1975 – Met Éireann, Glasnevin, Dublin

In 1975 the new headquarters of Met Éireann, the Irish Meteorological Office, opened on the site of Marlborough House. Marlborough House was a large five-bay three-storey eighteenth-century house used as a teacher training college and later as an infamous detention centre for boys. Met Éireann, Ireland’s weather forecasting service, started operations in December 1936.

Designed by Liam McCormick as an unusual, truncated pyramid form with lots of windows to give the best possible view of the sky. The sloped elevations incorporate numerous windows and balconies designed to give a good view of the sky from inside the building, while the flat roof supports the necessary monitoring equipment. The original cladding finish was Ballinasloe Limestone which was used instead of, McCormick’s preferred, imported blue slate due to a wish to avoid any political fallout from using a foreign product on what is essentially a state building. This created problems later and had to be replaced with metal panelling due to water ingress. As the building has no gutters or downpipes, McCormick used landscaped pools to collect rainwater, a motif he had used elsewhere.