Medico Legal Centre

A new Dublin City Morgue and State Pathologists office near the Casino in Marino. A simple plan is programmatically marked off into medical boxes of paired, roof-lit autopsy rooms and ancillary functional spaces, with laboratories, offices and record holdings (forensic cases) around a courtyard.

The adjacent Casino in Marino is a tiny and delicate Portland stone pavilion in a damaged 18th century landscape. Located on the site of another (vanished) pavilion in the same scheme - the Gothic Room - the new building re-imagines the implicit relationship, becoming another stone pavilion, now within a walled garden, which encloses its most private functions, from arrival of a hearse to the private grieving of a relative in a garden.

Externally, the new building is a cube of Portland stone, eroded, cut into - a monument made frail by weather, by the knowledge of mortality. Daylight and views are carefully controlled to the very sensitive internal environments through discrete light incisions in the stone walls and roof mimicking the cuts of the pathologist's blade

At ground level and at roof level which is also a garden, is a place of stillness and sadness, reminiscent of graves, a calm sinking back into earth for those who have died tragically. The building was on site in 2011 and was half finished when the contractor went into liquidation. The building was never completed and now little remains apart from a concrete ruin footprint that is reminiscent of an archaeological find.