The views onto the city that feel most alive and inhabited for me are the rear views, the garden elevations and the shuffling telescoping of returns projecting out behind the main bulk of the house. Instead of the presentation to the street, you get more windows, and you can probably guess what’s where: the colours on the ground floor reflecting around a room are from a kitchen television, the room lighting up at 6am in winter is someone bleary-eyed in a bedroom trying to find matching socks, etc. In between, there’s pipes, chimneys, security lights, satellite dishes, and maybe even a fire escape. It’s a view that’s enjoyable to draw, more lived-in than picturesque, and there’s a privilege in seeing it. The view is reciprocal and controllable, with my neighbours seeing my little desk just as I see their amazing sitting-room wallpaper as long as we both have our curtains open, and for me, it’s an endearingly human aspect of the city.

I should say that these views were from Merrion Mews, a property restored and let by the Irish Landmark Trust, and I’m looking onto the garden of the Royal Society of Antiquaries at 63 Merrion Square. I visited Merrion Mews during Open House Dublin a few years ago, and since both properties were open to the public (you can see a tour in progress), this seems like the least alarming example of architectural voyeurism for me to choose.

Merrion Mews is on Fitzwilliam Lane, above a stable used by the mounted unit of An Garda Síochána, and as you can see, it’s exquisitely pretty on the interior and must be an amazing place to stay in the city. Lots of prints and colours, and very peaceful.

The Irish Landmark Trust’s site mentions that this is one of the only remaining back gardens on Merrion Square, and if you zoom over the aerial images, you’ll see that this is true – most of them are given over to car parking or are built on.

Here, there’s the second thing that’s so interesting about the rear view. If you know a city well, you can probably guess at what’s happening at the core of each block, and it’s fascinating explore maps of other cities to see whether they’re planted or car-parked or built upon, whether the perimeter is standing tall like a stage set with a void in behind or whether the block has been designed as a whole with the street facade only hinting at what’s behind. There’s an immense amount of land in between the built perimeters of the streets, whether you’re looking with a view to the city’s resources, tree population, transportation, or densification, and it needn’t be activated but it’s important to remember it’s here.

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In ascending order, I think there are three enjoyable things about the signs. At the most incidental level, there’s the intensely coloured lettering on the NEON sign, with blue arrows separating the words, and not much neon going on.

Then there’s the rather dinky Eiffel Tower for the eponymous distribution company.

Then there’s the stack of signs – again, entirely ordinary but there’s something about the framework as a representation of the units inside, with businesses slotted in and out as a matter of course. Eiffel is halfway out, and the fifth is empty, and security is a permanent resident.

On a more basic level, there’s a coordination to it, with a similar weight to the letters in the upper sign (though the NEON one is slightly italicised and the serifs are a bit more rectangular) and the two blues matching, and the foolproof red/white/blue colour combination. There’s a harmony to it and they’re positioned with a certain symmetry within the facade. Inevitably, they’re someone else’s eyesore, but they’re a small delight for me whenever I’m on Cork Street.

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They’re very striking objects. From close up, they’re heavy, functional objects: steel and iron coated in weatherproofing, studded in neat seams, trusses and bolted and welded into place. In the current docklands, they’re a reminder of the previous life of the place when they controlled the raising and lowering of the road to allow clearance for access by water. I fell in love with them in the 90s during some early, moody outings with a camera around the red-brick warehouses and eerie peace of the area, and had tons of close-up prints of fixtures and edges, not sure what any of them did but liking how they looked.

From the opposite bank of the river, they have an almost organic quality to the form. I found the amazing ad below on a bridge-fanciers’ site, and it’s wonderful to see them in motion. The closed bridge seems jubilant and poised, and the opening move is gently acrobatic. The Scherzer Rolling Lift Bridge is a form of bascule bridge, which use a counterweight to balance the movement of the bridge as it opens.

Image from HistoricBridges.org

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The formality almost conceals the second use for which the space was designed. Before the park was added (begun in 1994, for the 1996 Irish Presidency of the European Union), it was a field that was used for helicopters, and this was to be a continuing requirement. There’s a piece in the June 2010 issue of the OPW bulletin Obair (22 [PDF], p.9) written by Senior Architect Ana Dolan, which covers the design of the new Garda Memorial Garden but also takes a look back at the original project:

“The brief was to create a circular helicopter landing pad which had a circle of lights in the center to act as navigation guides. Two further circles of lights were required in the event of two helicopters landing together, one with the VIP aboard and the other acting as a decoy.

