Hegarty Architects was established in 1997.
Michael Hegarty RIBA MRIAI MAPM B.Arch.( 1st Hons ) B.Sc.( Env. Sci )
Associate - Michael Carr MRIAI B.Arch.(Hons) B.Sc.(Arch.)
Office Manager - Catherine McIvor
The practice offers the following services:
* RIBA and RIAI Chartered Architects
* Interior Design
* Historic Buildings Advice
* CDM Health & Safety Planning Supervisor Services
* Project Management Services
* Legal Expert Witness
* All services are Quality Assured to ISO 9001
Michael Hegarty has achieved the following design awards:
* 2005 RIAI Irish Architectural Awards Exhibition – The Collon Bar
* 2001 Art & Architecture Award (Royal Society for the Arts) – Gasworks Café with Locky Morris Artist.
* 1992 RIBA Regional Award for Nicoll Russell Studio project - Scrimgeours Corner, Creif
* 1991 Chamber of Commerce / RIAS, Winner -Ideas competition for Dundee Waterfront
* 1991 Gradus/ Spectus UK Detail Design Competition Winner
Hegarty Architects have had a number projects published in respected Architectural Journals and Magazines. A full list is available on request. The following books have been published internationally with the work of the practice:
Title: Two Minds – Artists and Architects in Collaboration
Editor: Jes Fernie (2006)
Publisher: Black Dog Publishing Ltd. London
ISBN: 1 904772 26 9
Title: Space –Architecture for Art
Editor: Gemma Tipton (2005)
Publisher: Circa, Belfast
ISBN: 0 9550319 0 7
Philosophy
Hegarty Architects produce distinct and specific buildings for individual sites. There is a consistent philosophical basis for decisions made during any project in terms of urban responses, activity responses and repair. An explanation of this is best set out with reference to the writers who have influenced us organised here as a discourse.
“In contemporary society where journeys into space are common place and satellite technology widespread, information about the earths atmosphere and surface have provided new insight into interactions between the living and inorganic parts of the planet.
From this has arisen my hypothesis, a model, in which the earths living matter, air, oceans and land surface form a complex system which can be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life”.
(from “GAIA” by J.E Lovelock)
The idea that the earth is alive has existed since ancient times. The first scientific expression of this belief was from James Hutton, known as the father of Geology, in a lecture before the royal society of Edinburgh in 1785.
Patrick Geddes, a century later looked at towns and cities. As a biologist interested in the phenomena of life – all life, in “cities in evolution” he displays pictorially the organic development of cities and elaborated his main theme. The city is inseparable from the landscape in which it is set and can only be understood in terms of its geographical situation, its climatic and meteorological facts, its economic bases and its historic heritage.
“Town plans are therefore no mere diagrams they are a system of hieroglyphics in which man has written the history of civilisation and the more tangled their apparent confusion, the more we may be rewarded in deciphering it.”
(from “CITIES IN EVOLUTION” by Patrick Geddes)
“The city is a fact of nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel, or an ant heap. But it is also a conscious work of art and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art.
Mind takes form in the site; and in turn urban forms condition the mind. For space, no less than time, is artfully reorganised in cities, in boundary lines and silhouettes, in the fixing of horizontal plans and vertical peaks, in utilizing or denying the natural site, the city records the attitude of a culture and an epoch to the fundamental facts of its existence.
The dome and the spire, the open avenue and the closed court, tell the story, not merely of different physical accommodations, but of essentially different conceptions of man’s destiny.
The city is both a physical utility for collective living and a symbol of those collective purposes and unanimities, which arise under such favouring circumstance. With language itself, it remains man’s greatest work of art”.
(from “THE CULTURE OF CITIES” by Lewis Mumford)
“A city is the expression of the diversity of social relationships which have become fused into a single organism”.
(from “SPACE, TIME, AND ARCHITECTURE” by S.Guidion)
“An organic architecture means more or less an organic society. Organic ideals of integral building reject rules imposed by exterior aestheticism or mere taste”.
(from “TOWARDS AN ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE” by Bruno Zevi)
“Every act of building is, with respect to it’s larger context, an act of repair: a part of the much larger process in which several acts together generate the larger wholes from which a building complex or a town is made”.
(from “A TIMELESS WAY OF BUILDING” by C.Alexander 1967)
Our attitude towards building use develops as the brief and design develop. Buildings are complex and must respond to both the existing and potential urban fabric and specific site considerations as I have established with reference to the above writers and others.
The building as a technology dependant resource has to have the flexibility to accommodate whatever advances arise. This requires a new type of architecture, not derived from compositions of solid and void, but based on attention to active and passive surfaces, spaces and places and the provision of a suitable framework to support these activities.
“Each building, when it is first built, is an attempt to make a self-maintaining whole configuration. But our predications are invariably wrong. People use buildings differently from the way they thought they would”.
(from “A TIMELESS WAY OF BUILDING” by C.Alexander)
“Several acts of building, each one done to repair and magnify the product of the previous acts, will slowly generate a larger and more complex whole than any single act can generate”.
(from “A TIMELESS WAY OF BUILDING” by C.Alexander)
“The idea of self-denial for the sake of posterity, of practising present economy for the sake of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendants may live under their shade, or of raising cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly recognised motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, usefulness include, not only the companions but the successors, of our pilgrimage”.
(from “THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE” (the lamp of memory) by John Ruskin 1907
We all actively analyse our environment whether consciously for example while working, or sub-consciously by living and participating in a city or rural environment. Any building therefore should become identifiable within the urban framework, while also facilitate future changes to the framework.
Any building or building complex has to provide a marker of its own existence to the outside world and people who approach the site. In local terms at any specific site the building exists within the city, town or rural environment, both in location and function. This can be marked as part of a marker sequence.
It may also be possible to expand a brief beyond what the client may have determined as their immediate needs. For example it may be possible to encourage public pedestrian use of part of a given site to increase the social vitality and in turn the commercial viability of a given development. Identifying such a potential route would be an act urban repair.
At the same time any building has to respond to the scale and mass of the surrounding buildings and spaces and become appropriate for the location as well as the function. To this end we take the view that while any building should be polite to the scale and nature of any surrounding buildings of local historical importance, any new building must be true to itself, its age, its use and its technology.
Contact Us
Hegarty Architects
Studio 51
Clarendon Street
Derry
BT48 7ER
Telephone: 028 7127 1237
Facsimile: 028 7128 3128
Email: info@hegartyarchitects.com
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03 30th, 2008| 
