Dublin City Architects Blog

Welcome to Dublin City Council's City Architects' blog about issues affecting the city’s buildings and public spaces and about designing to improve them.

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"Well designed places, well designed homes, well designed public domains create value, respect, empathy between people."*

Dublin City Council is committed to using design to improve the attractiveness, liveability and sustainability of our built environment in its roles as planning authority, manager of public spaces and buildings and through its own construction projects.

Dublin City Architects is responsible for promoting design and providing architectural, urban and conservation design services to Dublin City Council. In doing this, we will:

  • Aim for Dublin’s citizens to enjoy the highest quality built environment; one that is clear, generous, appropriately scaled, positive to context, well made and which promotes access and inclusion.
  • Work to achieve excellence in the ordinary.
  • Consider places before buildings so that new developments contribute positively to public spaces.
  • Learn from the past in creating architecture that matches the quality and longevity of earlier periods.
  • Facilitate architecture that is contemporary, performs to the highest environmental standards, addresses climate change and is culturally cosmopolitan.

Blog Posts

19.01.2012Bye for now to Kevin St cupola

Kevin Street Library bade farewell to its cupola earlier this month, temporarily. The cupola, which has suffered from corrosion, was expertly removed by contractors Collen Construction, and is currently being restored by Bushy Park Ironworks, as an early part of a refurbishment of the library.

 

Opened in 1904, the library was designed by the then City Architect C. J. McCarthy. It’s a hidden gem in the city which has unfortunately had its most impressive spaces closed to the public in recent years for health and safety reasons. City Architects drew up a conservation plan in 2011 with a proposal for bringing all of the spaces back into use. The library was subsequently awarded a grant of €2m by the Department of Environment, Community and Local Government to fund a refurbishment.

The works are planned to take place during 2012 and the cupola will be reinstated following its restoration and on completion of the building work. 

As an aside, the plan is not to have any repeats of the incident below when a crane working on the construction of the adjacent DIT technical college in the 1960s toppled over and went through the roof of the building.

 

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