HOWZAT

BMCE set the building back 70 metres from the road and raised it a little. Like a church, it is the highest point in the neighbourhood. The atrium runs the full width of the site, with offices behind and the council chamber and a restaurant out front in a butter-coloured pavilion.

The siting and linear atrium combine to link county hall with the local library and shopping centre on one side and future commercial developments on the other. The intention is that the atrium will become a street connecting a neighbourhood of buildings. In this sense it is public space, but is it more shopping mall than civic space? And does that matter if the end result is an open, accountable institution? Most people in Limerick drive to county hall. Visitors park in the shopping centre and enter the atrium at the ends, not from the ceremonial front. Disgracefully, 190 parking spaces have been provided for 260 staff, undermining Dooradoyle’s environmental claims, even if the sloping, earth-bermed car park is sensitively treated as a kind of semi-natural open space.

The county hall is basically a heavy, concrete office wing facing northeast, fronted by a lightweight atrium facing southwest. The sculpted concrete ceilings of the offices act as a thermal battery, absorbing excess heat during the day, while the timber-screened atrium, with its chimney stack effect, drives the building’s natural ventilation, all without the use of fans and ducts. Air is let in at the east side of the building, moves through the offices to the low-pressure zone of the atrium, heats up, rises and is exhausted at roof level.

There are echoes of Fingal in Dooradoyle’s atrium — the plywood ceiling, the projecting stair — but here everything is flipped. By placing the structure outside the glass, BMCE has created a calm interior screened from a frenetic, low-grade environment. It’s a real surprise after Fingal, where the cables supporting the facade make the tree-shaded atrium a little edgy.

The hinged and cranked atrium gables can move in and out by 25mm, to accommodate thermal expansion, but — glazed with 17 sheets of glass, all of different sizes — they are not pleasing. Never mind. What this building and suburb badly needed was an iconic, arresting image.

There is a rare dynamic quality to the steel-and-timber screen that shields the atrium from the heat of the day. When you walk around, it shimmers and responds — as if agitated into movement by its surroundings — taking on different appearances. It’s a herringbone tapestry, a Gothic veil, a pleated Issey Miyake fabric stretched over the building.

It is pleated for the sun, to catch both the high southern rays and low western beams. But the screen does more. Elegantly formed into a series of bowed trusses, the glazing can be gracefully slung from its top. “There is no decoration,” says Bucholz. “Things end up looking the way they do because they have to work that way.”

In the atrium you only have to move your head. Look up, into the swelling sail of a racing yacht. Look east and you see overlapping, slanted lines of dense shading. To the west is a chorus line of dancers, twisting in sequence to face you, some turned at the waist, others at the ankles.

On your way to the public gallery and restaurant, you pass through the screen, which towers above you like the hull of a ship. Looking back, the huge structure dances along lightly, held up like a ballerina on impossibly slender legs.

“This is a human achievement, not a material one,” says Bucholz. Everywhere you look — from the rubbed and polished marble-dust soffit of the ceremonial entrance to the bolts that hold the giant screen together — there is the trace of a person’s hand. Just like in the workshop.