DUBLIN'S DILEMMA:
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Sam Stephenson's Central Bank |
As for future developments - somehow, after all the respectful height-conscious interventions of recent years, it comes as a relief to find architects de Blacam and Meagher building a tall, timber-clad apartment building near here.
In Temple Bar, the relatively new architects on the block are doing pretty well. But how about this: there is one Dublin building, a modern bastion, which acts as a gateway to Temple Bar and which looks better and better with every visit. This is the inverted ziggurat of the Central Bank of 1978 on Dame Street by Sam Stephenson, then of Stephenson Gibney. Deeply unfashionable during the 1980s and 1990s, its merits are gradually becoming better appreciated, and not before time. After all, in London, buildings of this quality are also listed and statutorily protected: think of London's National Theatre, or even the once-despised, now listed Centre Point tower - and the Central Bank is considerably better than that.
It is harder to love Stephenson's squat towers of the civic offices on Wood Quay, but nonetheless the hybrid building that has resulted from the project being completed by other architects in a totally different style has led to an unsatisfactory conclusion. There is not so much a join as a rift valley between the two parts. The river frontage of the new bit by Scott Tallon Walker, admired by many, has too much of a whiff of the American business-park about it for me. The world over, high-profile civic projects like this that drag on for years and years invariably end up half-baked, half-hearted, or both.
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Dublin Civic Offices: Stephenson's original "bunkers" meet Scott Tallon Walker's later business-park aesthetic |
Business parks, it seems to me, need to be out of town - near the airport, preferably, but anyhow not in full view of the centre. A shame, then, that they built one down by Custom House and called it the International Financial Services Centre, begun in 1990. It's not that it's irredeemably awful - it's just averagely bad and all too familiar. I'll concede that this Irish-American complex has been given an urban scale, but it seems to connect with the city in no other way: it excludes you. The greatest criticism of the project is a mute one, and it is uttered by the mere presence nearby of Michael Scott's masterly Busarus building of 1947-50. The Financial Services Centre at least makes you look at Busarus with freshly appreciative eyes. The building is a national treasure.
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Michael Scott's 1947 Busarus HQ |
