Publisher: Canalside Press, ISBN: 9781399905350, Editors: Patrick Lynch and Simon Walker, Contributors: Elizabeth Hatz, Tom de Paor, Douglas Carson, Niall McLaughlin and Laura Evans, Format: Clothbound Hardback, 223 x 182 mm, 329pp
Educated at Wesley College in Dublin, and then at UCD, where he later taught, Walker worked for both Le Corbusier in Paris and for Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, before returning to Ireland to help build the new Republic; working on significant civic and cultural projects as well as a number of exemplary private houses. Walker became a Roman Catholic in his later years, and his writing reflects a profound interest in the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of architecture.
Married to the prominent Irish arts administrator Dorothy Walker, the couple's country house designed by Robin overlooking The Kenmare River in West Cork, Bothar Bui, became a salon for many of the major artists and writers of post-war Irish society. Robin Walker is remembered in his friend Seamus Heaney's poem An Architect, published in the collection Spirit Level (1996); and in fact parts of other collections, including Seeing Things (1986), were written in and about the house and its landscape.
The aim of this publication, and what is becoming the ambition of a series of books published by Canalside Press, is to recover the lost cultural energy of modern architecture, revealing its intellectual depth & artistic urgency; beautiful books about beautiful ideas and buildings, which reveal their reciprocity.