Newcomer in a canyon full of hostile traffic

The new Liffey House on Tara Street is a welcome replacement for one of the worst office buildings of its era. Frank McDonald, Environment  Correspondent, reports

Liffey House on Tara Street was typical of a whole generation of low-grade office blocks in the centre of Dublin. Speculatively developed with an eye to filling it with civil servants, the seven-storey pile did nothing other than maximise the ratio of net lettable space.

Completed in 1981 and occupied by Dublin Corporation's by-law and fire departments, Liffey House was memorable for having one of the smallest entrance lobbies in the city. It was also built on a road setback line, dating from an era when Tara Street was to be widened by 15 feet.

Ultimately, of course, the road-widening plan was abandoned, though its memory lingered on. So when multi-millionaire developer John Byrne erected Ashford House on the derelict site of Tara Street Baths, its south-western corner was turned around to meet Liffey House.

Nobody imagined that the building it was deferring to would be gone in less than a decade. Or that the old fire station would be turned into a nightclub called Fireworks and extended to create the Trinity Capital Hotel and that a fine new fire station would be built in Townsend Street.

The whole context of the area was changing. The Markievicz swimming pool - a ghastly flat-roofed shack from the mid-1970s - was replaced by a new pool with an apartment building overhead, in an early public private partnership (PPP) project involving Treasury Holdings.

So what to do with Liffey House? At first, the city officials gave serious consideration to renovating the building and it was on that basis that a number of architects were interviewed, including Donnelly Turpin, who were in the process of designing a major extension to Leinster House.

Eventually, a more radical approach was adopted - complete demolition of the existing building and its replacement by a new office block that would maximise the value of the site and set a good design example for developers, just like Joshua Dawson House beside the Mansion House.

John Byrne, veteran of the 1960s and still at it after all these years, was prepared to co-operate once he had seen Donnelly Turpin's daring design and realised its knock-on effect in uplifting the area. "The more gold plating you do, the better it'll be for all of us," said the canny Kerryman.

The new building's main façade is bow-fronted, mainly to avoid taking too much light away from the entrance to Byrne's Ashford House. Designed by Brian O'Halloran and Associates, it is one of the very few post-modern office blocks in Dublin and now looks hopelessly dated as a result.

Its new neighbour is very polished by comparison. Built of good, solid materials that will stand the test of time, its site extends beyond the building line on both Tara Street and Townsend Street, which is held by the glazed ground floor, with the black mass of the office floors floating over it.

There is an unfortunate gap between it and Ashford House to accommodate a right of way to the rear of both buildings - a pity in urban design terms, but unavoidable in the circumstances. And Tara Street isn't so much a street as a grimy, hostile canyon filled with northbound traffic.

Given that the street environment is so hostile, Donnelly Turpin have certainly livened up this pivotal corner. Charlie Donnelly likes it best at dusk, when the stunningly optimistic glass-walled reception area is illuminated and the rest of the ground floor resembles a bright car showroom.

Traffic noise and pollution meant that there was no question of substituting air-conditioning with natural ventilation. "The city council was taking fledgling steps into development and we couldn't really visit on them the experimental nature of trying to overcome those problems," Mark Turpin says regretfully.

As for its scale - seven storeys to parapet level, with a glazed penthouse floor above - he points to the height of other buildings in the immediate vicinity, such as Apollo House on the west side of Tara Street and the cluster of new office blocks on George's Quay, just across the DART line at the rear.

The fact that the new block is so close to Tara Street station is another reason to justify its 5,575 sq m (60,000 sq ft) of office space on eight floors, on the basis that office clusters should be close to public transport nodes. And incidentally, it only has 10 car-parking spaces at basement level.

Tara Street is also a curious case in urban design terms. Though Apollo House dates from the late 1960s (and what an example it is of that period), newer apartment buildings on the same side are only four storeys high while the most recent one to be built, adjoining the fire station, is only one floor higher.

Goldsmith House, on the corner of Tara Street and Pearse Street, recently had its 1970s pre-cast concrete façade replaced by a more presentable alternative, using high-quality stone cladding - and the developers in that case were permitted to add an extra floor for their efforts. Donnelly Turpin chose to clad their building in black Chinese basalt.

"Limestone is so dull. When we used it in Leinster House, it took a bit of terracotta to brighten it up," says Turpin. Donnelly agrees: "Basalt looks much better in the rain, it adds lustre to it - not like it's just been pissed on."

Grafton Architects, the first to use basalt on the Department of Mechanical Engineering in Trinity College, had great difficulty persuading the planners to allow it rather than limestone. And that building couldn't even be seen from any street. Donnelly Turpin's can be seen from Designyard in Essex Street.

Basalt is also used to clad the ceiling of the lobby, which has a granite floor and reception desk. Floor-to-ceiling heights are 3.75-metres (over 12 feet), compared to just three metres (short of 10 feet) in the building it replaced. All the offices are glazed floor-to-ceiling, but have yet to be fitted out.

The open plans and absence so far of raised floors and suspended ceilings give it a warehouse quality. There are spectacular views over the city from the glazed penthouse and its terrace - though, inevitably, they include close-up views of the dilapidated horror that is Hawkins House.

High-performance thermal glass is almost clear, unlike the "aviator sunglasses", as Donnelly calls them, used in glazed curtain walls in the 1970s. Three huge circular vents on the pavement outside are stainless steel, though it would be hard to tell that from the traffic dirt deposited on them.

Donnelly Turpin got to design a light steel staircase running up through the full height of the building on all four sides of its core; it was prefabricated and bolted together like a Mecano set. The brick gable is also notable for the panelling effect given to it by horizontal steel bands at each floor level.

Whoever occupies it, the completion of this fine building should encourage the Department of Health to dust down renovation plans for Hawkins House and perhaps even prompt the same from the owners of Apollo House.