New building beside City Hall

They belong to the OPW, afaik. Originally displayed at Earlsfort Terrace in the 1860s, I’ve heard they are to be transferred to Iveagh Gardens (bounded by Earlsfort terrace, Hatch Street, Harcourt Street and St Stephen’s Gree South).

Site for sore eyes
The designers of a square in Dublin hope to learn from past mistakes in attempting to create something memorable, says Shane O’Toole

All architects have disappointments. Even the greatest are afflicted — perhaps they more than others. When they are younger, the pain is for the most part private, kept well concealed from view. It doesn’t pay to be a sore loser.
Architects know all about losing. Most important projects are awarded by competition and everybody loses more than they win. Even when you win a competition, you can still lose the project, for any number of reasons. Only architects in the evening of their professional lives can tell it like it really is.

Only they have the necessary distance and perspective to transform personal losses into lessons for us all. Lost Architectures, an exhibition by Barcelona’s MBM Arquitectes at the RIAI’s architecture centre in Dublin, offers a revealing glimpse of the battlefield that is international architectural practice.

Founded in 1951, MBM’s pioneering work in transforming Barcelona’s public spaces during the 1980s earned a worldwide reputation for Josep Martorell, Oriol Bohigas and David Mackay. Here they show 32 of their stillborn projects — “the ones that got lost along the way,” as Mackay puts it.

The exhibition dates from 2000, when Bologna was European city of culture. It was first shown in Bologna’s facsimile reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s seminal temporary Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau, built for the exhibition of decorative arts in Paris in 1925.

The venue shaped the exhibition’s content. “It was by his courage more than the magic of his pencil that we wished to remember the author of the pavilion,” says Mackay. “When he received the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in London in 1953, Le Corbusier spoke of his failures.

“Now, after 50 years of architecture, we are guilty of the crime of being on the scene too long. This has given us, too, the opportunity to accumulate many failures.”

The failures — beginning in Barcelona in 1952 and continuing over the decades through Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, Holland and Qatar — offer a rare opportunity to reflect on the reasons, the trends, and the architectural culture of the time.

Although there are positive failures among the exhibits, such as the Rosa Regás house in Girona, which became the inspired model for numerous house designs by MBM, right up to the present day, the lasting impression is of architecture’s unsustainable wasteland of creative output.

Bohigas puts it bluntly: “These failures were influenced by the senselessness of the competitions, a lack of understanding by the politicians, a lack of trust on the part of the clients, insufficient financing and, without doubt, also some mistakes on our part — at times too far removed from reality and not clever enough to hide the fact.”

Reality changes. MBM are now working in Dublin, a city that was derelict as recently as the 1980s. Many of the most forlorn sites of the time were owned by Dublin Corporation, having been acquired and cleared for road widening. In a society with little ambition and a poor grasp on communal values, the city’s traditional urban qualities — its complexities of scale and continuity — were being systematically eroded.

In the absence of a city architect, the parks department was often called in to ameliorate the worst of the damage done by the roads and traffic department. That’s how the millennium garden on Dame Street, beside City Hall, came about in 1988. During the 1970s city road engineers planned to widen Dame Street, and this had set in motion a sequence of events that resulted in the demolition of all the buildings in the block between Exchange Court and Palace Street, apart from the former Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers’ Society building.

The garden was the city’s weak and fussy attempt at disguising the dereliction it had brought about. With its three raised, decorative discs, two of them grassy and the other a reflecting pool for monumental sculpture, it is a pleasant enough setting for summer sandwich eaters. But it has none of the intimacy one finds in New York’s pocket parks, for example.

It is neither public enough nor sufficiently private.

These misgivings were uppermost in the mind of Jim Barrett, Dublin city architect, while the restoration of City Hall was underway during 2000. The new city exhibition space, which would create a public entrance on the building’s gable, shouldn’t be accessed off a laneway. Besides, work needed to be carried out on the exposed gable of the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers’ Society.

“I thought we could mask the gable and provide a proper forecourt to City Hall,” says Barrett. “A small building with a public exhibition space beneath the square, possibly related thematically to Dublin Castle, could pay for itself and fund the paving.”

Although Barrett is formally the project’s architect, he entered into a design partnership with MBM because he “admired the quality of the many smaller public spaces they had created.”

The conceptual input to the project is largely MBM’s, but the implementation will be by Barrett’s in-house team.

Mackay describes the site as “very delicate and sensitive, on the threshold of the old city. We have proposed a very small project, but one with big architecture. Our basic idea is to create an incident in the square to try to match the giant, almost two-storey scale of the City Hall and AIB bank on either side of the space.”

They should achieve their aim through careful siting, a certain sleight of hand — employing a double facade to Dame Street — and the sculptural bravura of their silver mosaic roof, with its homage to Le Corbusier.

The underground museum was abandoned as archaeological explorations revealed that both a tributary of the Poddle and part of the ditch that lay outside the city wall traversed the site. Only a fragment of the idea remains, a small underground chamber with a glazed roof, inspired in part by a similar space in Berlin that marks the spot where the Nazis organised the infamous burning of books.

Mackay and Bohigas believe that Dublin underplays the cultural aspects of its heritage, especially its writers. Referring to James Joyce’s Ulysses, they wonder why the city has no space named for June 16. With the centenary of Bloomsday falling next year — just as this project is due for completion — it is a suggestion the city council would do well to consider.

The square will be paved in three widths of granite, inset with stainless steel strips. “We wanted it to be like a doormat before the city entrance,” says Mackay, “running across Dame Street, doubling the space of the square.” Like a blast from the past, however, the engineers said it couldn’t be done without reducing the size of the paving slabs to prevent breakages.

That would destroy the unity of the concept. In an ideal world, the crude apartments, built between the square and Dublin Castle as recently as 1994, would be levelled to open up a view of the castle from Dame Street.

Mackay is stoic about setbacks. “Following the example of Le Corbusier’s tenacity,” he says, “We expect to accumulate more failures, but hope for some successes.”

Dame Street, it seems, will offer them a bit of both.

Lost Architectures at the RIAI Architecture Centre, Dublin, until February 28 (01 6761703)

I like that little square.

It’s often my morning waiting space while I’m waiting for the AIB branch to open. It’s very peaceful, it draws people in to the City Hall museum in the basement, and into the Castle. I think it’s a nice space.

I like that spot too, except I don’t think of it as a square. I glance over weekly on my hop over to the bank. Just get the trash out and it’s an unexpected break along Dame. Wonder if it has any greenery around it later in the year?

…and so this thread reminds me to go and take my tourist shot of the little place as a keepsake…

Ah the legendary Inner Tangent route, Designed to run around from Cuffe Street on Stephen’s Green to Parnell street Via Patricks street, North King Street etc etc buggering up everything along the way, don’t know what they were planning for Dame Street, usually they knocked buildings just to widen the street by four feet or something similar

I notice work has begun on clearing the small park beside City Hall. Hoarding has also been erected. The DCC are planning a new office here. Anyone have any idea what it will look like?

Totally disagree. It’s full of drunks, very dark, and was always heavily littered.
Admittedly, the litter is the fault of the City Council.
I saw models of this two years ago and it proposes a nice little public square and was a very good looking development.
I think this a positive step. I actually believe crappy parks are worse than no parks at all.

As long as a park is retained is what counts. The fact that an open space here (as opposed to a building on the site) opens up the view of the pleasant side facade of City Hall is an added bonus.
Any pics of the proposed building – saw it before but can’t remember much. Lots of wood cladding used?