Dublin's 'crisp, serene' public buildings

Christine Casey's observations on contemporary architecture in Dublin are instructive but her book is marred by errors, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

We are used to architectural historians waxing lyrically about Georgian or Victorian buildings, and describing their attributes in minute detail. What is more rare, and therefore more interesting, is what happens when they turn their attention to modern architecture, some of it of very recent vintage.

Christine Casey's book on Dublin*, the latest in the Buildings of Ireland series, covers everything within the canals as well as the Phoenix Park.

Inevitably, many of its 756 pages are filled with descriptions of the city's great public buildings and the rich and varied interiors of its 18th century houses.

But the 20th century and even the first few years of the 21st are not ignored. How could they be, when their legacy accounts for so much of Dublin's current fabric? And what Casey has to say about contemporary architecture in the city is instructive, often in ways that she could not have intended.

Few would quibble with her verdict on the Abbey Theatre, by Scott Tallon Walker: "A brick-clad Miesian envelope, which for all its heroic intent is dull in the extreme". Though McCullough Mulvin's "cleverly layered portico of 1991 adds emphasis to the entrance on Marlborough Street", she says it "does not solve the problem".

Referring to the enthusiasm of architects for Busáras, Michael Scott's magnum opus, she writes: "It is undoubtedly a heroic and potent building, with passages of immense lyricism, but it is also a rough diamond, awkward and downright dull in parts". The book includes a 1953 cartoon of James Gandon contemplating it.

Liberty Hall (1965) is characterised as "Dublin's most conspicuous example of International Modernism ... the descendant of Busáras 20 years on".

Its height is given (correctly) as 198 feet, or 60 metres, but for some unaccountable reason the metric measurement (perhaps not a strong suit of architectural historians) is given as 181 metres.

While branding the Central Bank (1978) as "big, bold and structurally overstated", Casey doesn't refer to the row over its height. "The 'look no hands' structural ingenuity evidently appealed to [ Sam] Stephenson's client and it is ironic that the most aggressive statement of corporate identity in the city was built for a State institution".

Benson and Forsyth's National Gallery Millennium Wing is described as "a strong composition in a refined Neo-Brutalist idiom informed by Scottish medieval architecture and by the monumentalism of Louis Kahn, IM Pei, et al". Casey also refers to its internal walls randomly punctured by "narrow slits and deep Ronchamp-like apertures".

Though Brutalist in style, Paul Koralek's Berkeley Library in Trinity College is hailed by the author as the 20th century equivalent of Edward Lovett Pearce's Parliament House (now Bank of Ireland) in College Green. She describes it as a building "at once restrained and gloriously self-indulgent [ that] sits serenely" on its site.

John Tuomey's Juvenile Court in Smithfield (1987) merits an entry as "a crisp, finely wrought building in a Postmodern classical idiom . . . that is ill-served by nasty interior finishes". Casey also concludes that its entrance front, flanked by limestone benches, "is somewhat diminished by a diminutive gable and dinky glass canopy".

Blackhall Street, as she says, "is now a strange mélange", with terraced 1980s brown-brick three-storey public housing on the south side and, on the north, "gobbling up much of the former street, a handsome public housing scheme" by Shay Cleary Architects that unfortunately results in a lop-sided view of the Blue Coat School.

She admires the Millennium Bridge by Howley Harrington Architects, saying its "only bum note is the dirt-trapping slotted aluminium deck", but is dubious about Santiago Calatrava's offering: "One cannot escape the impression that this is a big bridge reduced to a small scale. It is a very large statement for this cramped and modest site".

On Bachelors Walk, Casey regrets the loss of "the late and much lamented Transport House of c.1935", and says an "enormous chunk" of the quayside was rebuilt in pastiche by Zoe Developments during the mid-1990s for an "architect-free residential and retail scheme".

She notes that five early brick houses on Essex Quay were "unceremoniously demolished" in the mid-1990s (by Temple Bar Properties, though she does not say so) to make way for an apartment block by Gilroy McMahon Architects. Its quayside façade is "filthy from traffic fumes and a display case for the detritus of domestic life".

Temple Bar gets a whole chapter in the book. O'Donnell and Tuomey's remodelling of the Quaker Meeting House in Eustace Street for the Irish Film Institute wins her vote as "the most effective recent intervention" in the area, for its "sensitive yet dynamic . . . sequence of atmospheric spaces rich in spatial and textural effect".

In the west end of Temple Bar, she mis-names deBlacam and Meagher's award-winning Wooden Building as "The Timber Building" and observes that its distinctive nine-storey tower is "medieval in its associations and strongly reminiscent of the work of Louis Kahn". She also mis-names the nearby Cow's Lane as "Cow Lane".

The book contains more serious errors. It describes phase one of the Civic Offices at Wood Quay as consisting of "two 10-storey office towers" whereas, in fact, one rises to 10 storeys and the other to eight.

They are easy to count, and how else can one explain the sloping glass roof of the atrium inserted between them? Dealing with the International Financial Services Centre, Casey wrongly states that the initial plan to turn the Custom House Docks area into a business quarter was developed by deBlacam and Meagher Architects.

In fact, the Custom House Docks Development Authority's 1986 master plan was by Murray O'Laoire Architects.

DeBlacam and Meagher were involved initially in plans for the site of Sheriff Street flats where, as she writes, their "vision of sustainability (retaining much mid-C20 public housing) exceeded that of the developers".

Ultimately, the flats were replaced by Custom House Square, re-designed by Anthony Reddy and Associates.

"Most of the office buildings are bland at best and there are several shamefully squandered opportunities, not least the IFSC west of George's Dock by Burke-Kennedy Doyle and Benjamin Thompson & Associates, and the visually weak if fortress-like apartment blocks which stand in the inner Revenue Dock", according to the author.

She rightly complains about the "dull, low, excessively regular skyline" of the IFSC extension's Liffey quayside. But when she singles out Clarion Quay as "the most thoughtful and engaging new project to date", its designers - Urban Projects - are wrongly identified as including Shay Cleary Architects rather than Derek Tynan Architects.

The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin by Christine Casey (Yale University Press, price €43.70)