Opened in October, 1996, Blanchardstown Shopping Centre has not enjoyed a reputation as a cultural haven until now. Inevitably, the entire complex is more a temple to mammon than art, a daunting maze of 650,000-plus square feet of shops surrounded by thousands of surface car-parking spaces. The attractions of the centre, except as a place in which to spend money, are not easily discovered, despite an original and elegant design for the development by Dublin-based architect, Andrzej Wejchert.
The reality is that Wejchert's scheme did not envisage the untidy mass of signage, traffic management structures, street furniture and unimaginative planting which have been installed over the past four years and now obstruct the character of the central structure.
Anything not concerned with retailing in the vicinity of the shopping centre is therefore going to face a severe challenge in making its presence felt. Nonetheless, it would appear the challenge has been successfully met by a new arts centre and library due to open to the public next week on a site directly opposite the centre's main entrance.
The £11 million complex was designed and built over the past two years by Fingal County Council, some of the inspiration for the scheme came from elsewhere. For the past decade, a group of local residents has been campaigning and fund-raising for the provision of an arts centre, and its members managed to attract £1.1 million from the Department of Arts for the project. A further £2.5 million of the total budget came from the Department of the Environment, but the balance of the money was provided by the local authority, clearly conscious that Blanchardstown is now at the heart of an enormous - and expanding - catchment area.
In the past 20 years, the population in this part of west Dublin has effectively doubled to almost 80,000 and still further growth is expected in the immediate future. Since the shopping centre is the vicinity's biggest draw, it made sense to locate a library and arts centre nearby, especially since public transport serves the complex, around which cluster a number of restaurants, a multiplex cinema and other entertainment venues. So the new premises ought to have no trouble drawing in a crowd. But how do they compete with the powerful allure of commercial businesses, such as the Leisureplex centre which has recently opened on an adjoining site? The two people principally responsible for the job, the Fingal County architect, David O'Connor, and the authority's senior architect, Marguerite Murphy, were aware from the start that the structure they designed would have to make a more overtly "civic" statement than other buildings in the area and yet show some sympathy with Wejchert's work.
Accordingly, as with the shopping centre, the three materials used for the exterior of the arts centre and library are glass, yellow brick and brushed aluminium panels, all of which are durable and unlikely to alter with age. Similarly, the rippling stepped front of the entire complex echoes a similar motif in Wejchert's work and helps to link the two blocks. More importantly, O'Connor and Murphy's building acknowledges the large oval "piazza" Wejchert intended for the site in front of the shopping centre.
While the ground plan for this public space is evident, it has become obscured by the presence of bus shelters, taxi ranks, bollards, fencing and other clutter which O'Connor would certainly like to see cleared away in the near future. He and Murphy have carefully sited their work along the line of the oval piazza form, while breaking what risked being a daunting mass by giving the arts centre and library their own sites. These are joined together by a first-floor bridge beneath the route, which follows an old road on the site. By acknowledging the latter, as well as Wejchert's oval, the architects were obliged to set the two largest sections of their structure - three-storey blocks on either side of the bridge - at an angle with the rest of the site. It is to O'Connor and Murphy's credit that the result provides a strong but not overwhelming presence, manages to suggest civic dignity and holds its own against the shopping centre while celebrating that building's architectural virtues. The alternating masses of glass, brick and metal set on different planes, and at different angles, account for much of the structure's success, aided by a decisive skyline in which the top of the building is defined by a bold brise-soleil or, as Murphy prefers to call it, a canopy. Internally, neither the arts centre, to be known as Draiocht, nor the library show a similar boldness of design, but the two architects advance understandable reasons why this is the case. In regard to the arts centre, which covers some 2,000 square metres, the temptation to create spaces of a powerful character was resisted because the precise function of much of the interior remains to be decided.
On the ground and first floor, therefore, there are a number of rooms capable of serving a variety of uses: for general meetings, for rehearsals, for small-scale performances, for an artist-in-residence. The wedge-shaped foyer, rising two storeys at the glass entrance, is also capable of serving different purposes, although the presence of both a reception area and a bar in the space will somewhat inhibit other uses. With ceramic tiled floor, ash doors and woodwork, and end-walls painted a deep red, this makes a powerful opening statement for the building, but the same boldness is not necessarily found elsewhere.
The one section with a clearly-defined and meticulously-executed brief is the theatre, a 280-seat auditorium with fully retractable seating to accommodate three times that number when standing, and a stage with a sprung wooden floor, which at 12 metres is far deeper than most others in the country. Similar flooring in the largest of the first-floor rooms means this building will be of particular interest to dancers.
Clearly a great deal of the centre's budget has been spent on fitting out the theatre and making sure that the space is as versatile as possible - the back of the stage, for example, has been so built that, should the architects' ambitions for an open-air arena behind it ever come to pass, a section of the wall can be altered in the style of that on the Meeting House Square side of the Ark in Temple Bar.
However, the focus on the performance space has been somewhat to the detriment of the rest of the centre: although the architects drew up meticulous plans for the fit-out of every part of the building, limited funds have meant walls in a number of rooms have not been plastered - the concrete breeze-blocks were simply painted over - linoleum covers floors in certain areas and inexpensive fluorescent lighting has been installed. It is inevitable that the modestly-finished appearance of these areas will influence how they are viewed and used. The pity is that a little more money could not have been found for a more thorough fitout, but O'Connor and Murphy hope further work might be done on the interior in the future. However, what is unlikely to alter is the relatively small amount of space allocated for exhibitions in the building - a single room on the ground floor in which a substantial area is overhung by a walkway leading to the library (meaning only relatively small pictures can be shown), with one wall given over entirely to windows.
Again, the character and size of the space will almost certainly dictate its use, leading to less emphasis being placed on the visual than on performance arts. The greater amount of the adjacent building is devoted to offices and storage, but some 2,000 square metres are given over to the public facilities, making this the biggest local authority library in the country. While there are rooms for lectures and "cyber skills", the main area is a lofty hall, part of it climbing straight to the stepped roofline in which are fitted a series of north-facing windows. The rest carries a mezzanine balcony to permit the inclusion of more readers' desks and shelving. The wall abutting on the three-storey office block is faced in the same yellow bricks used on the exterior, but otherwise the palette is neutral.
The scale of the library, and indeed of the entire development, is indicative of Fingal County Council's commitment to the cultural interests of the local community. Additional funds ought now to be provided in order to ensure that the same high quality of design evident on the exterior of the building is shown indoors.
But even before those doors open for business, Blanchardstown's new arts centre and library are a welcome addition to the stock of fine contemporary architecture in a part of the country desperately short of such work.