Dr Patrick Lynch - Progress is a Myth, Change is the Reality
Weekend House, Kinsale, Co. Cork – photograph Henk Snoek
Progress is a Myth, Change is the Reality:
On Poetics, Myth and Modernity in the Architecture of Robin Walker
A talk by Dr Patrick Lynch
Tuesday 2 June 2026, 7.00pm
at the Alan Baxter Associates Gallery, 77 Cowcross St, London EC1M 6EL and online.
Docomomo members go free. To book a member’s ticket please click here. To become a member see here.
Tickets for attendance in person and online are available here. Tickets will also be available on the door for £15. For online attendance, please book your ticket before 18.00 on the day of the event. A link to watch the talk online will be sent to attendees before it begins.
This is the first lecture of the Summer 2026 Series - Irish Modernism in Architecture. Read more here.
A partner in 1974 RIBA Gold Medal winning practice Scott Tallon Walker, Robin Walker combined a successful career as designer with a compulsion to write architectural theory, seeking to reconcile what he saw as tensions within and limitations in the modernist project of his day. Educated at an elite Protestant boarding school near Dublin and at UCD, and then with Mies Van def Rohe et al IIT, Walker also worked for Le Corbusier in Paris. Whist there he met his wife to be Dorothy Walker, who went on to become instrumental in the early years of the Irish Arts Council, and subsequently the couple’s homes in Dublin and west Cork became the centre of Irish artistic and literary cultural life.
Numerous painters, critics and poets became their friends and allies in a project of national renewal involving modernism as a means to engage with international cultural themes and universal values: the tension between this and the local vernacular architecture of Eire, and Walker’s conversion to his wife’s Catholicism, led to a series of texts expressing his honest confrontation with contradictions at the heart of modernist ideology.
The book, Change is the Reality: The Work of Robin Walker Architect, edited by Simon Walker and Patrick Lynch (London: Canalside Press, 2021), explores these themes and publishes Walker’s essays alongside new writing by contemporary architects and academics including his student Niall McLaughlin, Laura Evans, and Patrick Lynch.
Dr Patrick Lynch RIBA MRIA studied architecture at the universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, and in 2015 completed a doctorate at London Met that was supervised by Joseph Rykwert and Peter Carl. He is a director of Lynch Architects in Hackney, whose work has been widely published and exhibited internationally and received numerous awards, mostly recently in 2025 RIBA East Conservation Award and RIBA House of the Year Shortlist, and the MRIA International Award. He is the author of several books and teaches at The University of Cambridge.
Read more about the Irish Modernism in Architecture - Lecture Series Summer 2026 here