1973. The year the marriage ban ended. I did my leaving cert. The Pidgeon House towers were built. The arc of this quite fascinating book, the final one in the three volume series beginning in 1900, covers years intensely familiar to me – and I suspect to many people in this room. The structure – essays, fine case studies and an outline survey or gazette of selected buildings – is identical in each of them. The view is rational and clear-eyed, a record, not a judgement. And that is its value.

I’m very honoured to have been asked by Ellen and Charles to launch this remarkable book – with Eddie - and as Niall McCullough launched the first of these volumes 7 years ago, it’s very poignant for me to bookend with this one. It recovers what seem incredibly recent buildings and reveals them, now, to have become ‘history’ before our eyes - in the case of the last volume, a history I feel privileged to be part of.

I’m profoundly grateful to Ellen and Charles for dedicating this final volume to Niall. Being a very modest person he would have said – what, me? you’re joking - but he would have been very honoured and his eyes would have crinkled with pleasure at this very fine record of his beloved city.

Many of the 135 buildings featured in this third book have a direct and immediate connection to his and my own becoming aware as architects – not all of them positive resonances – bear with me - but always intense: and for the wry amusement of the room I thought I’d mention some of these – because, as you’ll remember, Dublin was a slightly oddball and schizophrenic place to grow up in those years. Life appeared to be elsewhere. But as the succinct essays indicate, there was a tussle going on between what Ellen presciently calls a ‘middle landscape’ of modestly scaled and apparently dull suburbia where nothing ever happened - and an invasion of American-inspired corporate and semi state buildings arising out of the zeitgeist of the 1960s. An earlier generation of architects were returning from America to clear away evidence of poverty, dereliction and – incidentally - the city, to forge a new State. Looked at through the lens of the time it must have seemed a humane aspiration – abandon the exhausted city and live in sunlight, air and space – or surburbia. But there were murmurings, even if they came from belted earls, of another, more complex reading of the city, with gems of beauty among the ruins and car parks awaiting redevelopment, especially after the oil crisis.

Wood Quay was a seminal moment and we were of course on that march along with 20,000 others – against Sam’s Civic Offices scheme (no 63 in the gazette at the end of this book). It represented everything our generation of architects rejected – faceless city bureaucracy isolated in an urban Waste Land worthy of T.S.Eliot, and we had had no war.

Our student years bridged those same tensions - As a first year student I remember the total frisson of excitement at being part of a UCD student-led campaign against the ILAC

centre (no 37 in the gazette) – in a trench-coated, post 1968 way, with typewriters on formica tables, we took over makeshift offices around the back of Henry Street, and breathing the air of strident protest, we took notes, photographs, interviewed traders in Moore street, produced manifestos - besotted with the idea of action. So much for that.

Then there were the first elective courses we were ever offered in UCD – as students we had asked why we couldn’t, please, have courses in philosophy – instead we got the highy intelligent Bill Nowlan with a course called The Economics of Land Use – which was to prepare us for our role as small cogs in the game of development of the city- or to put us off it all. It was in fact vastly interesting and I remember Bill spoke in detail about the tremendous difficulty of assembling the site for the Irish Life Centre (no 60 in the gazette) – he had had to buy out 64 individual titles and it had taken years – and Niall and myself were transfixed at the idea of 64 houses, lanes and yards being sacrificed to the monster that was the giant floorplate essential to the burolandshaft ideal of highly efficient workplaces. Because in our student lives those large amalgamated developments were the norm. Despite the finely composed materials used in the Irish Life Centre, its architectonic qualities and places for artworks, we were acutely aware of the obliteration of vast areas of city grain. (In fact when I was writing some words for this evening I looked up the date Mary Harney announced to the world that we were closer to Boston than Berlin – amazingly, it was in the year 2000, in my head it seemed a lot earlier).

The other elective was run by the great Brendan Murphy talking about the History of Urbanism, where we could immerse ourselves both in fabulous plans of Italian hill towns and the modernity of Le Corbusier and the Ville Radieuse –and while there was still the separation of new and old, he was the first person I ever heard say, Dublin has as many sunshine hours as Paris, why don’t we have a culture of cafes on the pavements here? I have to say, that seemed completely impossible.

Turning practical, on a student summer job in Scott Tallon Walker I worked on the Port and Docks Board building (no 44) and was invited to go to the topping out ceremony–I had no idea what that was except it was a Significant Moment – not knowing what was the appropriate apparel, I decided on a wrap around dress of my own making, arrived on site on a very windy day and realised with a sinking heart I would have to climb ladders to the very top with the wrap around dress unwrapping in the wind. A good lesson.