The Garda Memorial occupies one of the corner gardens, and other have been put to symbolic use too: the Veronica Guerin garden with its unsettling and unfortunate bust of Guerin, and the Special Olympics volunteers area surrounding a fountain. From an aesthetic perspective, the peripheral elements like the stone arches and the ironwork aren’t my favourite, and I prefer the centre to the corners, but there is a soothing cloister effect if you walk through the smaller paths right after coming from the busy streets outside the Castle.

Though I’m not a huge fan of Celtic symbolism, I find the centre lawn really charming. The OPW piece linked above emphasises the lawn being read from above and the idea of maze gardens and parterres, which is a smart dovetail of the garden and helicopter briefs, and the intertwined snakes unlock the expanse of the neat lawn to kids running around the paths and jumping between the lines, focusing the wear-and-tear on the paved sections as well as bringing life to the centre of the space. That, and the mute expression in the glass eyes of the snakes is gorgeous.

There’s an economy to using paths as a feature, and it still seems to be successful in brining vitality, just looking at this and the similar effect we saw before at Father Collins Park in Clongriffin.

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It’s a small thing, but the effect of the sign is like a signature on the building, a little flourish to mark it out as an address where something stylish (though not likely contemporary) is happening. From a distance or from above, it’s an industrial unit with a roof made of north lights and little externally to distinguish it from its neighbours, but the sign stands apart. The effect of the weathering blurring the edges of letters makes it more interesting to look at and to trace the lines, though it must have looked handsome when it was crisp and new.

There’s some rather wonderful potential for taking the wrong meaning out of a 1988 headline in The Irish Times which asserts that “Henry White styles are dateless wonders.” The business was established in 1932 by the eponymous Henry, manufacturing “ladies’ fashions” (though they certainly went into menswear at some point, too). The 1970s appears to have been a decade of change for the company, with reports of a move towards attracting a younger and less conservative customer, and expansion into North America. This overseas expansion appears to have been a success, also launched in the UK and Japan by the 1980s, and winning an Industrial Development Authority award. In my ignorance, I hadn’t come across Henry White Ltd before (as much as I’d love a good classic wool coat!) and was surprised to see the company highlighted in January sales bargains into the 2000s, not to mention appearing in many eBay listings.

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From this perspective, using an urban or inner suburban site as car parking is abhorrent – it’s a major part of the city’s decline into and through the 80s, and it’s a big contrast between images of the city then and now, not least in Temple Bar. Phibsboro’s scale as a shopping centre makes it even stranger, because while the suburban edge centres are going to get shoppers only if they can get there by car (as the constipated traffic around Dundrum demonstrates so often), Phibsboro’s surrounded by housing and a short walk from the centre of town. Maybe that’s not part of the shopping centre dream, though.

As I mentioned the last time we saw a project by David Keane and Partners, it’s remarkable how many of the practice’s projects come up in lists of the city’s uglier buildings – for me, that’s not the same thing as bad architecture, it’s just a description, but I know that’s rarely the intended meaning. In its current condition, there are aspects of the building I think are beautiful, and aspects that are problematic, but I’m quite fond of it.

As constructed, the accommodation was ”32,280 sq. ft office building, supermarket, department stores, 12 shops, 5 service shops” (The Irish Times, 28 May 1969, p.a10), with over half of it let within months of completion. Right behind the centre (on the best-named land in Dublin, the former Pisser Dignam’s Field), there’s Bohs‘ grounds, Dalymount Park. The mid-2000s scheme for the site, in limbo, addressed the adjacency of the two sites and viewed it as a selling point, as well as developing a new stand.

The new centre was described as a neat combination, and the estate agents considered it an example of urban renewal, replacing a row of “single-storeyed and sad and depressing” (November 1 1969) cottages in need of modernisation with this bright new hope.

The draw for me is the precast concrete, these alien articulated forms fitting together on the upper storeys to frame the windows and create the facade grid. On the corner with Connaught Street, the panels taper back and sit as if clipped in a band around the corner, with a kick in and then out again along the side.

The office tower panels are almost the negative of this, which is gorgeous. Panes of glass are recessed and the concrete angles back to frame them, with a sharp line around the outer panel edge. The contrast between the exposed aggregate and the clean, smooth edge here works well for me, and likewise with the fluted effect on the negative corners.

That said, the lower storey meets its concrete neighbours in a bit of a mess, not helped by a jumble of signage and wires, and the silhouette of the complex is almost an essay in scrappy aerials and add-ons.

It’s undoubtedly a building that inspires strong feelings, and somehow, mine are mostly excitement. (Even after having it as my local shop for a few years!) The glittering sea of cars revealed on the roof when you pass on the upper storey of a bus looks almost pretty, and then the concrete. More than anything, though, I’d love to see what David Keane saw, and to figure out what gets lost in popular translation.

