Last Saturday I spent a rainy afternoon at the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment. As opening lines go, it’s not quite “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” although the building is close in age to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and its vintage is why I was there.
Voluntarily hanging out in government departments isn’t my normal weekend vibe – that would be drifting through Tesco despairing at the price of cheese – but Open House, the free architecture festival, was on, and 23 Kildare Street was somewhere I was keen to visit (for what I wrongly assumed would be the first time).
Why? Because it’s art deco. Indeed, to borrow a Lana Del Rey lyric, it’s so art deco, which makes it aesthetically more refined than about 95 per cent of buildings in Dublin.
It has long been my rule that there’s no need to ask if something is art deco. If it is, it’ll definitely be mentioned. If it’s not, but it has any elegance at all, it might still be bestowed with that compliment.
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Art deco has become one of the great descriptors: it’s evocative shorthand for a time when people (and not only civil servants) were told that, yes, they could have nice things, even if those nice things were mainly amazing wall lamps.
Neither JR Boyd Barrett, its architect, nor anybody involved in the construction of 23 Kildare Street from the mid-1930s would have identified the building, which was completed in 1942, as art deco, as the term was only coined in the 1960s.
Since then it has been applied retrospectively to an interwar design style with distinct phases that infiltrated everything from teapots and jewellery to steel-framed skyscrapers synonymous with the jazz age.
What is now dubbed art deco can be luxurious, lavish and strikingly geometrical but also fluid and streamlined. Over time it evolved to incorporate a penchant for curves, which would then coexist with long horizontal lines to create a right old treat for the visual cortex.
Art deco is mostly associated now with the flourishing glamour and decadence of ocean liners and cinema, although fascist regimes appropriated some elements for their own ends, while its beauty and craftsmanship were democratised through public-housing schemes, such as those designed by Herbert Simms, Dublin Corporation’s first housing architect.
I always thought I was instinctively pro-deco because I grew up surrounded by buildings from that era. My first library was Drumcondra Library, in north Dublin, and although the interior seems to have shrunk since I was a child – funny how that happens – the exterior, with its tiered portal and wraparound windows, still resembles a delightful cake made of bricks.
But, as one friend regularly accuses me, I also have one of those brains that respond to symmetry and seek to impose it. Frankly, who doesn’t derive pleasure from some semblance of order in a world of chaos? On my fun tour of the department I was surprised to see a clock – not of the period but in keeping with it – hung askew against the Australian-walnut walls. What sort of sick mind could possibly get any work done while time itself is crooked?
Clearly, I’m not the only art-deco fan. Today it’s easy to buy serviettes, wrapping paper and iPhone cases that pastiche its patterns (including its fan-motif patterns). And whenever art-deco buildings fall into disuse or disrepair, it sparks protests.
The former Inchicore Library – which, like Drumcondra, was one of four Dublin libraries designed by Robert Sorley Lawrie and built between 1935 and 1940 – has laid empty for more than five years. An Post’s plan to vacate Rathmines Post Office is, likewise, a bone of local contention.
Recent headlines about the uncertain fate of both 1930s buildings have made sure to specify they are art deco – proof that the term has become a byword for the kind of heritage only heathens would disrespect.
As for 23 Kildare Street, I had barely made it up the steps when I realised I’d been inside before. This was for a masked-up press briefing in December 2020 that I’d memory-holed because it was all a bit surreal and tense, and just not the right occasion for appreciating original linoleum flooring, curved skirting details or carved stone panels by Gabriel Hayes.
This year has been designated the centenary of art deco, with various cities celebrating the staging of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925. I might join in by slipping on a chevron-patterned dress, shelling out for my annual cocktail and pretending the Wall Street crash hasn’t happened.
But it would be lovelier still, of course, if the authorities could do whatever is in their power to ensure Ireland’s remaining art-deco gems make it to their own big birthday in decent shape. Who knows? Maybe one of these decades someone will do something about the Carlton cinema facade.
