HOWZAT

()Architecture: Bunker mentality

The proposal was already controversial; that’s why the competition was arranged. The conservation movement in Ireland grew out of the battle for Fitzwilliam Street, brilliantly documented in Frank McDonald’s The Destruction of Dublin. It was the first of many bitter struggles fought out in the streets of Dublin between the forces of barbarism and civilisation.

Stephenson was rarely on the side of the angels. Later, student occupations of Georgian houses in Hume Street and Pembroke Street were intended to thwart plans he had prepared. In September 1978, 20,000 Dubliners marched to protest at the destruction of the city’s earliest archaeological remains at Wood Quay.

Modern architecture was universally disliked then, but Stephenson became the lightning conductor here for that popular discontent. Would he do it differently? “There isn’t a building I wouldn’t revise,” he says.

Gibney, who designed the ESB’s façade, says, “I’ll take the blame. We believed then there was no way to save the houses. Architects had no doubts about it. We wanted to get into the 20th century. We were at the stage Germany had been in the 1930s. But the vista is important. I would save that now.”

The weakest part of their design is the blunt way the building meets the pavement. The windows, their rhythmic, projecting fins a witty take on traditional recessed Georgian reveals, are based on Walter Gropius’s 1958 Pan Am building in New York.

American references abound in Stephenson’s work. His was the first generation to believe they wouldn’t have to emigrate to have everything their American cousins had.

You can see the influence of his architectural hero, Kevin Roche, in Bord na Mona’s glassy headquarters near Baggot Street bridge. The Educational Building Society on Westmoreland Street is indebted to Norman Foster’s 1974 Willis-Faber and Dumas building in Ipswich.

If glass is for commercial headquarters, Stephenson used expressive forms of massed brick to define minor institutions, such as the Central Bank mint at Sandyford, Fitzwilliam lawn tennis club and his own offices at Molyneaux House, Bride Street.

The Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies on Burlington Road, with its exhilarating cantilevered corners, floating bands of brick and free-standing service towers — originally designed by Gibney — shows the strong influence of Louis Kahn’s 1961 Richards Medical Research Laboratory in Philadelphia.

Stephenson’s big works, the Civic Offices and his masterpiece, the Central Bank, are clad in monumental Dublin granite. Utterly dissimilar, each perfectly reveals the character of the institution for which it was built.

The old, defensive Dublin Corporation brooded in its glowering bunkers, while the towering, optimistic bank, its floors confidently suspended from steel cables, conveyed a progressive, can-do, engineering approach to the management of the economy.

“I take great comfort from Frank Lloyd Wright’s career,” he says of the inspirational American architect as we part. “He went bankrupt twice, ran off with a client’s wife, became a pariah and married three times. But from the age of 70 until he died, at 91, he did more work than in the rest of his life.”

Stephenson’s first big commission in Dublin for 20 years — a glassy, postmodern office block on Tara Street, framed by chunky granite bookends — starts on site in the Spring. Let history — and the future — be kind to him.