HOWZAT

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)