Madam, - Sean O'Laoire would have us believe that Grafton Architects, winner of a prize for world's best building, are representative of Irish architecture in general. Sadly, this is not the case.
After 14 years of boom, Dublin's city centre has not acquired one new building of outstanding merit and aesthetic interest, a building capable of setting a standard for what the architect's craft and art can do.
One golden opportunity was the site at the entrance to Dublin Castle, at the top of Parliament Street, and owned by Dublin City Council.
A rather attractive urban park with charming and rather scatty Victorian statuary and some greenery, where people used to sit eating their sandwiches, was replaced by something with all the appeal of a Lithuanian crematorium. An incongruous office block with derricks hanging off the roof in the manner of a Baltic coal-carrier was moored on the corner.
The city manager said at the time, patronisingly, that it would just be a matter of time before people came to appreciate it. They haven't. It is still hideous.
And it stands for a great deal of the architecture of the past decade-and- a-half. - Yours, etc,