Hawkins House to be knocked, but what about its ugly neighbours?

It can be hard to get away from Hawkins House: Dublin's most hated building looms over my desk at The Irish Times. Almost all the windows in our office face its streaked, dirty concrete, peeling paint and bits of scaffolding that protrude at odd angles to keep bits of it from falling off. In an odd way it is so ugly that you end up becoming fond of it. Almost.

This week the Office of Public Works confirmed that it’s preparing a planning application to replace Hawkins House with a development of similar height but with 50 per cent more space. Three adjacent buildings – Apollo House, on Tara Street, and College House and the former Screen Cinema, on Townsend Street – are all now vacant and in the hands of a developer that is also believed to be working on an application.

As a result virtually an entire city-centre block, with the exception of the Tara Street-Townsend Street corner, is likely to be demolished in the next couple of years. That would be significant enough, but what lends it more poignancy is that this is almost certainly the most despised collection of buildings in Dublin.

From the grim slab of Apollo House to the precast monotony of College House and the windowless bunker of the Screen – its wrecked signage currently gives it an appropriately bullet-scarred appearance – a walk around this particular block offers a primer in the worst architectural crimes committed in 1960s and 1970s Dublin.

Hawkins House may be the most infamous, but the four together represent the purest collective distillation of the architectural violence wreaked on the city. It doesn’t help that they have been left to decay miserably by their owners, but their sheer bulk, their refusal to relate to the surrounding streetscape, the inappropriate materials used in their construction and the mediocrity of their design amount to a study in bad architecture.

For older Dubliners these buildings are a reminder of the wound inflicted on the city when the much-loved Theatre Royal was demolished to make way for Hawkins House, an act that this newspaper’s former environment editor, Frank McDonald, described as the biggest single loss Dublin has suffered.

McDonald's ground-breaking book The Destruction of Dublin helped ignite a counter-revolution against the cabal of politicians, civil servants, engineers and developers who were responsible for this sort of vandalism. In the 30 years since the book was first published there has been some improvement in the fabric of the city centre, although the overall report card is still pretty mixed. But Hawkins House and its neighbours have, remarkably, survived, despite many calls for their removal. Time and again demolition has been reported as imminent. This time it looks as if the end really is nigh: the Department of Health is due to move out of Hawkins House by early next year.

Tangible record

Will we miss them when they’re gone? Don’t laugh. These buildings are a tangible record of the forces and ways of thinking that shaped modern Dublin for a generation. I took a walk around the block this week with Dr

Ellen Rowley

, the architectural and cultural historian at Trinity College Dublin, who is an advocate for the preservation of 20th-century Irish architecture, to see what, if anything, they have to tell us.

We start at Apollo House, which the Department of Social Protection vacated last year. The street-level windows of the former unemployment office are grimy and stained. There’s graffiti on the metal shutter doors. The derelict garage that forms part of the complex is cordoned off with rusty railings. A peeling sign offers car washes.

The only part of the building in use appears to be the first-floor car park. The nooks and entranceways are filled with detritus: plastic bags, bottles, syringes, cardboard bedding left behind by rough sleepers. To call it bleak is to understate the matter. The only note of levity is the cartoonish “Greek” lettering in which the words “Apollo House” are picked out on the building’s corner.

Rowley expresses some admiration – with reservations – for the purity of the design; personally, I can't see it. We're all products of our own time. For me this architecture conjures up the landscapes of alienation expressed in JG Ballard's High-Rise, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and any number of depressed monochrome bands of the late 1970s.

On to Hawkins House, a T-shaped block rising 11 storeys from its surface car park. Part of the building is clad in grey concrete, part in avocado-coloured panels of an indeterminate material. None of it has aged well. The window frames are flaking and discoloured, the concrete streaked with water stains. Protective scaffolding bristles above the entrance. A vicious wind whistles down the perpetually shaded canyon that the building has created on Poolbeg Street. If you came across this building in a bankrupt post-Soviet republic you wouldn’t be surprised.

Rowley says Hawkins House is one of a trio of roughly contemporaneous high-rise buildings, along with O’Connell Bridge House and Liberty Hall. “The three of them go hand in hand, all built in the early 1960s and open by 1965,” she says. “The skyline was totally reinvented.”

She argues, though, that Liberty Hall is quite different, that it’s lighter against the skyline and more integrated with life at street level. “It’s not a groundscraping hulk like this. The scale of these structures was ultimately alienating,” Rowley says.

Undeniable ugliness

Leaving aside its ugliness, why has this building aged so dreadfully? Is it down to inferior materials and methods at the time? In the 1970s the architect Sam Stephenson famously declared that much of Georgian Dublin was shoddily built and short term. Forty years on, his own ESB offices on Fitzwilliam Street are now scheduled for demolition, while the surrounding Georgian streetscape serenely survives.

“From the start of the 20th century the idea is that a building has a life of 40 years,” says Rowley. “The underlying tenets of modernism are technocracy and replication and also experimentation.” Experimentation in this case meant “moving away from bricks and stone, exploring concrete”.

Nobody really knew initially how these materials would age, but it was already clear by the 1960s that wet northern climates wouldn’t be kind to them. That’s why so many buildings from the period look as though somebody has been urinating on them for the past half-century. The problem is exacerbated by “spoiling”, as minerals leach out of the metal frameworks and discolour the walls further. “Flat roofs don’t improve over time, either, and they don’t suit the climate,” says Rowley.