Later as a very young graduate working in de Blacam and Meagher I remember being in the office the day after the fire in the Dining Hall in Trinity in 1984, and Shane coming back from a meeting and asking us what our diaries were like for 1994 –he was in for the long haul - work on the Atrium (no 66) started that day.

Even the sub Venturi - post modernist petrol station on Ushers Quay (no 65) has a resonance, which we – being fired-up rarefied beings influenced by European modernism in Barcelona - were vastly amused by and also appalled when it appeared on the front of Dublin Corporation’s brochure advertising the new Urban Renewal Scheme of 1986. It’s such a piece of history, because it was the only new building the length of the gap-toothed quays at that time.

The Central Bank (no 34)– although people have learned to like it in recent years as an exception in the middle of historic fabric - when we worked on the Temple Bar Framework Plan it was part of the problem. An ‘object’ building albeit with an interesting structure, which had removed an acre of historic grain and rotated the Commercial Buildings in Dame Street - it seemed impossible it could ever be an assimilated part of the city. But then, as one of the eight groups of architects in Group 91 when we won the Framework Plan competition, it looked like we could neutralise its impact by the liveliness of what was now to fill the area – people living, artists working, musicians practicing, new urban spaces in a city where there had been no new urban spaces for over a century. Our intent as you’ll remember, was to demolish almost nothing, to use vacant lots to create new public rooms and work our urban dentistry within the city fabric. We inserted and upgraded muscular buildings into that grain, entirely modern, but now within the cannon of complex European modernism as described by Aldo Rossi in The Architecture of the City. It seemed as though the world was suddenly at a pivot point where things might genuinely change – and I think Temple Bar was an immensely good thing for the city, despite the later proliferation of pubs. The fervour of activity at the time was infectious – as a group we had to build a number of buildings all at once and for a short moment we became a quasi-planning authority for the area. A political wind was blowing for once in the right direction, Dick Gleeson, Chief Planner of Dublin City Council was a generous high priest, and Frank McDonald championed and quizzed, interrogated and analysed what was happening in the pages of the Irish Times so that Temple Bar became an entity people understood as a new approach to our actually European city.

I’m very proud that Ellen has written up Temple Bar Gallery & Studios as one of the beautifully illustrated Case Studies. What she has coined as the concept of ‘Precarity’ astutely highlights a state of mind which passed as ‘inevitable’ in the cyclical development of cities at one time – meaning short term cheap occupation by artists and craftspeople in areas shadowed by threat of demolition– the artists create a new ambience and a Left Bank vibe, ‘civilising’ the city, and then are forced out when redevelopment is ready to take advantage of their work – a concept now sealed into developer-speak as ‘meanwhile uses’. In the case of Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, ‘precarity’ allowed a strong bunch of artists to take over a building on short leases from CIE and get on with their work. In a miraculous conjunction of fate, stars and politics, the demolition plan was lifted and the landbank released for development in a truly new idea about a ‘cultural quarter’. And in many ways, I believe it succeeded, both in saving that part of densely plotted city from demolition, and in creating a series of buildings which demonstrated typologies within the city grain - housing (Derek Tynan’s Printworks, no 103 ), artworking (Temple Bar Gallery & Studios and Black Church, no 105,), cinema (O Donnell and Tuomey’s Film Centre no. 95), food and social (Grafton’s Temple Bar Square and Paul Keogh’s Meeting House Square ), the unique Centre for Children ( Michael Kelly and Shane O Toole) and as an unwelcome by-product, laterally, rather too much drinking.

But what a feast this book is. With this final volume the series has established a reputation for rigour and perception in equal measure. History has been recovered. Provenance established. Extraordinary leaps of the imagination celebrated. Good, hardworking, almost anonymous buildings that do the important things in a city are highlighted – particularly housing like John Meagher’s Herbert Mews (no 29), James Pike’s Coombe housing (no 22), and Fitzgibbon St flats (no 20) – valuing these for the first time. Buildings are transformed by this survey - lifting a veil by careful research, warmly coloured new photos, insightful text and fantastic archival photographs –like Bolands Mills curved sweep wall– now sadly gone. You don’t have to like all the buildings in it, but it’s important that they are recorded and there. The humble concrete block is rendered a material of beauty and utility.

I’m hoping the series will become a sort of latter day NIAH – in other words that the buildings featured in it will be afforded some tenuous protection in advance of being listed– and that can’t happen quickly enough. Already some are gone, from this book, for example Sam Stephenson’s beautiful Molyneux house(no 05), from the previous one, the wonderful Kevin Street Tech, incredibly demolished this year, and from the first, the iconic Imco building.

I’m delighted to see this book published. Congratulations to the editors, Ellen, Charles and Carole, and the tireless researchers, already named. You have done the State some service.

Thank you. 

—Valerie Mulvin