Academy of entertainment retakes the stage

INTERIOR DESIGN:An historic building on Pearse Street has been transformed into offices, the latest incarnation in an industrious and entertaining existence that spans nearly 200 years.

JAMES JOYCE AND John McCormack sang here, as did George Bernard Shaw's mother, while other historic performers included Charles Stewart Parnell, Lady Gregory and WB Yeats.

Yet the Academy, as the building on Pearse Street, Dublin, is now known, had a more industrious beginning in 1824 when it was the home of the Dublin Oil and Gas Company. The gas was made from fish oil, an energy source that peak-oil-crisis watchers might want to think about reviving.

When new types of oil took over the gas building became a concert hall run by the Society of Antient Concerts, who bought it in 1842, where Ireland's illustrious performers gave their best to an audience encompassed by ornate plasterwork. The building then became the workshop of sculptor Edmund Sharp in 1911 before re-entering the world of entertainment as a cinema in the 1920s.

This grand movie house was bought by one of Ireland's big cinema families, and they still own it, along with 15 other cinemas across Ireland.

Paul Anderson, chairman of Omniplex Holdings Ltd who grew up in the business, oversaw the building's latest transformation into offices, begun in 2002, with a restoration of the existing building (for let as offices through McNally Handy and Jones Lange LaSalle) and new offices built to the rear designed by James Toomey Architects, who were responsible for the Ritz Carlton in Powerscourt. These overlook traditional council housing, in just one example of the many interfaces between new and old in this area of Dublin.

The building looks spanking new, partly because much of it was recreated. It took four planning applications to get permission for the new work and the conservation aspect, overseen by architect James O'Connor, involved looking at historical documents and finding small pieces of the original building in order to build up a picture of what it was like.

"The concert company put the plasterwork in," says Anderson, "and we sought to return it to how it was in 1847. There was just about 20 per cent of the original left because over the years the interior got butchered, but there was enough there to create moulds to reproduce it as it was."

The work was carried out by Irish Fine Art Plasterwork: "Every ceiling flower was individually hand cast."

The mezzanine floor sits one metre off the wall so that the original proportions of the concert hall and cinema can be appreciated.

"We went back to the old drawings and found that the building had six-pane windows and railings to the front, which had since gone." When they dug out the front area ready to put in new, square steps, they found curved foundations and realised that they should add in round steps.

They also found one piece of architrave, one door and one piece of skirting, from which they recreated new pieces.

"It was like watching a child grow up," says Anderson who recalls Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf being shown in the cinema here. "It had an over 21 certificate then whereas it would probably get a PG today."

Times have certainly changed but buildings like this give some impression of what they were like.