, no, no. Because I know all the mistakes, in my head.”

Things can go awry. The Wooden Building should have been four or five storeys taller, but caution prevailed. A much wilder card was the plan to build a mini-Manhattan on Thomas Street in the Liberties, rising to 54 storeys: “Meaningful discussion of the project was ruled out by preconceived convictions of the authorities,” claims de Blacam.

Among the new additions to the cultural landscape of Venice is the conversion of its custom house (Punta della Dogana) by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando to house some of François Pinault’s eclectic, largely sex-obsessed collection of contemporary art. It is worth going just to see the old timber trusses and beautiful new concrete walls.

Santiago Calatrava’s bridge, sweeping across the Grand Canal on its fishbone-like arched truss, is being renovated only two years after it was finished. Much criticised at the time for failing to provide universal access, it is now festooned with scaffolding on its northern flank to make way for the belated addition of a chair lift.

Calatrava is known to disapprove and may even take the same view as de Blacam and Meagher about not wanting to go back.

The 12th Venice International Architecture Biennale continues until November 21st