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Sisters of mystery and portents of doom: high modern architecture in Dublin, and its commercial nemesis.
By Hugh Pearman. A Gabion special. You wait around for years for a significant new piece of contemporary architecture in the heart of Dublin, and then suddenly two, both competition winners, arrive at once. Trinity College’s James Ussher Library now nods along Nassau Street to the National Gallery’s Millennium Wing on Clare Street. Both are unapologetically modern, each is nonetheless very different, yet both tease and challenge the observer.
The National Gallery, by breaking through northwards from its Merrion Square fastness, has done mighty things with a small amount of land. It has given itself a new and somewhat enigmatic public face on the city. Is it open or closed? Hard to tell, at first. As with the earlier Museum of Scotland by the same architects, Benson and Forsyth, the Millennium Wing smacks of the fortification. Like some medieval bastion, it peers out at the world through arrow slits and embrasures.
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