To my shame, I had never heard of Shane de Blacam, who won this year’s Architecture Prize at the Royal Academy last night and gave a charming, informative and beautifully illustrated account of the buildings he had designed as if for the first time.

He was trained at University College, Dublin and then went on a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania which was obviously a good place to be in the late 1960s, not least because of the presence of Louis Kahn, with whom de Blacam worked as a project assistant on the Yale Center for British Art. He told a story which I had never heard that the first version of the project came out at $17 million (I think that was the figure, but wasn’t taking notes) but Paul Mellon refused to budge from the budget he had set of $14 million because he was annoyed by New Haven who had insisted on there being shops on the street (actually, a good thing). So, de Blacam was responsible for re-engineering the building to cost quite a lot less, which normally results in an impoverishment of the building’s character, but not at the YCBA with its luxurious use of white oak and concrete (Kahn died in 1974 and the building only opened in 1977, so quite a bit of the work at this stage must have been done by Anthony Pellecchia and Marshall Meyer who worked in Kahn’s office).

De Blacam then went back to teach at University College, Dublin which he was obviously brilliant at to judge by the number of his former students from Dublin who where in the audience, before setting up in practice with a colleague, the late John Meagher who had studied in Helsinki before working for Venturi Scott Brown, also in Philadelphia. I now realise that we were only shown a relatively small proportion of their projects, but they were without exception exceptionally interesting – beautifully drawn, carefully considered, an unusual mixture of modernism, but with declared, sometimes modern, historical references, including a recreation of Adolf Loos’s Karntner Bar at Trinity College, Dublin and much acknowledgement of Kahn and Asplund.

There was little indication of the dates at which the projects were done, so I have looked up when they were done (some are undated on their website).

This is a residential block inserted into the medieval part of Dublin, finished in 2000:-

This is the courtyard of the Cork Institute of Technology, completed in 2007:-

The Abbeyleix Library (2009):-

I hope it’s OK to have reproduced the photographs which are by Peter Cook.