Dublin city council aims to have the spire of Dublin, symbol of the city’s renaissance, erected by Christmas. It seems appropriate that Ian Ritchie’s Monument of Light — conceived as a 21st-century interpretation of standing stones and obelisks — should be unveiled at the darkest time of the year.
The winter solstice is when the sun’s rays illuminate the gloomy alcoves of the ancient burial chamber of Newgrange, pre-eminent among the passage tombs of Europe and dubbed “the cave of the sun” by Charles Vallancey, the 18th-century antiquarian.
Newgrange and its decorated stones were in the architect’s thoughts as he formed the idea for the spire. When he embarks on a new design, Ritchie writes before he draws. In September 1998 his “first sketch” for the spire was a 33-line poem that referred to “spiral and light, symbols past and present” and described the monument’s base as “a hand-drawn Celtic spiral in stone”.
The finished article has remained true to his original concept. The base became bronze but the spiral remained. The spire itself was immutable, “a cone 120 metres high/of rolled stainless steel sheet/shot-peened to reflect, softly, the changing/light of the sky,/gently in the wind swaying”.
Ritchie describes the spire as “reaching for the sky, going to the edge of what’s possible”. He considered other materials — carbon fibre, polyamides, titanium — before settling on stainless steel. “It’s a 20th-century material with a purity and materiality that’s strong. You can play with the surface, with light and texture”.
Nobody ever made a shell structure like this out of stainless steel before. But then no other architect has as many firsts for construction and design innovation. In Paris, Ritchie collaborated on developing the first all-glass bridge. At Leipzig he designed the world’s largest glass structure enclosing a single volume.
Radley Engineering, from Dungarvan, Co Waterford — specialists in fabricating stainless steel pressure vessels, reactors and heat exchangers for the pharmaceutical industry — won the right to fabricate the spire. The challenges were unique.
“It’s precision engineering at a monumental scale,” says Ritchie. “The design appears simple, but it is very demanding to manufacture to monumental — as distinct from everyday — quality.”
Brendan Moloney of Radleys agrees. The working tolerances for the 120-metre high, 124-ton structure were, he says, exceptionally tight. “For example, where flanges connecting separate lengths of the spire meet, the maximum permitted deviation was three-quarters of a millimetre,” he says.
Beginning last April, Usinor, the world’s leading manufacturer, rolled and taper-cut the stainless steel plate for Radley in two thicknesses, 20mm and 35mm, at Le Creusot in central France. The sheets were polished by Politolinox in Tours, before being formed into tapering, half-conical sections — between 2 metres and 5 metres long — by Barnshaw in Hamilton, outside Glasgow. From July the sections began arriving in Dungarvan for precision trimming, assembly and welding to form the nine lengths of the spire.
Pairs of flanges, formed and machined in Germany, connect lengths of the spire to each other. Giant pieces of jewellery, each flange must taper to follow the profile of the spire and is therefore unique. The base flanges, one of which is already cast into the monument’s concrete base, are held together by 48 60mm bolts, while the smaller top flanges have holes for 13 36mm bolts.
The spire is perforated over 9 metres near its top and will be internally illuminated by the world’s most advanced light-emitting diodes, specially developed by Hewlett-Packard and Philips. White light will be visible through 11,650 circular 15mm holes drilled through the shell of the cone. Rainwater is collected in an elevated internal gutter that can be flushed clean from ground level.
The tip, or nose cone, is to die for. Beautifully styled, its miniature fins and rings recall classic art-deco skyscrapers, such as the Chrysler building in Manhattan. This verdict will have to be taken on trust, though, as verification will be difficult once the slim-line assembly is a 40-storey erection.
The spire will change with the light, appearing bright or dull depending on the sky. Most of its surface has been shot peened, an engineering process that imparts a texture that looks not unlike skin.
The technique — developed by the American aerospace industry to deal with stress cracking and crankshaft fatigue in turboprop aircraft and now used to case-harden fans in Boeing jet engines and Formula 1 racing cars — called for the spire to be bombarded with tiny stainless steel balls and then with glass powder.
Ritchie wants the base of the spire to “capture the light of the street, as well as the sky”. The first 10 metres of the spire have been mirror-polished by Radley — a procedure that involved slowly rotating the base of the monument on rollers, polishing it 24 hours a day, seven days a week for more than a month. On to this gleaming surface Ritchie has introduced a pattern. He took a core — a long cylindrical bore of earth and rock — from beneath the base of the spire and rolled the sample across a scanner to produce a two-dimensional image of the core. Over this he superimposed a double helix DNA pattern — “a late-20th-century spiral”, as he calls it.
The flat pattern was laser cut in the west of Ireland on to plastic masking material and then wrapped around the spire. Where the two patterns overlap, the surface is left mirror-polished; where they do not, it is shot peened.
The spire is so light and slender that if left unchecked it would self-destruct in the wind, so it is restrained by a 2-ton mass damper fixed to the inside of the shell by hydraulic pistons.
Despite such high-technology innards, Ritchie maintains the spire is sculpture, not architecture: “The difference between architecture and sculpture is that the former has functioning toilets.”
When finished, the spire will be the tallest sculpture in the world. It will undoubtedly become one of the most popular postcard images of Dublin, even if it has had a difficult birth. “Once it went legal, everybody pitched in with their opinion,” says Ritchie. “Everybody’s had the chance to put the knife in — or kiss it.”
Given the recent row over trees in O’Connell Street, Ritchie may have underestimated our capacity to act the begrudger. But he is right to take the long view. In its time, the Pillar was loathed by many on aesthetic grounds. The Eiffel tower was hated at first. Opinions change. Monuments outlive the period in which they originated.They form a link between the past and the future.
www.ianritchiearchitects.co.uk
