A monument, so says the dictionary, is anything that preserves the memory of a person or event. But it adds that a monument can be anything that is considered an object of beauty. Right, then. On both counts, the architect Ian Ritchie’s 400ft-high stainless-steel needle, recently erected in the centre of Dublin, is a monument. A singularly interesting one.

It is officially called the Spire of Dublin, and unofficially the Spike. It has created a storm of interest in Ireland and become the most photographed and discussed part of the city. It stands at a key crossroads in O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main thoroughfare — the equivalent of London’s Oxford Circus. And it has a history. This particular monument replaces another, a squat Nelson’s pillar, blown up by the IRA in 1966.

Ritchie is British, based in London, but any apparent imperial irony is limited — he has offices in several countries and is generally pan-European. He won the international competition for what was meant to be Dublin’s millennium monument back in 1998. But the project was challenged by one of the 204 losers, a septuagenarian artist named Michael O’Nuallain, brother of the late fantasti-cal writer Flann O’Brien. The courts decided that the Spire should not be built straightaway, but be made to jump through bureaucratic hoops first. Presumably, the idea was that the delay would kill it off, but no, it has been built, just as Ritchie designed it, and now only needs the final details to be finished at its base and apex.

I saw the Spire on a glorious, clear winter’s day. The low sunlight glimmered off the slightly matt finish of the stainless steel, dematerialising it slightly. I imagine that on misty days it will vanish altogether. People instinctively gather round it.

Anything so tall plays visual tricks on you. As you look directly up at it from below, it appears to curve alarmingly. At times, from various viewpoints, it looks slightly crooked towards the top — perhaps because its final few metres are perforated and reflect the light differently. Once finished, this final section will have a light source glowing inside it, replacing the lumpen aircraft warning lamp that is temporarily stuck on top like a cherry on a cocktail stick. Once the lighting is complete, this will be quite some night-time spectacle.

Costing an official £2.6m (I suspect more), the Spire might seem a touch extravagant. Criticism of it — much muted, since it has become a popular success — tends to be of the impoverished “How many hospital beds could we get for that kind of money?” variety. As if there were no place for uplift in human life, only grim utilitarian endeavour. As it happens, though, the Spire is not just an isolated object, but the first part of a regeneration strategy for the whole of O’Connell Street, which has become shabby and run-down in exactly the same way as Princes Street in Edinburgh.

This is where you are dumped when you arrive in from the airport, and an unedifying, often smokily gridlocked kind of place it is. The Spire — which rises from a 23ft-diameter bronze disc set in the ground and tapers very gradually from about 10ft wide at the base to 6in near the top — will eventually command a street with more space given over to pedestrians, less to motor traffic. O’Connell Street and its tributaries are certainly jam-packed with people on foot who could do with a better deal. In that respect, it is like so many other city centres, Trafalgar Square included, where the car has finally been tamed, though not removed.

Ritchie has tried to think of everything, right down to the internal mechanisms to change the lights at the tip of the Spire, and exactly the appropriate high grade of stainless steel to keep its shine in a polluted, semi-maritime environment. We’ll see: stainless steel left out in the open has a habit of discolouring surprisingly quickly. But if it keeps its gleam, can such a modern-day obelisk take on any of the qualities of its ancient forebears? Ritchie has left it mute — no inscriptions, just a geometric spiral pattern set into the bronze base. He intends it to maintain its air of mystery. It could be a monument to peace, to cultural revival, to anything you like. But in the end, it is just very satisfyingly itself.

www.ianritchiearchitects.co.uk
The work and thoughts of one of our more original architects