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Despite the dreary Dublin evening of now seemingly perennial rainfall, the Robert Emmet Theatre was filled to hear Neil Michels, Associate Director of Carmody Groarke, deliver a lecture entitled Value Judgements as part of the Architectural Association of Ireland’s ‘Systems and Selves – Social Agency of Architecture’ series. The series is composed of interdisciplinary talks exploring the qualitative significance of design in the public domain within the contemporary built environment. Now in their twentieth year, London-based Carmody Groarke have established themselves as one of the pre-eminent contemporary architecture practices. From their earliest work comprising impromptu and temporary installations – including collaborations with artists such as Anthony Gormley – to more recent, large-scale public projects, Carmody Groarke have developed a unique and tangible visual ethos of making buildings. Theirs is a language where formal speculation and meaning is found in the conciliation between invention and tradition; in the sympathetic relationship of materials and the understanding by which hands and tools put them together; and an honest engagement with place and purpose. The work of the practice is often epitomised by an attitude of ‘doing the most with the least’ [1], utilising overlooked materials and unorthodox construction methods to yield unexpected solutions.
Michels began by outlining the practice’s early work via the unbridled vigour and initial sensibilities exhibited in their 2008 atectonic private underground swimming pool in Limerick, before transitioning to an onscreen image of the recently completed preservation of Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry. ‘Value judgements,’ he stated, ‘comprise the constant decisions architects make daily and over long periods of time in creating their work.’ The metric or means of this ‘value’ often varies, as illustrated in the two projects shown. The former centred on the removal of context and the formation of space through a composition of the finest materials from around the word. A very different approach was taken on the latter, listed, public building, where judgments of heritage, context, and decarbonisation became key measures of the process.
The body of Michels’s lecture expanded upon this idea of value judgments as drivers across three recent large-scale, cultural works. Each featured cultural institution was at a moment of evolution or growth. The resulting projects adopted distinct empathetic reactions to issues of contextual intervention; public access and appropriateness; climactic response; decay; and availability of local material, while questioning sourcing and established material manufacturing processes. This process he described as 'an arc of judgements’.
The first of the presented projects was for Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London, the world’s first purpose-built public art gallery. Interested in how a historic institution engages a modern audience and responds to the contemporary visitor’s needs, the gallery approached Carmody Groarke to design a children’s art gallery, update their considerable grounds, and gently renovate the existing John Soane-designed museum. Initially conceived as a space to protect the housed works as well as a mausoleum for the museum’s founders, the building’s defensive nature and heaviness needed to be broken down to make the gallery more inviting and open to the public. Carmody Groarke’s first move was to reconsider the approach and arrival to the site and existing galleries. The entrance was reoriented, making the gallery visible on approach to the public entrance. An additional southern entrance was enlarged, and an existing small cottage on site renovated into a public café which activates the space around it. However, it is primarily the creation of a new children’s art play pavilion, centrally located and visible on all sides in the newly opened parkland, which has gifted a publicly accessible and inviting garden meadow to a new demographic of people in London.
While the intervention at Dulwich was centred around public use and activation, the brief for the Ghent Design Museum, as described by Michels, was that of sympathetically stitching a contemporary building onto a tight site within Ghent’s historic core. While the medieval-inspired building form, varied programmatic function, and contextual sensitivity are of note, it is the extensive material research and innovative construction of this project which most clearly demonstrate the conscious value judgements of the architects and the broader design team. Historically a city of timber structures clad in masonry skins, Carmody Groarke set themselves the task of developing for Ghent 'a new sustainable vernacular, coupling less environmentally onerous materials with more forgiving detailing’ [2]. As with most construction materials and their manufacturing processes, brick production, previously geographically and aesthetically linked to place, has become ‘mechanised' and its procurement 'increasingly globalised’ through time. A multi-year research project involving a team of architects, material specialists, lawyers, and regulators resulted in the development of a low-carbon brick for use on the Ghent Design Museum’s new wing. The resulting Ghent Waste Brick is made from 63% recycled local municipal waste, with hydraulic lime acting as the primary binding agent. Most notably, unlike conventional bricks, Ghent’s are cured and compressed rather than fired, a process which, combined with the use of recycled composites, results in a brick that the architects report to have just one-third the embodied carbon of a typical Belgian clay brick. The recycled waste product was sourced within 7km of the project site and manufactured on a brownfield site on the city’s outskirts, re-establishing the possibility of what Carmody Groarke term ‘hyper-localised construction’. Crucially, as the principle of production is not contingent on a particular mix or recipe, this technique could easily be replicated in other urban settings.
The third and final project Michels presented was a new storage repository for the British Library’s ever-growing print collection. Occupying a 44-acre campus, the collection houses over 170 million items. In the last ten years, around seven million physical items have been added to the library’s archives, requiring approximately 8km of new shelving annually [3]. The project was for a new, fully automated storage repository to provide approximately 225 linear kms of additional capacity. Carmody Groarke’s goal was to create a modern, high-performance, airtight envelope to house the automated storage systems and passively climate-control the high-use space, thus lowering the massive amount of energy ordinarily required to operate such spaces. Their primary departure from default thinking was to challenge the assumption that a mechanical ventilation system is the easiest route to climatic control. Instead, they conceived of a building which has no traditional heating, cooling, or humidification systems; with passive climate control achieved through the building’s facade. Remarkably, an airtightness approximately thirty to forty times the Passivhaus standard was achieved, meaning that in a building the size of a football stadium, filled to bursting with twenty-five-metre-tall shelves in compact rows, the combined air loss is equivalent to that expelled through a closed domestic letterbox. Nitrogen is pumped into the space automatically, dropping the oxygen below 14.5% and so eliminating any potential fire risk. This significant shift in attitude from constant mechanical temperature and humidity control to one that allows gradual temperature and humidity changes throughout the year means a space which would traditionally cost approximately £1m a year in energy use instead has an annual inclusive running cost of £50,000. During a time of rampant soulless data centre construction, this building is vital to the discourse of architecture designed for technology, both in how it operates and in its aesthetic judgements.
