Re: Re: “Modern” Protected Structures in Dublin

@DGF wrote:

From the letters page in today’s Irish Times:

Madam, – Contrary to the suggestion by Frank McDonald in his article “Back to a brave new world” (July 26th), I have not until now made any statement regarding the proposed redevelopment of the Bank of Ireland Headquarters buildings in Baggot Street. For the record, I do not approve of the proposed development. – Yours, etc,

RONNIE TALLON, Scott Tallon Walker Architects, Merrion Square, Dublin 2.

Mmeeeow!

Isn’t it a shame Ronnie didn’t get the job?…

Anyhow for the record, an interview he gave to the IT 2 years ago in which he says “They might get an extra floor on Baggot Street – it’s quite capable of taking it alright.”, but in fairness follows it up by saying “I suppose they might want to take out the plaza and turn it into an atrium or something but it would be a shame because it’s one of the nice spaces that the public has access to.”

Perhaps the latter bit didn’t quite appeal to the lads 🙁

Wonder where Frank McD got the following bit so that RT is referring to above?

The 2 articles in their entirety also follow.

“As for the radical nature of the proposed renovation, Ronnie Tallon is on record as saying that “the one lesson you learn, really, over the years is that buildings do change. I think the day is gone where you make a building and it’s a complete entity, never to be touched again. That really doesn’t happen in the real world, in the commercial world.

“Almost every building that we made has had to change over the years. It’s a very simple concept. Good buildings can accept change. If you have a simple structure, I believe it can take expansion and it can take change without too much damage.”

And this is from the eminent architect who feels that the Bank of Ireland is almost like one of his children”

Could Bank of Ireland’s headquarters be listed?
Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Now that the Bank of Ireland headquarters building on Lower Baggot Street is expected to be sold and leased back, many are wondering what the future holds for the 1970s structure. Emma Cullinan reports

“I do feel a link with it, of course, it’s almost as if it’s one of your children,” says architect Ronald Tallon about the Bank of Ireland headquarters building his practice, Scott Tallon Walker, designed in Baggot Street, Dublin 2, which is expected to go for sale.

While the bank is due to lease back the 1970s building for at least five years, the prospect of new owners does throw up the possibility of changes being made to the structure.

Many are wondering now whether the building, which was completed in 1975, should be listed. But while this would prevent changes being made to the building, a spokesman for Dublin City Council points out that even without such status, any changes would be subject to a rigorous planning process.

One of the criteria for protected status is that a building has to be of significant architectural interest and, so far, most of Dublin’s 8,500 listed buildings are Georgian, followed by Edwardian buildings, yet, with the advancement of architectural quality in Ireland recently, more contemporary buildings will need to be considered.

At the moment anyone can propose that a building be listed (or delisted). If the planning department deems it a suitable candidate, it is then put to the councillors.

If they give it the go-ahead, a report is done on the building. After that, public notices are served (in newspapers and so on) and the property owner is notified. After this, councillors decide whether to proceed. The whole process usually takes around six months.

The problem, says the council spokesman, is that what is deemed to be of architectural interest is subjective.

But, while people may be divided on whether they like the Bank of Ireland building or not, some may consider that it indeed has merit on historical grounds.

This was one of the first modern buildings to be slotted into a Georgian streetscape and was based on the work of architect Mies van der Rohe, in line with world trends at the time.

While anyone can propose a building for listing, Tallon himself is leaving it up to others to decide. It was German tutors at the Architectural Association school in London who helped to get another Scott Tallon Walker building listed: the Goulding Summerhouse in Enniskerry, Wicklow.

Michael Scott’s Busárus is also listed, as is the P J Carroll’s cigarette factory in Dundalk which Scott Tallon Walker is restoring for the Dundalk Institute of Technology. “There’s a sense of relief when one of your buildings is listed,” says Tallon. “It’s great to see a building restored and given a whole new life.”

When the practice designed the Carroll’s factory it was with a view to expanding it. Its modular design was added to three times in the past.

In the case of the Bank of Ireland building, the composition is important to its placing which will make it more difficult to expand. It’s in three parts, set around a central plaza, with two lower buildings on Baggot Street matching the scale of surrounding Georgian buildings while the higher building to the rear is set well away from the street frontage.

“If it is bought by a developer, I presume they may want to maximise the density of the site but it’s pretty dense anyway,” says Tallon. “It’s a nine-storey building in the centre of the city.

“They might get an extra floor on Baggot Street – it’s quite capable of taking it alright. I suppose they might want to take out the plaza and turn it into an atrium or something but it would be a shame because it’s one of the nice spaces that the public has access to.”

The bank building didn’t involve the demolition of Georgian houses, but instead replaced the Lincoln and Nowlan car assembly plant and showroom. While the dark building looks somewhat imposing, as the bank may well have wanted, the materials are of high quality and show a remarkable craftsmanship that has been lost to Ireland.

“We chose a curtain wall in bronze because it’s a beautiful material that lasts forever and needs no maintenance,” says Tallon.

It was also the material Mies van der Rohe used on his Seagram Building in New York. “What is amazing is that the whole curtain wall was made in Ireland by Smith and Pearson, an Irish firm with Irish craftsmen.

“That couldn’t happen today. Despite all our technology and all our advances no-one could do that in Ireland now.”

© 2006 The Irish Times

Bank in a brave new world
Saturday, July 26, 2008

FRANK McDONALD
Built only 30 years ago, the Bank of Ireland’s head office in Baggot Street, Dublin is a protected structure – but a major alteration of the building could bring it right up to date, writes Frank McDonald .

YEARS AGO, after the battle for Georgian Dublin had been joined, it was a common theme – almost an article of faith – for architects to argue that the 18th-century houses conservationists sought to save were “only built to last a lifetime”; it is no thanks to this grim-reaper view that so many are still standing, after more than two centuries.

