Clancy Moore architects
66 Meath Street / Crosstick Alley
D08 DK64 Dublin, Ireland
+353 (0) 1 709 3005
info@clancymoore.com
House on a Hillside
2018-2023
This project is for a family planning to return to Ireland. Their brief was deceptively simple. They sought a house both for themselves, and one that could comfortably accommodate large numbers of extended family and friends at regular intervals. We designed it to be robustly made to thrive that it might gain its character from years of repeated use and abuse.
It is to be a place to live and age in, to gather and to be alone in.
March 2024
A+U 642
Guest Edited by Tom dePaor and Andrew Clancy A+U 642 features several projects from Clancy Moore alongside works by 5 other practices.
01st August 2023
NCAD Masterplan
Clancy Moore in collaboration with TAKA architects are working on a masterplan for the entire NCAD campus. This incredible place has educated many of Irelands leading creative thinkers and is badly in need of capital investment. Incorporating a bottom up approach, and building from a rich survey of the social and physical contexts of the school our emerging strategy involves minimal interventions as well as larger scale works. The initial stages of this work were positively received by Minister Simon Harris. We are now working a full business case for HEA funding to be submitted in early 2024.
1st August 2023
Social Housing Castleblayney
Clancy Moore placed second in the open design competition for new social housing in Castleblayney co Monaghan. Our design involved making a generous shared courtyard, which acted as sthreshold, play space extension of the civic spaces of the town. The proposed construction involved a low carbon approach involving stick build timber. With all apartments universal access it also sets a new standard in terms of inclusion for people of all levels of mobility.
01st July 2023
Mendrisio
Andrew and Colm have been invited to act as Guest Professors in the renowned Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio. Our studio will run in the Autumn Semester for the next 4 years and will involve using fiction as a site, allowing our students explore contexts in depth, and to propose work which acts in emtpahy with the social, climatic and narrative ideas in the work. Our reading list involves works by Hisham Matar, Zadie Smith, WG Seabed and Chimamanda Ngoni Adichie. Follow the work here.
01 Jan 2023
School in Renens
Clancy Moore placed 4th in this open competition for a school and community facilities in Renens, Switzerland.
Our design makes an enabling landscape in which classrooms link to the exterior via terraced external play areas. The site is structured to allow core facilities such as the library and sports halls to be shared with the broader community. The language of the architecture was found in a careful consideration of weather, water, and energy generation.
This competition design was made in collaboration with Tekhne SA; Muttoni SA (engineers) and CWA SA (landscape designers). Images by Aiva.
01st December 2022
Kay Fisker Book
Our book about the Danish Architect Kay Fisker is now published.
Fisker built many extraordinary housing schemes, mostly for non-profit workers’ housing associations, and developed innovative, high-density, low-rise block schemes, which have proven useful and influential to the growing number of contemporary architects who have examined his designs. Beautifully illustrated with photographs and architectural drawings mostly made by our students in Queens Belfast, this book documents and critically analyses three of Kay Fisker’s seminal housing projects in Copehagen: Hornbaekhus (1923), Vestersohus (1935-39), and Dronningegarden (1943- 58). These projects reflect how Fisker’s work contains valuable lessons for contemporary architects in economy, precision, and generosity in housing design. Essays by Job Floris, Martin Soberg and others the book shows his continuing relevance today. Published by Lund Humphries
7th September 2022
AMAG publication
Clancy Moore’s work has been extensively featured in AMAG 28 along with friends Steve Larkin and Ryan Kennihan.
The editors comment that “Each project thus represents an addition to a place, be it partial or total, material or immaterial, that not only becomes part of the landscape, but whose encounter with and incorporation into the natural context allows for and reaffirms its total sense of belonging and shared use.A slow architecture, whose characteristic and fundamental purpose is well-being, adaptability and the enhancement of such simple and common issues as living, sharing, freedom, encounters, the collective, permanence and condition. Entirely devoid of any symbolic or stylistic pretension.”
Purchase the book here
A room for a novelist in a back garden in Dublin
2020
This project makes a space for a novelist to write in solitude in his garden. With the site inaccessible to builders behind an existing terrace of houses we designed the room so it could be constructed off site and craned into position. This aspect governed the design, meaning it became an exercise in éspace minimum, in order for its weight to work with the capacity of the crane. The form and weight limits were shaped by these limits - shaping both form and tectonics with the room being made with an exoskeleton which allowed it to be hung when in motion and to sit on its foundations once in position.
With these contingencies we found space for a rich internal world, lined in red stained beech and mirror. It provides a desk to work from, and a daybed to rest. Placed in a corner of the garden the room seeks to capture a series of spaces between itself and the surrounding planting. Recognising that repose is as important as production the room reaches beyond the site also, providing a distant view to the sea from the daybed via its mirrored ceiling.
Shortlisted competition entry for Grangegorman Development Agency
2021
The FOCAS research institute is a part of the TU Dublin Campus - housing advanced microscopy laboratories and support services. Our design for the second stage was developed in partnership with COADY partnership.
Our proposal for the open competition placed the building to make a series of public spaces and gardens about the building, to build a community between research facilities. This location also allows the building resolve level differences on the site to create a rich internal landscape of conversation and encounter. This layout was inherently flexible to future changes in use while catering for the high level of vibrational control and service access required by the laboratories.
The design was calibrated to be low in carbon, using minimal depths of material, a composite steel and timber structure and a layered facade which is demountable and recyclable.
