1978 – Design for St. James Hospital, Dublin

The history of St James’s stretches back to 1703 when an Act was passed to build a workhouse on its site. Thirty years later a foundling hospital was added to the workhouse.

As the South Dublin Union Workhouse, it played a role during the Great Famine, giving shelter to thousands of starving people. The buildings of the workhouse were commandeered by the 4th Battalion of the Irish Volunteers during Easter Rising of 1916. After Independence the South Dublin Union was renamed St Kevin’s Hospital and became a municipal hospital for the poor of the city. Later, plans were made to amalgamate smaller voluntary hospitals in the city and to build a new hospital at St Kevin’s. This hospital was named St James’s Hospital and its board met for the first time in 1971 when the planning of the new hospital began. Moloney O’Beirne Guy were the local architects, where Hutchinson Locke and Monk, now known as HLM, are based in Sheffield.

“The general philosophy of design, which has been adopted by the architects is one of providing a building which is intimate in scale and will balance reassurance in atmosphere with function. At the outset it was agreed that a low-rise building complex would be most appropriate to these ends, a factor which is endorsed by a site largely surrounded by residential areas.

The building is deliberately designed to provide interplay of forms which consistently change plane in both horizontal and vertical dimensions to rise on all side from one and two storeys around the perimeter of the hospital to be linked together by the spine of service distribution at third floor running east/west down the longs axis of the hospital to feed the various departments Thus, the assembled hospital cascades down from roof to ground level in an ever-changing interplay of buildings of domestic scale, which will hopefully achieve a continual element of warmth and surprise to all external areas followed through to interplay of space and relief of the courtyards provided to internal spaces.
Architecture in Ireland, December 1978

It was a long project – existing hospital buildings onsite continued to be used into the early 1990s.

Each of the existing buildings on the site provide accommodation or a service which must be maintained or substituted but not diminished during the course of construction of the new hospital. The problems posed by this factor are considerable and obviously dictate a policy of phasing which will allow construction work to commence while imposing the minimum of inconvenience to the proper and continuing operation of the present facilities
Architecture in Ireland, December 1978

St James’s Hospital is now a major teaching hospital for Trinity College Dublin and there is a new teaching centre on the campus which was officially opened in 1994.