Making is a new documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Pat Collins which documents Making In, the annual gathering of makers that takes place each September at Joseph Walsh Studio in Fartha, Co. Cork - watch Making now, via RTÉ Player.
It features interviews with American curator and writer Glenn Adamson, French architect and design historian Cloé Pitiot, Italian bell-makers Pasquale and Benedetta Marinelli, Irish musician Martin Hayes, Finnish architect Kimmo Lintula, Irish weavers Karen Hay-Edie and Mario Serra, Japanese stonemason Hiroyuki Tsujji, Irish chef Rory O'Connell, Japanese sculptor Kan Yasuda and American conductor Teddy Abrams.
The film also follows the construction of Stone Vessel at Joseph Walsh Studio, the second of three ‘rambling houses’ designed by Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey of O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects and Joseph Walsh.
Ahead of the Irish TV premiere of Making on RTÉ One on August 14th, architect John Tuomey explores the making of his building Stone Vessel...
The three Rambling Houses at Fartha are experimental structures, lively demonstrations of local skills and built in locally sourced materials. Rambling houses were found in old Irish villages, gathering places for music and story-telling, places open to the passer-by.
Passage House, a structure in timber and thatch, completed in 2022, stands at a point of convergence on the path between the Joseph Walsh design studio and production workshop. It is a place of pause, somewhere to slow down and admire the folding landscape of fields and hedges.
Stone Vessel, built across the spring and summer months of 2023, is a development out of ten years’ collaboration between O’Donnell + Tuomey and Joseph Walsh. Together we have made a number of Vessels, one in layers of oak and light-catching gold leaf, another, the Unfinished Museum, was carved out of alabaster. Stone Vessel, is similar in idea to these smaller vessels, but it works at a different scale, larger in its dimensions, monumental maybe, but no less intimate.
Hedge Theatre, to be completed in the summer of 2024, is a crucial link in the chain of three rambling houses at Fartha, a centre-piece in the trilogy of architectural experiments, a theatrical space grown out of the thickness of the hedgerow. The skyline roof shapes of Passage House and Stone Vessel make a scenic backdrop glimpsed through the filter of trees.
Stone Vessel is a shrine-like gathering house, aligned east-west to catch the rising and setting sun. It is a faceted structure, chamfered at its corners, sharply angled in its outline against the sky. And, inside this prismatic profile, within this solid shape, we wanted to hollow out a softer interior, an acoustic space, a curvilinear cave-like containment, a dynamic volume scooped out of the static form.
It was assembled by hand, stone on stone on stone with the energy and commitment of a meitheal of masons, working together through fine and filthy weather to complete this unusual building. It was built within the limitations of available material, walls made of fieldstone quarried out of the immediate site, or locally sourced harder limestone for quoins and lintels. The plan depends on the forces of gravity, the section respects the natural bed of the stone, the roof rises in a corbelled structure.
The building site rang with the sound of hammer and chisel, with the convivial rhythms of masons working together. We wanted to use an ancient technology to test a contemporary idea, to stretch old ways of working to search for something new, to imagine a synthesis of space and volume and structure, a resonant integrity rarely experienced in modern construction.
At the end of many months of hard work on the building, as we shook hands with each of the masons, who had all become friends, Michael Fearnhead, the elder of the group said; "We’ll give you a thousand-year guarantee on this one, John!"
Making, RTÉ One, Wednesday 14th August at 10.35 pm - catch up afterwards via RTÉ Player.
