Bank in a brave new world

Built only 30 years ago, the Bank of Ireland's head office in Baggot Street, Dublin is a protected structure - but a major alteration of the building could bring it right up to date, writes Frank McDonald.

YEARS AGO, after the battle for Georgian Dublin had been joined, it was a common theme - almost an article of faith - for architects to argue that the 18th-century houses conservationists sought to save were "only built to last a lifetime"; it is no thanks to this grim-reaper view that so many are still standing, after more than two centuries.

Now we are being told by HKR Architects that the Bank of Ireland's headquarters in Baggot Street "has come to the end of its working life" - after just 30 years - and needs to be radically altered, upgraded and extended to create "market-leading [office] space, fit for the future demands of an international corporate headquarters building". What the bank's headquarters and the Georgian houses around Merrion and Fitzwilliam squares have in common is that they are all protected structures - even though Scott Tallon Walker's three-block composition, clad in Delta manganese bronze, was only completed in 1978, at the expense of demolishing five late 18th-century buildings.

The Bank of Ireland was Ronnie Tallon's homage to his great hero, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Its bronze façades are carbon copies of Mies's Seagram Building on New York's Park Avenue from 1958 - right down to the detail of I-beams and double re-entrant corners; it also has exactly the same layout as Mies's Federal Centre in Chicago.

I have to confess, however, that I was unduly harsh in my judgment of the bank's headquarters in The Destruction of Dublin (1985): "By its sheer mass and bulk, the bank's head office destroyed the essential unity of a once fine Georgian street - more aggressively even than the ESB, just round the corner [in Lower Fitzwilliam Street]".

That was the view of an angry young man. On mature reflection, I believe that the architects managed very cleverly to conceal the bulk of the eight-storey main block behind the much lower four and five-storey buildings on the street frontage. In fact, its true scale is only evident from the rear or in distant views - notably from Merrion Row.

Largely built on the L-shaped site of Lincoln Nolan's car assembly plant (yes, they were making cars in Baggot Street once), the first phase was completed in 1969 - the year Michael Scott won the Royal Institute of British Architects' Gold Medal. It was the second phase, finished in 1978, that required the demolition of a Georgian terrace.

When Landmark Developments, headed by Paddy Shovlin, teamed up with financier Derek Quinlan to buy the bank's headquarters for just over €200 million in June 2006, it was not a protected structure. But Dublin City Council moved quite swiftly to add the entire complex to its lists - just in case the new owners might have tried to get rid of it.

This was not their intention, as they made clear in a submission to the council. Instead, the Quinlan-Shovlin consortium indicated that they would be preparing plans to upgrade and extend the complex - taking into account its newly acquired status as a protected structure - while the bank scouted around looking for an alternative head office site.

Before lodging their planning application a few weeks ago, HKR Architects consulted with the city planners and also ran the scheme past the "three wise men" of the council's Urban Advisory Committee (architects Ken Shuttleworth and John Worthington and urban design consultant Kelvin Campbell), getting a generally positive response.

"We like these buildings and need to show respect," says David King-Smith, the HKR partner in charge of this sensitive project. But what's wrong with them is multitudinous - from leaks in the glazing units to solar gain in summer, heat loss in winter, over-large service cores and "completely outdated" mechanical and electrical systems.

This entire schedule of dilapidations would be addressed by the renovation programme, which includes replacing all of the glazing with new triple-glazed units fitted with "interstitial blinds" to combat solar gain. The existing bronze-tinted glass would be replaced with clear glass, but coated with a patented film to eliminate glare.

King-Smith stresses that the bronze curtain walls that define the three buildings will be retained - except at the rear, where most of the façade would be stripped away to add a seven-storey extension, to increase the floorplate at every level. The existing service cores - lifts, stairs, toilets, and so on - would also be substantially reduced in size.

Instead, a replacement service core would be created in a new atrium between the three blocks, occupying most (though not all) of the existing open plaza - which the architect describes as a "quite windswept quasi-public space that can be bleak - you wouldn't go in there unless you worked there or had business to do in the bank".

Bridges at several levels within the glazed atrium would link the three blocks, easing access from one to another; at present, inter- communicating staff must go outside or via the basement. King-Smith says the atrium not only addresses this issue, but gives the complex a "new heart", which will be open to the public during office hours.

More controversially, the scheme proposes to add two floors to both the existing eight-storey and four-storey blocks and one floor to the five-storey block. Altogether, including the proposed rear extension, more than 15,000sq m of (mainly) office space would be added to the complex, bringing it up to a leviathan-like 35,300sq m.

"It's significant, there's no doubt about that," King-Smith concedes. But he points out that the extra floors would be set back and clad in frameless glazing, to distinguish them from the original buildings. This is in line with the 1964 Venice Charter on architectural conservation and the idea that there must be clear legibility between old and new.

Is it not a bit greedy? "Of course, it all revolves around commerciality, given the vast money changing hands. There's a game to maximise, but also physical constraints," he says. "The bank is to move out in five years and these buildings are commercially unlettable in their present form . . . In other cases [or places], they would simply be torn down."

The payback from the "aspiration by the client to achieve extra space" is that the renovated buildings would achieve the highest environmental standards in terms of their energy performance. It is also envisaged that the ground-floor areas of the two street-front blocks could accommodate livelier uses, such as cafes or even shops.

On-site car-parking would be reduced from 220 to 100, in compliance with the current Dublin City Development Plan, and the buildings would have universal access. Renovation of the complex would also help to reinforce traditional office use in Dublin 2, which is in danger of draining away into Docklands where much larger floorplates are possible.

As for the radical nature of the proposed renovation, Ronnie Tallon is on record as saying that "the one lesson you learn, really, over the years is that buildings do change. I think the day is gone where you make a building and it's a complete entity, never to be touched again. That really doesn't happen in the real world, in the commercial world.

"Almost every building that we made has had to change over the years. It's a very simple concept. Good buildings can accept change. If you have a simple structure, I believe it can take expansion and it can take change without too much damage."

And this is from the eminent architect who feels that the Bank of Ireland is almost like one of his children.