A redevelopment of a pair of buildings on Molesworth Street involves keeping their Georgian frontages and creating modern offices behind which are not visible from the street, writes Emma Cullinan
"The issue is about how you intensify the city centre without wrecking the historic core," says Gordon Benson of Benson and Forsyth Architects, putting his finger on a key question in an Ireland that is beginning to sprawl.
Benson and Forsyth has a track record in slotting contemporary buildings into jumbled urban settings, including an impressive example in Dublin - the Millennium Wing of the National Gallery of Ireland.
The practice has now designed a project nearby, which is tucked in behind two Georgian buildings on Molesworth Street and runs through to Schoolhouse Lane at the back. The O'Shea Partnership applied to Dublin City Council in April for permission to build the project.
The practice also designed the award winning Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, which huddles up against the old city wall and is opposite a Victorian museum. Gordon, who is from Scotland himself, adores old buildings - and new ones.
"The Molesworth Street scheme is on a sensitive Georgian site with parts that are seriously untouchable, as you get in Edinburgh and the West End of London. The interiors of such buildings are okay for lawyers working out of one room but they are not flexible enough to be offices for larger institutions."
With this in mind, the practice has kept the Georgian frontages and created offices - with the deep floor plans required by contemporary companies - in behind them which are not visible from the street.
This will comprise around 5,000sq m (53,820sq ft) of accommodation with a two-storey basement topped by four floors and pavilions above those.
The scheme is broken up by voids that bring light and ventilation deep into the plan. These "voids" will include a garden, an internal court and atrium. Routes between spaces will include bridges, while glass lifts and a staircase will help the light to flow.
One of the Georgian frontages - at number 32 - is pretty much intact and that will be conserved while the other building, says Benson, is really just a façade as it was developed during the 1970s and even has a flat concrete roof.
The practice's work on the National Gallery has really helped it to get a feel for this project, says Benson. For instance, in the atrium between the existing building and the new offices in the centre of the site, "it is like the diningroom in the National Gallery", says Benson, "so we know what the quality of the space feels like".
Being in the city centre, with its ever-improving transport links, this building will only have two car-parking spaces and the basement will be used to house services. "The National Gallery has a 7-metre deep basement," says Benson, "and here we will excavate the basement and get all of the kit, and stuff, into it."
That "kit" will be kept to a minimum, as the developers are seeking a Bream (environmental assessment) excellence target, which will be aided by the bicycles that shall be parked beneath the ground.
Putting services in the basement has the advantage of keeping the roofline clear: of nasty plant objects anyway. Instead, up here will be pavilions where perhaps board meetings and conferences can take place, as well as housing a staff restaurant surrounded by gardens (few people realise that the National Gallery also has a roof terrace, because there is no public access to it).
Such roof adornments are reminiscent of the art gallery that Renzo Piano put on top of the former Fiat factory in Turin, whose existing building already had a race track on its roof.
This pavilion is designed to be hidden from the street by being stepped back.
"It will not affect the historic skyline," says Benson. "The issue is: can you see it [the new building] and you can't. We have a deep floor plate in a building that is connected to the outside world but is not visible in the urban tissue. This will still look like the city people always knew."
Yet anyone looking in through one of the Georgian buildings with be able to see right along the clear spine of the building through to the rear. "So by looking into the Georgian building you will know that something is happening," says Benson.
There will be glimpses of it from Schoolhouse Lane though, where a close neighbour is the swish offices of architects Horan Keoghan Ryan.
The two architectural practices have crossed paths before: Benson and Forsyth Architects began work on a project in the Docklands which HKR later completed. To demonstrate how small the architectural world is, Heneghan Peng was on a short list of architects asked to design proposals for the Molesworth Street site and that practice has recently been commissioned to design another wing on the National Gallery.
"There are countless streets like this around Dublin that are paralysed and you can't leave it the way it is," says Benson.
"This scheme retains and reuses existing buildings and helps to prevent the building of more Dublin on the edge of Dublin. It's a way of sustaining the urban core and not turning it into a doughnut city."
It is early days for this design but Benson has happy memories of working here before. "I love working in Dublin. It is a city I like partly for its Scottish melancholy. When we were building the National Gallery extension everybody was absolutely delightful."