The idea of value judgements is evidenced across the three projects in three distinct manners, however, embedded in each is the throughline of care. In an essay entitled ‘Permanence is a Privilege’ for their 2023 A+U magazine, Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke wrote:
‘Facing increasingly urgent duties to create a low-carbon future, the methodology, values and culture of architectural practice must evolve to become more empathetic, agile and resourceful towards these concerns of uncertainty... We must be receptive to diverse methods of production that balance the needs of natural and man-made worlds and arbitrate between the highly calibrated requirements of the here and now and the expectation of an undetermined future.' [4]
The Architectural Association of Ireland's Systems and Selves lecture featuring Carmody Groarke was held at TCD's Robert Emmett Theatre on Thursday 12 February 2026.
the write-up is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2026.
[1] Lang, R., ‘Modes of Production’, A+U: Architecture and Urbanism, Issue 634, July 2023.
[2] Michels, N. and Richards, S., ‘Gent Waste Brick’, Architects’ Journal, December 2022.
[3] ‘British Library Boston Spa’, Carmody Groarke website, (accessed 16 February 2026).
[4] Carmody, K., and Groarke, A., ‘Permanence is a Privilege’, A+U: Architecture and Urbanism, Issue 634, July 2023.
If you haven’t been to architect Mies Van Der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno, this exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square will give you all the impetus you need to get there. While we can assess, gain understanding, and measure remotely, most architects and historians will argue that the truest understanding of a built artefact arises from a visit. We cannot fully get a sense of acoustics, natural lighting, ventilation, or innocuous details without experiencing a space first-hand. This exhibition does not aim to recreate the experience of visiting Villa Tugendhat, but does something else, managing to present a forensic telling of the background, history, construction, and restoration of the house: a dissection that can be objectively presented at some distance from the artefact itself.
This exhibition is not just about a building; it is about the concepts, lives lived, and legacies connected to that building. For almost a century, the Villa Tugendhat has captured a collective architectural imagination. Take, for example, the catalogue of the seminal 1932 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition in New York. Its cover features a black-and-white photograph of the Tugendhat House, at that time a mere two years old. With hundreds of celebrated works to choose from, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock were making a statement by foregrounding Mies’ structure, which they saw as the direction of modernity.
While the building’s white walls, chrome-finished steel structure, extensive glass, lavish stone, and technical devices were all striking for 1930, they alone have not gifted its enduring presence. More important still is its demonstration of the new concept of theatrical living in open-plan, adaptable spaces: not just the house, but the idea of the house. With its seemingly experimental, avant-garde ambitions, this exhibition reminds us of art historian Justus Bier’s provocation: ‘Can the Villa Tugendhat be lived in?’
I found it enjoyable to ponder this question within a restored late eighteenth-century home in Dublin. We read of Tugendhat’s interiors flooded with daylight from its glazed facades just as the low winter’s sun penetrates the portrait sash windows of no. 45 Merrion Square. We are invited to imagine the flowing living spaces of Mies’ open-plan design as we pass from lofty room to room in the piano nobile of the former Georgian home. One couldn’t imagine such different ideas on dwelling.
The content can be explored at a number of depths: the time-pressed observer can cast their eyes over the beautiful drawings and photographs, the custom furniture on loan; someone invested in history can spend time understanding the Tugendhat family and the remarkable episodes this building lived through; and a practitioner or academic interested in the restoration of modern structures can read an in-depth overview of the scientific and faithful remaking of the house.
German designer Lily Reich has been largely sidelined in the popular history of Mies’ European career – a contribution that is gradually being reclaimed – and while she does gain credit in this overview, it is still not abundantly clear where in the interiors and furniture she has full or even equal authorship to Mies. However, one antidote to the often-overzealous cult of Mies is the well-balanced attention given to the building’s clients: Fritz and Grete Tugendhat. They were not bystanders to his genius, but engaged and fluent, creative and conscious in their direction. Their life stories are tragic, including a desperate flight from persecution to Venezuela, and while Grete returned to visit in the 1960s, Fritz never saw their home again.
The intriguing black-and-white photographs of the Villa’s wartime and post-war occupation provide a complex and rounded portrait of this structure, particularly its afterlife as a dance school and, later, a children’s physiotherapy centre. An Irish audience might draw comparisons with the familiar turbulent history of Eileen Grey’s E1027, built concurrently to Tugendhat in 1928. Photographer Miloš Budík’s photograph of a group of young women in the physiotherapy centre, taken in 1956, is particularly captivating: an accidental, temporary use distils some of the most promising aspects of modern architecture: light, airiness, reflection, ventilation, to create a humanistic space for living.
The Villa Tugendhat exhibition – presented by the Embassy of the Czech Republic and the Villa Tugendhat – is free to enter and runs at the Irish Architectural Archive from 22 January to 10 April 2026.
In this piece, the first in Type's new event review series, 'the write-up', Cormac Murray considers the Villa Tugendhat exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive.
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