29th September 2021
EU Mies Award Nomination
We are delighted that our Atcost project has been nominated for the EU Mies Award 2022. The project, for Drawing Matter in Somerset, involved converting a barn for use for education, performance and storage.
Refurbishment of a Victorian Home, Dublin
2018-2020
Sometimes you don’t need to add space to transform a house. In this project a previously modified Victorian house was renovated, with minimal increase in floor area. Our work to the rear is less an addition than it is a weaving, building on a careful consideration of the site as we found it.
The design is made in a series of bay windows and roof lights which imply rooms of various scale in a large open plan. The rear wall of the house is propped at the first floor level by a steel column which opens up the existing rooms to the back of the house as one large living space. This structural figure anchors the spaces surrounding it. In spite of the terrace condition, each of these ‘rooms’, for cooking, gathering, eating and relaxing, is lit from all directions.
Competition entry for Sara Hilden Museum, Tampere
2020
The museum is placed in four volumes, linked on half levels by a central stairs and lift. The result is an interconnected landscape of galleries, event spaces and more. The volumes step to preserve existing trees on site, and to make pocket public spaces between the building and the city.
The conversion of a warehouse for use as a studio and dwelling
2017-2018
The existing warehouse had a delicacy in its structure, and in its layered spatiality built from an ad hoc collection of screens, gantries and ladders. In converting to use as a house we built the design to preserve and enhance these qualities.
Two upper levels of bedrooms - one for parents, the other for children sit either side of the major living space. At the ground level smaller spaces such as kitchen, den and studio are divided from this central space by a series of figurative elements - columns, stairs, screens and furniture.
A major wastewater treatment plant and associated landscapes for Arklow town
2016 - (due 2024)
This project is for a major piece of civic infrastructure for Arklow and has been designed in collaboration with ARUP and Bryne Looby for Irish Water. Currently Arklow has no water treatment and raw sewerage discharge has badly impaired the social, ecological and economic development of the town. The selected site is highly significant and Clancy Moore were selected as architects as part of a design competition.
The design builds itself about the practical requirements of the plant and the sites sensitivities on a prominent part of the town. Operational aspects are stacked and massed into distinct elements which hold yards between. The facades act as infrastructural armatures, holding cranes and lighting, sheltering working areas, and sealing the treatment sections of the plant from the broader environment.
The design works with the expressive potential of these rational requirements and makes civic face in keeping with the industrial processes and histories of the site. It was hailed for its innovation in the planning decision to grant permission for the project.
It is currently under construction with Clancy Moore acting as employers representative and Ward and Burke acting as main contractor Sean Dockery as their site architects.
A multigenerational dwelling for a number of growing families in Dublin
2008–2012
Situated in a disused phylite quarry, and in a very sensitive landscape our approach was to think of the architecture as infrastructural, spanning from rock outcrops and making the quarry floor into a shared garden. Due to uncertain ground conditions, the houses act as an inhabited bridge, spanning between natural and man made outcrops forming sheds a shared entrance staircase. The houses language derives from the structure necessary to achieve these spans. Internally more intimate living spaces and bedrooms occur in a lower north-facing wing. Taller living spaces address the south. The form of the two dwellings closes the quarry to create a shared communal garden room overlooked by a long verandah and the living rooms.
Alterations and additions to a house in South Dublin
2017
This domestic reworking builds itself about the requirement to prop an upper level return. Using this central column as a figure to build from the project is constructed in layers, each tuned to mediate between the interior and the exterior, capturing niches and light between.
Red Pavilion, London Festival of Architecture
2015
This temporary pavilion for the London Festival of Architecture was a collaboration between Clancy Moore, TAKA and Steve Larkin. It explores various types of intimate public space, from arcades, market halls, snugs, park benches. These are assembled to make a facade to Cubitt Square in Kings Cross.
Renovations and additions to a house in South Dublin
2015—2016
The existing interior of this house was one composed of objects - furniture and space carefully arranged by the domestic eye over time. In the renovation of the house we sought to preserve this conversation. So each new intervention is considered as a discrete autonomous object that would enter into a conversation with the existing elements of the house and its furnishings. The primary addition to the house is the extension to the return of the house. Made in Steel it is intended both as a pavilion and an oversized piece of garden furniture.
The conversion of a precast concrete barn to use as a gallery and a house.
2018
This project is born from the found figure of the central branching support to an existing portal framedbarn in Somerset. We enjoy this moment with it’s ability to speak about system and inflection at once. The scheme exposes this condition. Building out from this in a fragmentary process the proposition becomes a series of aedicules, props and rooms which capture and frame this existing structure. It proposes a conversational architecture, contingent and ordered, complex and ambiguous, nuanced and rigorous.
A small inner city church needed more space, Dublin
2008
A small inner city church needed more space to allow for flexibility in catering for its dynamic congregation of new arrivals to Ireland, along with its more established community. We wrapped these new spaces around the entrance, manipulating the form to allow it to frame the existing architecture for those entering.
A collection of studios for differing arts practices in a park
2008–2009
The grain of the north-lights allow the simple form to be subdivided into a series of spaces to suit varying arts practices, from multimedia, to painting, sculpture and music.
Alterations to a ‘House of the Middle Size’ Co Kerry
2008 - 2010
This project takes the form of a series of extensions and alterations to an 18th century house at the edge of a lake. The project is a columnar field, its rhythm and order derived from the proportions of the original house. This makes a deep threshold between the existing discrete interiors and the richly planted garden. Clearings and linings in this space make rooms, and the weathering line steps to make verandahs and porches.