“I think what one noticed about Dublin in 1965 was that it was saved by being hard up.”

Without any blank slate like a Chicago fire or mass demolition, modern Dublin city centre architecture has mostly been inserted in between the other periods and it’s low on pure, polemic, avant garde examples of international movements. Instead, it’s been more subtle and allowed for relationships with the past, with a particular interest in context and intervention in design-led architecture since the 1980s.

It’s not hard to think of ways the city might have been better served by prosperity – like Dublin’s tenements lasting into the 1960s, with way too many people living too close together in wretched, unsuitable buildings – but the above comment by Edward Jones, a British architect who got to know Dublin well, makes a fair point about the built heritage. As well as individual landmarks like the Custom House or Trinity College, there’s the Georgian squares and streets in the city centre, the terraces of artisan housing hugging the city’s core, and even the tenement rehousing schemes south of the Grand Canal.

The boom was a little different, of course, with huge schemes like Heuston Point, large-scale redevelopment of the docklands and, stranded at the edge of the suburbs, the eerie, unfinished Beacon Quarter with its luxury shops and apartments surrounded by the skeletal remains of hubris. Now that the days of being hard up have returned and large commissions in the city are unlikely, Irish architecture is busy staying afloat in other ways.

Dublin base, international work

One dream solution to construction drying up in Ireland is to win an international competition and make big, gorgeous buildings in other countries. Competition entries demand long hours and inventive work without any guarantee of a return, even more tough in a recession when money is tighter and all entrants are hungrier, so it’s been heartening to see major competition wins by practices like O’Donnell and Tuomey (London School of Economics Students’ Centre, and Central European University, Budapest), heneghan.peng.architects (Grand Egyptian Museum and Palestinian Museum) and Grafton Architects.

Grafton Architects won World Building of the Year for their competition-winning design for an extension to Universittà Luigi Bocconi in Milan – a bold, heavy form with the ground floor carved out as a public space, drawing pedestrians through the building beneath the inhabited ceiling of research spaces, with material choices and a hard exterior particular t o the Milanese context. Since Milan, their competitions wins have included projects for primary schools in Rome, a faculty building for the University of Toulouse and a university campus in Lima, Peru.

Grafton’s most recent major project in Dublin is 7-9 Merrion Row and the Billets, housing the Department of Finance, completed in 2007. It slips into its context harmoniously, mediating between the height of the Georgian terrace it terminates and the higher parapet line at St. Stephen’s Green, with the entrance bridge over a sunken area picking up the move from Stephen’s Green’s set-back buildings, with steps bridging over a basement to reach the front door. 7-9 Merrion Row gains the traditional benefit of the bridging move – natural light getting into the basement – as well as helping to secure the entrance, but with the façade stepping out above and on the Merrion Row side of the entrance to assert itself on the street.

Especially for a civic building, architecture’s role starts with the public façades and their relationship to people who will never go inside. So, challenges like dealing with incorporating a protected structure (the Billets), determining the optimal office accommodation and making a secure connection to Government Buildings matter a great deal – and this is a building with exemplary interior organisation, as it happens – but for the public, the building is about the street face and, visible from a greater distance and emphasised by its unbuilt neighbour, the calm, ordered composition of the side façade meeting the solemn Huguenot graveyard.

The building’s skin is masterful, a thick Ballinasloe limestone screen with the depth revealed by cuts and in the recesses for windows and natural ventilation inlets, but the standout is the handcrafted bronze railing at street level. Sure, it’s there to keep us out, but it’s doing it in the most mesmerising, generous way you could want.

Domestic scale

By contrast with public buildings, one inherent quality of domestic projects is that they’re designed for the people who live there and maybe their guests, and only the street façade or a sneaky sidelong view by the neighbours speaks to the world at large. Stopping short of a targeted campaign to make friends with people in these houses so that they’ll invite you over, events like Open House Dublin are the only way to see how these projects work beyond the photographs and drawings published.

Architecture has a parallel history of unbuilt projects – like Norman Foster’s U2 Tower for Britain Quay and the 1980s Skidmore Owings and Merrill scheme for replacing Temple Bar with a bus station – things that were cancelled, speculative, intellectual exercises, or unsuccessful competition entries. The inaccessible nature of domestic projects has the same aspect of idealisation, projection and empty longing if you’re an architecture fan, where the three photographs in a magazine seem more real than the building you can never visit, and the dog pictured by the window or the blurry man crossing the kitchen in an image might as well be as permanent as the walls.

Domestic-scale design in Dublin and Ireland is quietly continuing, and it’s populated by practices who enjoy detail, working with craftspeople, spending weeks figuring out exactly how to make or remake small spaces just right for these occupants and their real lives. But so much of it is in back gardens, mews lanes or side streets where it’s awkward to explain to the residents that you’re actually photographing that window by Boyd Cody or squinting to see if A2 Architects used gravel around the paving, and so it’s particularly exciting when the practices do something you can visit without wondering about trespassing laws.

