Dublin architect Cormac Murray has turned his “personal obsession” with Ireland’s US embassy into a really engaging book about how this white precast concrete drum, “squatting on a prominent corner site in Ballsbridge” came to symbolise the glamour of America after it was opened in 1964 – just when Ireland was emerging from the gloom of previous decades to build a more successful economy.
Designed by New York architect John M Johansen, it was one of the last of a batch of modernist embassy buildings in a US government programme that set out to “export its vision of open and free democracy to the rest of the world” – with a circular form inspired by Martello towers, the National Library in Kildare Street and the curved colonnades of the old Irish parliament on College Green.
The author describes Johansen as a “maverick architect, painter, sculptor, composer, poet and theorist”, who once said: “I see architecture as sculpture, big enough to get inside of”. His Ballsbridge building’s rotunda was conceived as a civic space, used in 1970 to exhibit a tiny piece of Moon rock, long before security dictated that the embassy had to be surrounded by high railings.
Johansen’s initially toyed with a hexagonal design for the triangular site and only switched to circular after his earlier proposal ran into political opposition in Washington. The final design was personally approved by President John F Kennedy, two years before his memorable visit to Ireland in 1963; they had been contemporaries at Choate, an elite Connecticut prep school, and later at Harvard.
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The book’s most mesmerising images are what Shane O’Toole describes in his wonderful foreword as Johansen’s “hyper-precise ink drawings” of twisted single-fin precast concrete units for the embassy’s emblematic facade – prefabricated by Schokbeton in the Netherlands “using a high-stakes precision method that left no room for error”, as Murray notes, before being shipped by barge to Dublin.
Viewed abstractly, he writes, Johansen’s chiaroscuro drawings “could almost be an anatomical study, a biomolecular structure, an astrophysical trajectory, or one of Piranesi’s imagined spaces”. In reality, they are “preserved fossils of how complex geometry could be realised before the advent of computer aided design”. Very few architects today could produce anything like them using pen and ink.
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Johansen’s “open-weave, Aran-knit concrete structure in Ballsbridge”, as O’Toole describes it, is one of the top five 20th-century buildings in Dublin. Hopefully, this fascinating book will focus attention on its future – perhaps an American-Irish museum, as architect Niall Scott has proposed – after the embassy relocates to a new building (yet to be designed) on the former Jurys Hotel site nearby.
