Obituaries

Cathal O’Neill: Head of UCD School of Architecture who nurtured a gifted generation

Passionate enthusiast continued to work at his architecture practice until the end of his life

Cathal O'Neill gave teaching jobs to some of Ireland's most gifted architects in the 1980s at a time when they might otherwise have been forced to emigrate.

Sat Oct 8 2022 - 00:00

Born: November 23rd, 1930

Died: July 11th, 2022

If Irish architects had a uniquely gifted mentor, it was surely Cathal O’Neill, who has died at the age of 91. As head of UCD’s School of Architecture from 1973 to 1996, it was he who created a nurturing environment for learning that inspired a whole generation of architects, many of whom later won international acclaim – to the delight of their much-loved professor.

Born and raised at 94 Capel Street, in the heart of Dublin, he was the youngest son of Charles O’Neill, founder of what would become Ireland’s best-known sportswear company. As a boy, he would spend afternoons watching his father carefully crafting leather GAA footballs in a shed behind the family home, where his mother May also ran a dairy before they moved to leafy Griffith Avenue.

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Even in Scoil Cholmcille on Marlborough Street, he showed an aptitude for architecture. One of the teachers, Kerryman Séamus O’Shea, used to make wooden block constructions of cubes, cylinders and pyramids, get his pupils to look closely at what he had built and then draw what they had seen from memory. “I was very successful at this, and he would say, “Beidh tú i do ailtire” (”you will be an architect”).

He met Le Corbusier in Paris, Picasso in Antibes and Buckminster Fuller in Milan, helping him to assemble his first geodesic dome from cardboard

After finishing secondary school at Coláiste Mhuire in 1949, it was inevitable that he would enrol at the UCD School of Architecture and in 1954,he won a travelling scholarship and set off for Europe on his new Lambretta, travelling through France and Switzerland to Italy, sketching and photographing buildings along the way.

He met Le Corbusier in Paris, Picasso in Antibes and Buckminster Fuller in Milan, helping him to assemble his first geodesic dome from cardboard, and sent superbly drawn cartoon postcards to family and friends – a practice he continued throughout his life. He had met and fallen in love with fellow UCD student Deirdre Monks; they got married two years after he graduated in 1955, spending their honeymoon riding the Lambretta through France and Spain. But although he had made several trips to Scandinavia, it was to the US that he turned to do his master’s degree, settling for Chicago where Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ran the architecture school at Illinois Institute of Technology.

What Mies taught O’Neill in the austere, almost monastic milieu of IIT’s Crown Hall was “how to manipulate space and compose it, how to understand the connection between structure and space and function, and essentially how to use your eye”, as he told Tom de Paor in a 1996 interview. Mies also convinced him that “you can make architecture anywhere” by working hard at it, and also gave Cathal a job in his office for two years, before he was drawn home to Ireland.

“Really it was to do with understanding the society in which you lived, and to understand it so clearly that an inevitable architecture would be produced by that society. That was what I brought back from America, not as some sort of firebrand or evangelist but as somebody seeking to tap the energy, the economic development, the renewed confidence we had in ourselves in the Sixties, and to try and interpret this in some way and to shape it into architecture.”

The main reason O’Neill returned to Ireland in 1961 was to become a “special lecturer” in UCD’s School of Architecture, then headed by the autocratic Prof Desmond FitzGerald. O’Neill was eventually appointed professor of architecture and head of the school in 1973, not least because he had a very clear idea of where he wanted to take it.

Highly contested move

He also steered the school’s highly contested move in 1981 from Earlsfort Terrace to the former Masonic Boys School at Richview in Clonskeagh, adjacent to UCD’s Belfield campus. Some of the the most important architects of their generation, including Shane de Blacam and Robin Walker, taught at the school, and Cathal O’Neill brought in John Meagher, Yvonne Farrell, Shelley McNamara, Sheila O’Donnell, John Tuomey, Shay Cleary, Gerry Cahill, Derek Tynan and Paul Keogh – giving them guaranteed incomes that underpinned their fledgling architectural practices during the bleak 1980s, thereby enabling them to stay in Ireland.

He placed a personal advertisement in The Irish Times last November that read: ‘To celebrate his 91st birthday, Cathal O’Neill, Architect, is taking the day off work’

His “biggest single disappointment”, as he told Tom de Paor, was that the Irish people had not become “an aesthetically aware nation of people who had regard for architecture” in the way that other societies do. Although there was great interest in it “at a superficial level [with] property pages in the newspaper and programmes on television”, he regretfully believed that “the fundamental knowledge and appreciation and respect for architects has not grown at all”.

He remained active in Cathal O’Neill & Associates, the practice he set up on his return to Ireland, until the end of his life, placing a personal advertisement in The Irish Times last November that read: “To celebrate his 91st birthday, Cathal O’Neill, Architect, is taking the day off work.”

Pre-deceased in 2015 by his wife Deirdre, he is survived by his children Garrett, Melissa, Nicholas, Rebecca and Emma.

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