Many of the current domestic forerunners had experience doing large public work with the internationally acclaimed older practices mentioned above, including Emmett Scanlon, who was a project director for Grafton Architects and worked on the competition entry for Bocconi before forming CAST Architecture in partnership with Sarah Cremin. CAST Architecture have made a series of clever, warm, impeccably crafted domestic extensions and alterations, just the kind of thing that might drive you insane fantasising about how they might really feel to live in.

Luxury retail is pretty different to private housing, but CAST Architecture’s work on The Children’s Rooms for Brown Thomas makes it clear that they can have a few things in common: they’re designed for a very particular person, they have a brief to provide pleasure and luxury beyond the basic requirements, and to be good, they need meticulous detailing as well as a unifying, considered approach to the whole.

With the second phase completed in February 2012, The Children’s Rooms are up on the third floor beside the dazzling kitchenware displays. If you’re shopping for a very fortunate child, you pass through a timber-lined portal into a display of tiny, colourful clothes, the project wisely designed to have the merchandise taking the foreground. There’s a motif of framing and niches in the perimeter walls, presenting the clothing on floating shelves and rails like it’s being exhibited. In the biggest niche, the one behind the shoes, candy-coloured illustrations by Nigel Peake bring in a series of cues for imagination like storybook characters, sewing tools, toys and planes.

The freestanding furniture in the centre of the room varies in size and form but shares a dimensional relationship that suggests a family, with a solid and sensible sophistication that brings to mind toys like Froebel blocks that treat children like small, curious, tactile humans. More subtly, the Hungarian pattern parquet on the floor with each piece of timber laid by hand is pretty exquisite, though staring down at your adult-sized feet after seeing all the perfect little shoes on display might mean breaking the spell.

Big names and the boom hangover

Irish architecture in general is the polar opposite of the ‘starchitecture’ that emerged in the 90s: cults of celebrity with iconic or novelty buildings and signature styles. The icons are recognisable and often self-branding, popular with developers and commissioning authorities because they tend to be a tourist draw.

Right after the opening of Frank Gehry’s sculpted, landmark design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Spanish city began a social and economic resurgence, and it’s easy to understand why the ‘Bilbao Effect’ caught the attention of other municipal bodies – it’s super visible, it sounds positive and it’s simpler than tackling complicated underlying social issues. Long before the word ‘starchitecture’ was coined, the Centre du Georges Pompidou in Paris (1977, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers) demonstrated that contemporary buildings could be a destination, bringing visitors to Beaubourg for the architecture as well as the art housed inside.

Santiago Calatrava’s James Joyce Bridge for Dublin at Usher’s Island (2003) brought the city its first high-visibility, big name international design, but his harp-like Samuel Beckett Bridge (2007) at Spencer Dock is more distinctive and heightened by its neighbours. At Grand Canal Dock, Dublin got its Libeskind, with the Grand Canal Theatre (2009) awkwardly pushing past an office building, shouting into the public square (landscaped by Martha Schwartz, 2007) but concealing a pretty ordinary foyer. The chequerboard hotel by Aires Mateus is still unfinished beside it, and the square is battered by the wind coming across the dock and in from the river.

The striking thing is that you’ll always find people in Grand Canal Square photographing the buildings. It’s not like the city is lacking in visitors with cameras, but most buildings are drawing attention because they’re historically significant, old or something to do with Bono, and this is about something contemporary. From a context-sensitive point of view, the solipsistic showiness of the buildings and design focusing on the façade rather than the functional, inhabited interior is a problem. The city and its visitors are interested in landmark architecture, and it’s a pity we chose the skin-deep kind instead of a world-class building like the Bocconi.

Just across the river, there’s the Convention Centre Dublin at Spencer Dock by Kevin Roche, the best-known Irish architect since White House designer James Hoban. Roche is a bright, humble octogenarian who spent his career in the US making huge, bold work with masterpieces like the Ford Foundation in New York and the Knights of Columbanus Headquarters in New Haven.

Architecturally, the Convention Centre is just disappointing. The form is like a basic 3-D drawing exercise in intersecting solids, with the entrance drawn back from the public street to serve only the conventioneers. Inside, it’s a well-equipped convention centre but unremarkable, aside from the panoramic views of the city offered by the building’s height. Instead of the views, though, Dubliners get to see the building from miles in many directions, a baffling tilted cylinder garlanded with a light display straight out of an early 1990s low-budget television network logo.

Irish architecture can expect a good few more years of trying to make work in an inhospitable economic climate, but construction is cyclical and the veterans will always remind you that they’ve been through recessions before, that they’ll go through recessions again. There’s a thriving culture of exhibitions and events organised by the city’s architects right now, most of which will pop up in the listings maintained by the Irish Architecture Foundation <www.architecturefoundation.ie>.

In a way, the anomaly was the 90s and 00s, when architecture graduates could leave college and expect to be able to get a job in Dublin, while before that most people expected they’d have to leave. Many of them came back, too, and brought their experiences to bear on the Irish built environment, lessons learned from working on planning the rebuilding of Berlin in the 1980s or how American church entrances worked in the 1950s. Whether the architectural diaspora working in Brazil, Canada, China, the Middle East, Scandinavia and London can return to Dublin will remain to be seen, but if they do, it will be interesting to watch the influences they bring to bear on Dublin’s future.

Words: Lisa Cassidy

www.builtdublin.com