Re: Re: goodbye hawkins house

You just want to keep it Devin because it has steel windows 😉 😀

I would agree to a certain extent though in that it is by no means the most damaging building in the city; the western quays apartment stuff as far worse than Hawkins. Also as has been said, Hawkins is self-contained – it is so god-awful, and located in such a compact place as to make quite distinctive from everything around it. It’s almost acceptable as a token piece of trash 🙂

But I disagree that it is an example of its time, simply because it’s barely even architecture. It doesn’t attempt to be radically Brutalist, nor go in the opposite direction and have a more designed, self-conscious look like Gibney’s ESB, or Centrepoint. It is just a heap of concrete panels chucked together that just happen to form a building. Considerably more effort went into designing Ballymun.

As it is now, it’s something of landmark – it stands for everything that went wrong with the city in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s intimately associated with all the ‘old’ arguments, with The Destruction of Dublin, the call to arms in the 1980s to save the city – essentially pre-Celtic Tiger Dublin. As such, it is somewhat difficult to let go of it all, turn a corner and move on – something which will happen with the demolition of Hawkins House.