Recently winning a NYCxDESIGN award for his Fred Flintstone-like Portals furniture, Alexander Buckeridge is an Irish architect who has worked with some of the world’s top practices. The design fraternity has taken notice.
With good looks and an ability to communicate complex ideas simply, Bagnalstown boy, Alexander Buckeridge, is an architect with ambitions.
International audiences have already taken note.
He recently picked up a NYCXDesign award for interior design for his Portals collection through his recently launched hospitality and retail practice, Studio Bucky.
He’s also worked with GRWN, a luxury jeweller selling lab-grown diamonds in West Hollywood.
Having trained at Waterford IT (now SETU), he moved to Paris to work with the French starchitectural practice Ateliers Jean Nouvel, which designed the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the Barcelona Stadium, the Philharmonie de Paris, and the Quai Branly Museum.
He was seriously impressed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Nouvel. “He was able to visualise a new reality,” he says.
"The French are poetic in a way that will drive through. We Irish are poets in our own right, too. How we storytell is different.
"The French are ambitiously crazy in their appreciation of art in their lives.
"The Pompidou Centre and the Louvre Pyramid are so counter to what’s around them architecturally. And yet it works.”
He then crossed the pond to New York to work with Snarkitecture, set up by artist Daniel Arsham and architect Alex Mustonen.
The firm blurs the boundaries between those two disciplines and encourages playful, sensory exploration.
He worked on immersive and experiential retail and hospitality projects, including sneaker and streetwear brand Kith’s retail flagships.
The Paris store features a glass-enclosed courtyard and a distinctive sneaker chandelier
He rose to a director-level role here, and you can hear the lessons he’s picked up in his speech. Forged by many business pitches, he’s able to convey ideas in simple, succinct and relatable terms.
He’s also built up a really good contacts book and has already worked in Ireland.
“I was always interested in vernacular architecture, in tower houses.”
He says digital detox cabin company Samsú founder Rosanna Connolly wanted verticality, a sleeping in the sky idea.
They workshopped it, first believing that it would be clad in thatch, but there were insurance issues with it.
“I came up with the red shingles, the agricultural red. It is surreal and playful.”
The Portals collection looks like it was hewn from the Stone Age, or at least the imagination of layout artist and designer Ed Benedict, who was responsible for the original character designs and concept of the 1960s primetime cartoon, The Flintstones.
There’s an element of child's play to the collection, with further development pieces going into the Ronald McDonald House in New York.
He’s thrilled that the pieces “will bring joy and life” to kids undergoing cancer treatments.
The facility provides temporary accommodation for the families of children undergoing pediatric cancer treatment.
What isn’t known Stateside is that the collection is inspired by a Co Carlow landmark. The Brownshill portal dolmen is located just three kilometres outside Carlow town.
“It’s about bringing ancient structures, a very primitive form of habitation to the future. It’s drawing a line between the worlds and asking, is it the past, or is it the future?”
The furniture has rough, hewn-like edges, as if quarried out of the rockface, yet the seating and surfaces are smooth.
Made of layers of solid salvaged maple that’s been dyed so that you can still see the grain, the furniture features layers of the wood, first glued and clamped together to make is super-sturdy.
The forms are then cut using a computer numerical control system (CNC) to make the pieces. The giant-sized mirror, for example, is comprised of four such parts. It was all made in New Jersey.
The lead image shown here was designed to evoke the west of Ireland. The stool has four feet, almost giving the impression it might walk away off set.
His goal is to open a studio in Europe, a mixture of art, interiors, architecture and build out a future business.
Polished and handsome with a great Bagnalstown brogue, you can expect TV executives to lap him up, especially given that he plans to return to Ireland in the next 18 months.
To find out more, visit Studio Bucky
