Meet the duo quietly putting Irish architecture on the world stage
Róisín Heneghan and Shih-Fu Peng are known for their sensitive designs that work not to grab your attention, but to direct it elsewhere.
How do you create a remarkable building in an extraordinary place, in a way that lets everything coexist? Can a building enhance its setting without taking over? That is the question occupying one of this country’s most internationally renowned architectural practices, Heneghan Peng Architects. The Dublin-based duo, who also have an office in Berlin, have been the quiet masterminds behind such projects as the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, the Giant’s Causeway Visitors’ Centre in Co Antrim, and The Palestinian Museum in the West Bank.
Scheduled to open this year, and with a budget of $1billion, the Grand Egyptian Museum will knock the Louvre in Paris off its perch as the largest in the world, but that’s not the most interesting thing about it. When the design competition was announced, back in 2003, it was the biggest in history, with more than 1,500 entries from 83 countries – including such architectural superstars as Zaha Hadid. So how did a tiny Dublin firm prevail? “We couldn’t believe it,” Róisín Heneghan said in an interview at the time. “We called back and said, ‘Are you sure?’”
“It’s quite simple,” says Shih-Fu Peng, speaking of the design, rather than the intricacies of the project. “Egypt has two levels, the level of the ultra-green fertile Nile Valley and then the desert plateau, which is about 60 metres up… so we made that 60 metres into its new identity.” He describes how, resisting any urge to create something that stood out, they formed a seamless extension of the plateau, the building then dropping down to give uninterrupted views of the stars of the show, the Pyramids themselves. “We said the iconic is actually in what is there.”
Looked at that way, the best architecture may be that which opens things up by looking more closely in. Something similar is at play in the design for the Giant’s Causeway Visitors’ Centre, completed in 2012. In this case, the focus is on the 40,000 basalt columns that have defined this part of the Antrim coastline for millions of years. As the Heneghan Peng team explain it, “there is no longer a building and landscape, but building becomes landscape and the landscape itself remains spectacular.” Currently, they are working on new buildings for the Storm King arts and sculpture park in upstate New York, and a significant and sensitive re-plan and extension of Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
Badly damaged by Allied bombs in 1943, the tower of the church had been deliberately left as a partial ruin, a symbol of those physical wounds that remain as reminders from history. What Heneghan Peng proposed was a gentle tweaking, rather than a major intervention. As Peng notes, the project comes as the Second World War passes from living memory into history, asking, “how does something like this live on?” Instead of adding a major central focus, they are removing a more recent roof, including a circular pool to reflect the church’s damaged window, and installing a commissioned sound work by artist Susan Philipsz.
While the world has mostly moved on from the “starchitect” trend, established by the likes of Frank Gehry’s titanium Guggenheim Bilbao, there is still a strong lean towards the “signature” in design. This makes the sensitivity of Heneghan Peng’s projects all the more striking. So how do you get to swim against the starchitect tide so successfully? Born in Erris, Co Mayo, Heneghan met her partner Shih-Fu Peng at Harvard, where she studied after graduating from UCD. “It was in a seminar,” she says, smiling at the memory. She has a warm smile, which emerges a lot as she speaks. “We had to do a paper together,” she continues, and the pair pause to recall the tutor, that paper, clearly back in college in their minds.
Peng was born in Queens, New York, and describes himself as “a nomad. I lived in Japan for three or four years, in Taiwan for six or eight. I have lived in Ireland for longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere,” he says with an expression that may be tinged with some small surprise at the passing of time. Initially setting up in New York, the pair returned to Ireland in 2001 on winning the competition to design the Civic Offices for Kildare County Council in Naas, in association with Arthur Gibney & Partners Architecture.
Heneghan and Peng make a good team, adding to each other’s ideas, sometimes disagreeing, often to arrive at somewhere new. She is brilliantly bright, a quick thinker who brings a joy to what she says and how she says it. He is more measured and precise in his speech, suspicious of the overly poetic, and yet inclined to a richness of thought that is – dare I say it? – poetic in itself. Musing on where ego comes into architecture, he describes “that fine line of how the self comes in and out of the equation. To make that call, I think, is the critical component of the success of these projects. Ego,” he continues, “tends to completely live in the self, only for the self. So how do you negotiate that line between when self is there, and self is gone?” Sometimes, he says, citing the Guggenheim, a dose of self can be what pushes something to greatness, but it is not always the best, or right thing to do. It is an approach to architecture, and to life, that I will mull over, long after our conversation is done.
Another crucial approach to their work is their blending of approaches. Winners of this year’s RIAI Silver Medal in Conservation for their refurbishment of the National Gallery in Dublin’s historic wings, Peng describes the different approaches to conservation and sustainability in different cultures. “Conservation in the West is based on material things. You have a building, it is made out of stone, so when you conserve it, you put the bricks back… in the end, it looks pretty much like it did before.” In contrast, he says, in Japan, and across Asia, things are made from wood, “and that isn’t going to last that long. So conservation has nothing to do with the material. What they preserve in Japan is technique, and that is why ritual is so powerful.”
Marrying the two, Heneghan Peng bring a sensitivity to time and place, carrying techniques learned as they go. Currently working in Ireland on projects including at Trinity College, and on refurbishing a 1960s city centre office block, they are interested in architecture that is helpful to society, in the idea of housing, rather than one-off houses. But, even with all their accolades and awards, and with the world clamouring for their work, we are unlikely to see any housing projects from them here. Procurement in Ireland means that only architects with multiple housing developments under their belts need apply. Heneghan says she understands the need for expediency, but adds that “not every single housing project is huge, and there are some places where there could be more openness.”
It is a compelling thought. Peng goes on to describe his interest in the spaces that need invention, those that are awkward, difficult, complex. Perhaps that is another reason their work is so powerful: it works on an emotional as well as a physical level. Architecture creates spaces for us to exist in the world, something we all try to do in our own ways, every day of our lives. It is remarkable to think of an architecture that takes that into account, on every level you could imagine.
This feature originally appeared in the autumn/winter 2024 issue of IMAGE Interiors. Have you thought about becoming a subscriber? Find out more, and sign up here.
Also Read