All of this contributed to creating a pretty repellent environment, but was it made worse by the fundamental principles of the brutalist style of modernist architecture to which some of these buildings seem to aspire? Rowley points out that the best modernist architecture internationally still looks superb and argues that the finest Irish modernism – the old Bank of Ireland headquarters on Baggot Street or the RTÉ campus – has stood the test of time.

“But so much of that is lost when it’s cheap and speculative. Most of the things we get in Dublin are mediocre replicas of great buildings,” she says

We’re now on Hawkins Street itself, beside the works for the new Luas extension. The soaring art-deco facade of the Theatre Royal would have dominated this street, flanked by its neighbour the Regal Cinema, which stood where the Screen is now. Going by the photographs, the street was a lot more fun back then. Now there’s just that same bloody surface car park, along with the blank side wall of the Screen, relieved only by an old plastic fast-food sign for the long-forgotten and unmourned Metro Burger.

I’m fond of this cinema: I saw some of my favourite films there. But it’s a horrible, squat dump of a place, which its owner, the IMC chain, let go to seed for years before finally closing it, six weeks ago. When it opened, in 1972, it was called the New Metropole; the old Metropole, another highly decorated pleasure palace beside the GPO on O’Connell Street, closed soon afterwards, to be replaced by another extraordinarily ugly building (now Penneys).

I’m feeling a bit like Prince Charles at this point. There’s nothing new about hating these sorts of buildings. “This term ‘concrete monstrosity’ comes from people who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s,” says Rowley. “They saw these beloved brick buildings replaced by a stark windowless, flat-roofed structure.”

More than 2,000 years ago Vitruvius issued his dictum that a building should be three things: solid, useful and beautiful – or, in Rowley’s words, it should have structure, function and delight. Whatever about the first two, she says, delight is ultimately subjective. She expresses her appreciation for the high, windowless curtain wall of College House, which overlooks the area in front of the cinema. For me it just seems to encapsulate the joylessness of all this architecture, with dullness and mediocrity masquerading as purity and principle.

College House itself is the dullest of all: a monotonous grey slab relieved only by a series of round, green pillars at ground level, which don’t seem much of a concession to human scale. Like Apollo House, the first floor is a car park.

“You see with Apollo House and College House the way each sits in its own compound,” says Rowley, pointing out how the architecture seals the buildings off from their surroundings.

“The car park wraps its way around the most interesting parts of the building. Circulation for the automobile gains primacy. One of the reasons even the good buildings around this part of town have failed is because you have a series of one-way multilane carriageways. So the human scale is lost.”

The architecture of the 1960s is blamed for the destruction of the Georgian and Victorian city, Rowley says, but that masks deeper social and cultural changes. “In reality people fell out of love with the city in the 1930s.” Slum-clearance plans, the development of new suburbs on the edge of the city, and the replacement of trams and trains by buses and private cars all led to a diminution of the central city, which was left as a place of clerical and administrative work. The city centre wasn’t for living in.

Is it fair to describe these buildings as brutalist? “You could say brutalism is the last phase of modernism, from the second World War up to the 1970s. The definition of it is quite complex, but it’s always cheapened by the word ‘brutal’. As in this is bombastic, this is coarse, this is an insult to my senses.”

To me this pretty accurately describes Hawkins House, Apollo House, College House and the Screen. Surely the time has come to knock them all and say good riddance.

Rowley advocates reusing, renewing and restoring buildings whenever possible, on the grounds that it’s more economically sound and environmentally sustainable. However, in this case, she acknowledges, demolition might win the argument. “They aren’t aesthetically pleasing. They don’t work very well. There’s two parts of your Vitruvian triad gone already.”

Dangerous juncture

She believes we are at dangerous juncture where we’re going to lose a whole generation of buildings.

“What is a city? It’s layers of time, layers of structure. All of those things need to be added up. This particular complex doesn’t resound in any way. It’s certainly not aesthetically satisfying. There are enough faults to raze it and start again. But that’s not the case with all the buildings from this era.”

The next day the Department of Health graciously allows me to have a snoop around Hawkins House. The contrast is striking between the shabby exterior and the clean and functional if somewhat old-fashioned offices inside. It feels, appropriately enough, like being in the admin block of one of our older hospitals. I take the lift to the roof, which is supposed to be a place where humans fear to tread because of the ferocious seagulls. But there are no gulls here today. I peer through a grimy window in to the rundown penthouse, with its retro 1970s wallpaper, which Minister for Health Leo Varadkar says contains “a dirty avocado toilet suite and some old empty whiskey bottles scattered about. There was just the one bedroom. I’ve no idea who, if anyone, lived in it.”

The view, though, is remarkable. Directly below lies the huge, flat roof of the cinema, along with the ramps, gates, bollards and fences of Apollo House and College House. There are swathes of underused tarmac and wasteland, partly filled by randomly parked cars. And, beyond, the whole city stretches out before you, looking handsome as hell under a cold April sun.

From here everything looks possible. For one moment, at least, you feel the excitement that comes with the 1960s dream of a high-rise life. Readers play fantasy wrecking ball with ugly irish buildings