Born: January 30th, 1944<\/p>\n
Died: November 15th, 2025<\/p>\n
Brian O\u2019Connell, who has died aged 81, was one of Ireland\u2019s leading architects<\/a> and one of the first from his profession to be credited as a conservation architect.<\/p>\n Highly skilled in his main calling, he was also an able lawyer and mediator. As an architect, he left his mark on many buildings and medical facilities across Ireland. At a personal level, he was intelligent and calm, with a gift for storytelling.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had a great skill set,\u201d according to Sean Mahon, his business partner of long standing.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was a unique character in so many different ways, with an ability to see through problems and find solutions. He was called on for advice, as a colleague and a friend, by so many of his peers. He never turned away a request for help.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Connell was born in Dublin in 1944. He was one of seven children to father Con, a surgeon and consultant at the Eye and Ear Hospital, and mother Marie-Therese, and was the only boy in the family. <\/p>\n His early life was spent in Whitehall before the family decamped to Rathgar on Dublin\u2019s southside. There, the young Brian attended Miss Carr\u2019s primary school before going on to Gonzaga College in Ranelagh, then only in its third year of existence.<\/p>\n He loved secondary school, developing a lifelong affection for the college and he recently attended its 75th anniversary black-tie dinner.<\/p>\n After Gonzaga, O\u2019Connell went to University College Dublin, graduating in 1968 with a first-class honours degree. A believer in lifelong education, he obtained no fewer than three degrees.<\/p>\n The first was in architecture from UCD, despite the family background being in medicine, a career choice he avoided consciously. Eleven years later, he got a first-class law degree from UCD and the King\u2019s Inns, and was called to the Bar, a second string to his bow which he deployed, despite eschewing a full-blown legal career, to good effect as an architect. <\/p>\n His final degree was a master\u2019s in building and urban conservation, which he obtained from UCD in 2012.<\/p>\n O\u2019Connell\u2019s architectural career began in 1968 when he joined Tom Kennedy\u2019s TP Kennedy and Partners, becoming a partner himself in 1974 and staying with the practice as it evolved and expanded, until forming his own firm, Brian O\u2019Connell Associates. It was the forerunner of O\u2019Connell Mahon Architects, a firm in which he remained centrally involved until his death. <\/p>\n Reflecting in later life as to why he didn\u2019t gravitate to either medicine or law, O\u2019Connell recalled being asked in fifth year, by the rector of Gonzaga, Fr John Hughes, what he wanted to do. Medicine didn\u2019t appeal to him; and a full-time career in law or engineering didn\u2019t appeal to him either.<\/p>\n But architecture was about people. <\/p>\n \u201cAn architect must engage with what people do,\u201d he told Irish Life and Lore in a January 2020 recorded interview. \u201cEverything they do has to have a framework within which to do it. And architecture seemed to me to be the expression, or formalisation, of that framework, which covers all human activity. And if you look at that as the shell that covers all humanity, what appeared to me was, it kind of gave you access to the way people are and the way they live and I suppose there\u2019s no greater investigation than simply investigating the world as it is.\u201d<\/p>\n A \u201cslightly sceptical\u201d Fr Hughes responded to O\u2019Connell\u2019s thoughtful enthusiasm by getting him a schoolboy work placement position with the architects Andrew Devane, then overseeing the building of the school chapel.<\/p>\n Working one day helping measure up a convent in the morning and a pub in the afternoon, O\u2019Connell felt he was doing something that gave him \u201caccess to the whole of the human condition\u201d, as he told Fr Hughes.<\/p>\n Inspired by the fusion within architecture of the aesthetic, the intellectual and a practical and hands-on approach, O\u2019Connell had found his tribe and the rest was history.<\/p>\n Working at TP Kennedy introduced him to hospital architecture, a field that would eventually come to dominate his work. O\u2019Connell was involved with no fewer than 30 projects across Ireland, including the national children\u2019s hospital, the National Rehabilitation Hospital and the National Maternity Hospital, as well as numerous others elsewhere in Dublin, Cork, Tipperary, Derry, Limerick, Offaly, Kerry, Galway, Mayo, Wexford, Louth and Clare.<\/p>\n In parallel with professional success came professional recognition. He was president of the Architects Association of Ireland in 1972 and became a member of the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland<\/a> in 1975, a fellow in 1987, and served as president from 1990 to 1991. He represented Ireland as a founder member of the Architects Council of Europe (Ace). <\/p>\n Architecture journalist and author Frank McDonald says O\u2019Connell was held in high esteem by his colleagues.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was tremendously well-regarded by his colleagues and part of that was not just as an architect but as a lawyer also,\u201d said McDonald. His knowledge of the law was \u201cdeployed to good effect, especially when he was president of the institute\u201d, McDonald added.<\/p>\n As a conservation architect \u2013 and in that, he was \u201cwell ahead of his time\u201d, according to McDonald \u2013 projects included Thomas Ivory\u2019s Blue Coat School in Dublin, Gandon\u2019s Registry of Deeds, Cassel\u2019s Rotunda Hospital, Johnson\u2019s house and offices at 64 Eccles Street.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a colleague, friend and mentor, we\u2019ll really miss him,\u201d Sean Mahon said this week.<\/p>\n