About this talk

Running time: 30 minutes

Sean Mulcahy trained as a mechanical and electrical engineer. He took his first engineering job in 1947 with the Danish services engineer, Jorgen Warming, advising the Dublin architect Michael Scott (see Your Mother Eire Is Always Young) on a programme of post-war buildings in Ireland. Mulcahy's practice now extends over Britain and Ireland, with links to Denmark and Australia, and he has worked with most of the best-known British and Irish architects on hundreds of major buildings.

He has lectured extensively (a number of his papers have been published) and he teaches at University College, Dublin, and Edinburgh University. Though recognising the architect as leader of the building design team, he stresses that it is useless for him to think of design form before seeking close engineering advice. The brief must include matters of performance as well as of space and budget.

He illustrates his talk with some of the work he has done, and says "if architecture is art with plumbing, then you must architect the plumbing".

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