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P R O F I L E | P A U L M C C L E A N
His first big break came as a teenager when
he landed a job working on an addition at his
school. The principal, who knew of young
McClean's aspirations, offered part-time
employment as a condition of awarding the
commission.
Later, while attending Dublin Institute of
Technology, McClean spent summers working
on architectural sites. One summer gig ("the
best summer job ever," he says) stands as a
personal favorite, and would instill a sense
of creating things of permanence. "I was
wandering around Ireland on trains and with
a bicycle," he recounts, "making drawings
and surveys of ancient castles."
Other design gigs of this period took him as
far away as London and Australia. "Basically
I would just go knock on doors till somebody
gave me a job," he explains. In the pre-Internet
1990s, this meant tearing phone book pages
listing architects, then charting their locations
on a map and walking from office to office.
Such confidence, one imagines, mustering
the pluck to present oneself at a stranger's
office, asking for a shot at a job. For McClean,
the stakes were much simpler. "I wouldn't
working on is about 105,000 square feet."
McClean is an architect to his core. He still
sketches with pen on paper, and his firm,
McClean Design, consists of a dozen or so
designers working from a low-key office in
Orange County, a former corner store that
retains the clover-green sign of its past life.
The man himself is unassuming, with an
easy smile and quick laugh. His profession,
he relays, was a calling in the truest sense,
and had him drawing homes in his childhood
Dublin house. "I wanted to be an architect
since I was a really little boy," he states. "When
I was like four or five, my mom said I was
always drawing houses and asking, 'Who's
the person who does that?" An architect, she
told him.
First Steps
Enter the early seeds of Modernism. At age
ten, young McClean discovered a book on
Frank Lloyd Wright among the handful of
architecture books at the local library and
was entranced by images of Fallingwater. "I
just couldn't believe that was really a house,"
he says.
P H O T O B Y M A N O L O L A N G I S
