Council makes its mark in Limerick suburbia

Limerick County Council's new headquarters is a startling totem of civic quality, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

Nobody living in the ordinary two-storey houses at the N22 end of Dooradoyle Road in Limerick could ever have imagined that they would end up with one of the more extraordinary views in Ireland - Limerick County Hall.

For the setting of Limerick County Council's new headquarters could hardly be more suburban - on a back road beside a shopping centre, with a McDonalds outlet at one end, a petrol station in the middle and the terraced houses directly opposite.

No wonder Bucholz McEvoy's County Hall, with its trademark timber screen, is so startling. But then, it was consciously designed as an iconic public building, yet driven by the same kind of environmental agenda that produced the Fingal County Hall in Swords.

The bow-fronted screen, or brise soleil, is 75 metres long, 15 metres high and tilted at an angle of 30 degrees. Designed in collaboration with Paris-based engineers RFR, it is also "pleated" to provide shading from the sun, both from the south and the west.

It was on the strength of winning the Fingal competition that the architects were commissioned in 1998 to design a new headquarters for Limerick County Council at Dooradoyle, just outside the city boundary - and there can be no doubt that they have made their mark.

Apart from having to deal with the shopping centre - "a big pancake, basically, that got bigger since we started working here", as Karen McEvoy says - they also had to relate to BKD's library building next door, with its corrugated roof supported on concrete columns.

Merritt Bucholz is frankly frustrated by the public perception that architects are only concerned with how things look. "It's not like that," he says. "A building is the product of so many considerations - it's not just about aesthetics." Though that, too, is important.

In the case of Dooradoyle, as in Swords, it was a "very strong environmental and functional integrity" that informed the decisions taken by the architects. And that started with the fundamental decision about how the building would be placed in the landscape.

What Bucholz McEvoy latched onto was the idea of connecting it to a semi-natural open space along Ballynaclough River. They envisaged the new building as a "gateway" to this ecosystem, compensating for the "stark erasure" of green space by the shopping centre parking lot.

First, the main block is set back 70 metres from Dooradoyle Road, with the flat-roofed council chamber and ceremonial entrance standing in front. A two-metre change in level on the site was also cleverly exploited to sink the car-parking between sloping earthen banks.

These banks, which rise up to meet the ground floor, are planted with a mix of grasses and shrubs - all in their infancy - and retained at the rear by a tough timber trellis. The on-site parking provides an extravagant 190 spaces for the 260 staff working in the building.

The council chamber, with its curved terracotta-clad wall and green-tinted concrete canopy, is a modernist pavilion standing in front of the timber-screened rectangular office block. A glazed corridor passes through the screen to provide a link between the two elements.

As in Swords, an atrium functions not just as the main public space, but also as the "engine" of this naturally-ventilated building. Air is drawn in from the east, heats up in the atrium and is then exhausted through vents at the top. Only the council chamber is air-conditioned.

Designed in collaboration with environmental engineers Buro Happold, the "no fans, no ducts" system works very well - though on the morning of its official opening, wind was howling through the atrium like the sound effects for a horror movie, until the culprit vent was closed.

Given that each office floor is open to the atrium, noise was a consideration. And there was no better way to mask it than Corban Walker's stacked fountain - 40 steel trays pouring water into each other - which was funded under the "1 per cent for art" scheme. Direct sunlight is controlled by the louvred screen so the atrium cools down at night-time. To the rear, facing north-east, white pre-cast concrete shelves reflect light into the offices, though the windows had to be tinted blue to counter over-heating from early morning sun.

The concrete structure serves three functions - it heats and cools the building as well as holding it up. "You need to understand the climate, the relationship between the weather and the land, to make a low-energy building in Ireland," as Chicago-born Merritt Bucholz says.

Along with the project architect, Graham Petrie, who is a Scot, and the guys from RFR in Paris, Bucholz and his wife and partner, Karen McEvoy, made lots of scale models of the timber screen before they got it right. "We had a lot of fun with glue guns," he says.

It took three trials, plus advice from French and German institutes, to find glue that would work for the real thing. He likens the screen, which dries out quickly after rain, to "a tapestry stretched over the front" or, more poetically, "a great hinge between the ground and the sky".

The screen is suspended from specially-designed steel beams, in the shape of hockey sticks, and anchored on pre-cast concrete trusses resting on steel pins. There is a real sense of the building being hand-worked, a human achievement rather than a triumph of materials.

At 7,500 sq m (80,729 sq ft), it is smaller than Fingal County Hall. The council chamber, too, is quite different. Members sit in a circle of desks topped by a continuous run of Carrara marble, flanked by a sweeping, top-lit curved concrete wall, a perforated acoustic wall and the public gallery.

The acoustic wall is decorated with sculpted porcelain "eggs" by Andrew Clancy, while the corridor outside contains a beautiful series of carpenter's tools carved from stone by Tom Fitzgerald, entitled Dom Duit (From Me to You), in memory of his carpenter father. The councillors were bound to have been taken in by the optical illusion of the rectangular lamps on their desks, which are real tricks of light. At first, each of them looks like a mirror with a light on top. In fact, the "mirror" is clear glass and the light comes from below.

Most visitors enter the building from either end of the atrium. At each level, by the limestone-topped walnut public counter of every department, there is a waiting bench set into the balcony. Nerves are soothed by Corban Walker's constantly flowing fountain.

Offices are mostly open-plan, with smooth pre-cast curved ceilings washed in a concrete stain to make them warmer. Cellular offices are located at each end, mostly at the rear, to avoid interfering with the cross-ventilation, while windows are set low to let in more light.

There are no blinds. Low-angle sunshine is screened by re-positionable visors above the baffles between work stations. Desks are larger than usual, to accommodate the volumes of paper local authority officials deal with, and there is good storage in red filing cabinets.

The building is two storeys higher than the adjoining shopping centre and, from its upper levels, there is a clear view of the Limerick cement works which supplied the cement for it - including a polished concrete soffit, inset with Iroko panelling, over the main entrance walkway.

According to the Limerick county manager, Ned Gleeson, it cost €32 million and was financed by a 20-year loan with no Exchequer funding. Though quite a lot more than the original estimate, its design life is 100 years so it will long provide the council with a totem of civic quality.