Now we are being told by HKR Architects that the Bank of Ireland’s headquarters in Baggot Street “has come to the end of its working life” – after just 30 years – and needs to be radically altered, upgraded and extended to create “market-leading [office] space, fit for the future demands of an international corporate headquarters building”. What the bank’s headquarters and the Georgian houses around Merrion and Fitzwilliam squares have in common is that they are all protected structures – even though Scott Tallon Walker’s three-block composition, clad in Delta manganese bronze, was only completed in 1978, at the expense of demolishing five late 18th-century buildings.

The Bank of Ireland was Ronnie Tallon’s homage to his great hero, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Its bronze façades are carbon copies of Mies’s Seagram Building on New York’s Park Avenue from 1958 – right down to the detail of I-beams and double re-entrant corners; it also has exactly the same layout as Mies’s Federal Centre in Chicago.

I have to confess, however, that I was unduly harsh in my judgment of the bank’s headquarters in The Destruction of Dublin (1985): “By its sheer mass and bulk, the bank’s head office destroyed the essential unity of a once fine Georgian street – more aggressively even than the ESB, just round the corner [in Lower Fitzwilliam Street]”.

That was the view of an angry young man. On mature reflection, I believe that the architects managed very cleverly to conceal the bulk of the eight-storey main block behind the much lower four and five-storey buildings on the street frontage. In fact, its true scale is only evident from the rear or in distant views – notably from Merrion Row.

Largely built on the L-shaped site of Lincoln Nolan’s car assembly plant (yes, they were making cars in Baggot Street once), the first phase was completed in 1969 – the year Michael Scott won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Gold Medal. It was the second phase, finished in 1978, that required the demolition of a Georgian terrace.

When Landmark Developments, headed by Paddy Shovlin, teamed up with financier Derek Quinlan to buy the bank’s headquarters for just over €200 million in June 2006, it was not a protected structure. But Dublin City Council moved quite swiftly to add the entire complex to its lists – just in case the new owners might have tried to get rid of it.

This was not their intention, as they made clear in a submission to the council. Instead, the Quinlan-Shovlin consortium indicated that they would be preparing plans to upgrade and extend the complex – taking into account its newly acquired status as a protected structure – while the bank scouted around looking for an alternative head office site.

Before lodging their planning application a few weeks ago, HKR Architects consulted with the city planners and also ran the scheme past the “three wise men” of the council’s Urban Advisory Committee (architects Ken Shuttleworth and John Worthington and urban design consultant Kelvin Campbell), getting a generally positive response.

“We like these buildings and need to show respect,” says David King-Smith, the HKR partner in charge of this sensitive project. But what’s wrong with them is multitudinous – from leaks in the glazing units to solar gain in summer, heat loss in winter, over-large service cores and “completely outdated” mechanical and electrical systems.

This entire schedule of dilapidations would be addressed by the renovation programme, which includes replacing all of the glazing with new triple-glazed units fitted with “interstitial blinds” to combat solar gain. The existing bronze-tinted glass would be replaced with clear glass, but coated with a patented film to eliminate glare.

King-Smith stresses that the bronze curtain walls that define the three buildings will be retained Рexcept at the rear, where most of the fa̤ade would be stripped away to add a seven-storey extension, to increase the floorplate at every level. The existing service cores Рlifts, stairs, toilets, and so on Рwould also be substantially reduced in size.

Instead, a replacement service core would be created in a new atrium between the three blocks, occupying most (though not all) of the existing open plaza – which the architect describes as a “quite windswept quasi-public space that can be bleak – you wouldn’t go in there unless you worked there or had business to do in the bank”.

Bridges at several levels within the glazed atrium would link the three blocks, easing access from one to another; at present, inter- communicating staff must go outside or via the basement. King-Smith says the atrium not only addresses this issue, but gives the complex a “new heart”, which will be open to the public during office hours.

More controversially, the scheme proposes to add two floors to both the existing eight-storey and four-storey blocks and one floor to the five-storey block. Altogether, including the proposed rear extension, more than 15,000sq m of (mainly) office space would be added to the complex, bringing it up to a leviathan-like 35,300sq m.

“It’s significant, there’s no doubt about that,” King-Smith concedes. But he points out that the extra floors would be set back and clad in frameless glazing, to distinguish them from the original buildings. This is in line with the 1964 Venice Charter on architectural conservation and the idea that there must be clear legibility between old and new.

Is it not a bit greedy? “Of course, it all revolves around commerciality, given the vast money changing hands. There’s a game to maximise, but also physical constraints,” he says. “The bank is to move out in five years and these buildings are commercially unlettable in their present form . . . In other cases [or places], they would simply be torn down.”

The payback from the “aspiration by the client to achieve extra space” is that the renovated buildings would achieve the highest environmental standards in terms of their energy performance. It is also envisaged that the ground-floor areas of the two street-front blocks could accommodate livelier uses, such as cafes or even shops.

On-site car-parking would be reduced from 220 to 100, in compliance with the current Dublin City Development Plan, and the buildings would have universal access. Renovation of the complex would also help to reinforce traditional office use in Dublin 2, which is in danger of draining away into Docklands where much larger floorplates are possible.

As for the radical nature of the proposed renovation, Ronnie Tallon is on record as saying that “the one lesson you learn, really, over the years is that buildings do change. I think the day is gone where you make a building and it’s a complete entity, never to be touched again. That really doesn’t happen in the real world, in the commercial world.

“Almost every building that we made has had to change over the years. It’s a very simple concept. Good buildings can accept change. If you have a simple structure, I believe it can take expansion and it can take change without too much damage.”

And this is from the eminent architect who feels that the Bank of Ireland is almost like one of his children.

© 2008 The Irish Times