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. A tower? A modest one, yes, and one which, coming from the architects of Trinity College's 1993 oak-clad Beckett Theatre, will have a pedigree. The area needs a vertical element. And it needs the traffic along the Quays to be tamed: amazing that heavy lorries still thunder past the foot of the pedestrian Ha'penny Bridge over the Liffey, and the door of U2's celebrated and still fine Clarence Hotel. With the area becoming increasingly residential as well as a tourist trap, the balance needs to be tilted away from vehicles and towards pedestrians.
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.
Dublin Civic Offices: Stephenson's original "bunkers" meet Scott Tallon Walker's later business-park aesthetic
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.
