Kevin Kiernan: an obituary

Kevin Kieran, architect, teacher and consultant to the Arts Council, died on Christmas Eve 1999 at the age of 45. Cancer prevented him from being with us in the 21st Century.

He made his entrance in Earlsfort Terrace in the early 70s already set in his ways, like a nineteenth-century character not fully acclimatised to twentieth-century life. His knowledge of Dublin's architecture was unusual and his powers of observation were extraordinary. He could describe in graphic and precise detail houses and their inhabitants from his childhood in suburban Foxrock. He was an early enthusiast for the Venetian Gothic brilliance of Benjamin Woodward's buildings. His later writings on the significance of structure and construction in the architecture of Louis Kahn and Frank Lloyd Wright were grounded in his reading of nineteenth-century theorists.

Exquisitely detailed pencil drawings were produced erratically, and with no regard for college timetables. He was a notorious prevaricator apparently allergic to deadlines, a perfectionist who could never convince himself that a thing could be finished while there was still a chance to start it again.

Graduating from UCD School of Architecture in 1977 he spent most of the next 20 years in America, working as an architect in New York, studying and then teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design where eventually he was appointed Director of Studies. He left Harvard to join the Benedictine Order in New Hampshire and then left the monastery to go back to teaching architecture. In 1997 he returned to Dublin to become the first architecture consultant at the Arts Council and to take up a teaching position at UCD. Shortly afterwards his cancer was diagnosed. His intellectual contribution has made a lasting impression in both institutions and his international reputation as a critic kept him in demand in architectural education and publications world-wide.

He was a prodigious letter writer and an inexhaustible conversationalist. He had a gift for friendship and made new friends wherever he went. An evening spent with Kevin was likely to cover an enormous range of subjects and emotions, from soul-searching about personal problems and discussion of ideas to an update on the progress of his beloved nieces and nephews, all interspersed with bouts of sheer giddiness and fun. Deeply religious, yet always irreverent, he was profoundly serious and profoundly funny.

A number of frustrations make it hard to accept his early death. Devoted to his many friends he never found a life's companion; one of the most gifted architects of his generation, he built only one building - a beautiful kindergarten in Rhode Island; more fluent in discussion than in print, he had not written the book of essays that we knew one day he would; loved and admired by students and colleagues, his extraordinary teaching abilities had not yet earned him the academic position he deserved. And yet this was also the nature of the man, his vital quality was registered by everyone with whom he came in contact.

The youngest of five children he is survived by his mother Kitty, his sister Ann, his brothers John, Dennis and Peter and his family of friends around the world.

Sheila O'Donnell & John Tuomey