1999 AAI Awards

[Paul Clerkin]

Just been announced!.

Strangely (IMHO) the new Dental School by Ahrends Burton Koralek only got a special mention.

Personally I think its a fine building with three distinct faces: the old facade, the brick drum and the more 'metallic' side facade. There is a mgnificent interior atrium and stairwell - although the tower is a bit reminiscent of their entry for the English National Gallery.

[MG]

I don't know... I'm not sure about the use of the brick in the drum. The punched through square windows are nice but I feel there is one row too many of them. It's a good building but not a great building to paraphrase Eamonn Dunphy.

[owen]

The ABK building is competent but nowhere near the quality of the two previous buildings they did in Trinity (I think the Berkley library is one of the best 20thC buildings in Dublin). The brick facade looks very PoMo - and what's the tower for?

[Paul Clerkin]

As far as I know, the tower is there to provide water pressure(though I am open to contradiction on that). I would agree thats its not as powerful a building as the Berkeley but taken in the context of this years awards I think it deserved better for the way it integrates the old dental hospital.

[Jas]

Good article about the exhibition in <A HREF="http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/property/1999/0311/prop1.htm">The Irish Times</A> by Frank McDonald

[J Lobb]

...but Irish architectural criticism has a long way to go yet - it seems we're now in a "simply mahvellous dahling" phase. When are we going to get a decent level of objective, properly informed architectural criticism?

[Paul Clerkin]

I tend to agree with you - the journal 'Irish Architect' [which seems to have died] could best be described as fairly sychophantic but then again there is a very small circle of architects doing anything interesting and mainly in or around Dublin so I suppose you review one building harshly, they'll all stick together :-)

The important thing is with the death of the 'Irish Architect', the only publishing outlet on Irish architecture is Frank McDonald's weekly article in The Irish Times. If I could persuade architects to free up more information for here, i would love to extend the OnSite Ireland section into a proper online journal with regular issues - but getting information can best be described as getting blood out of a stone and I have a day job which prevents me from spending all day chasing them for information. However if any architects reading these want to send me some stuff on their latest work opr even short written articles, I'll publish them on this website.