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It’s a gorgeous stone building, squat and clearly designed for its function, but more than just a shed. The long sides are broken up by regular pilasters, which step out to become deeper on the thicker lower part of the wall. On the gables, the roof is almost capped horizontally by terminating in an open pediment, with the arch for the entrance rising up through the gap. It seems like there should be more awkwardness in breaking the line of the pediment, but the arch is evenly proportioned within the surrounding masonry, and the function of the entrance is so obvious that perhaps it’s easier to understand it.

The thing that really draws me to the building is how it sits on its site and responds to the slope beneath. It’s a little like a tunnel segment, and the smooth lines of stone trailing out into the water are like indicators of action, with the station at the top like a boat-holder perched above the water of the harbour. The disappearing surface of the slipway is one of my favourite features along the pier, with its gradient of grey into red into blue-green, and its material similarity to the sharper, cleaner station gives a quiet, purposeful presence to the lifeboats within the harbour.

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Anthony Scott designed quite a number of the Carnegie libraries in Fingal – Rush, Malahide, Garristown, Lusk, Swords, Donabate (not a Carnegie library) – and won the competition for Skerries in 1908. Brendan Grimes, the authority on Irish Carnegie Libraries, indicates that Scott’s son, William Alphonsus Scott (the second Chair of Architecture at UCD), was involved in Skerries. The library was completed in 1911 and opened on 8th May.

The street facade has five bays, with a clock tower rising as the centre bay, the lower storey also projecting the two flanking bays for the entrance, and the two outer bays stepped back on the ground floor, four outer bays stepped back on the first floor. The limestone is coursed and rusticated (given a rough finish), with ashlar (smoother cut stone) on the quoins and reveal quoins. I particularly like the s-scroll brackets on the transition between the clocktower and lower storeys, and to either side of the Carnegie plaque.

There’s an interesting note here on the Skerries Historical Society site, drawing on a talk by Grimes: Malahide’s clock tower plan was rejected by Carnegie’s secretary, but as Skerries’ tower was built without the plans being sent for approval, somehow, the facade got its centrepiece.

To me, it’s always so interesting in a building like this to see how the different facades are handled. Addressing the street, the facade is handsome, nicely scaled, composed, and faced in limestone. If you move slightly to either side, you see the unadorned gable. It doesn’t diminish the quality of the street-facing facade, but it’s a point at which I can see the gap between my perspective (trained in architecture, with a contemporary mindset) and how this might be seen by an architectural historian) – there’s something strange for me about any building that’s weighted towards being two-dimensional, rather than a form that may have a hierarchy but probably doesn’t have a decorated shed approach. The character of the building feels different, requiring a different approach to examine it on the terms of its own time instead of it falling short on expectations from the contemporary.

Perhaps that’s obvious, but perhaps it’s also part of the split that often appears between, for example, Georgian architecture enthusiasts vs those interested in contemporary buildings. Again, for me, seeing the two as an opposition with one period superior to another is a great pity and ultimately quite facile, a false opposition – there’s so much to appreciate and think about in each period. The part I’m more interested in exploring is whether they’re really approached from different mindsets.

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The two shopfronts are in the same style as one of their neighbours, with a timber signboard, deep scroll brackets over fluted pilasters, and a brick pattern framing a rectangle beneath the shop window. Each is the ground floor of a two-storey house, with the shopfront timber clearly demarcating it from the residential entrance to the upper storeys.

On the Lilliput shopfront, the bench beneath the window caught my eye. It uses the brick rectangle, but replaces it with a fold-up timber panel (in the same soft grey as the other timber) which can be kept flush and out of the way outside business hours. The houses are on Dublin City Council’s list of protected structures, but with the added difficulty of that aside, it’s interesting to see a contemporary feature fitting seamlessly within the older facade pattern. Not only that, but it emphasises the sociable, community nature of the shop by facilitating a chat with a cup of coffee or a sandwich. The city could always do with more places to sit, but this one does even more than that.

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In the absence of context, the sign catches my eye all the time. It’s like the signage equivalent of a ruin, the fundamental elements still there but the life of the object long gone. The right-angled sign sits behind the wall, hanging the sign box out to the street, suspended on two hooks sitting into loops. The wires in are silhouetted like the tree branches nearby, and inside the box, two posts that were presumably light fittings sit bare and give it a slightly baleful expression.

I think it’s the location behind the wall that’s making the sign a positive point of interest – Dublin is plagued by excessive signposts, from redundancy and clutter in the road signs to erratic directional signage to those exasperating props and sandwich boards outside of shops, each one trying to shout louder than its neighbour. On this sparse stretch of Ranelagh Road between the Luas station and Ranelagh Multi-Denominational School, there’s relatively little clutter, and there’s space for this skeleton of a sign: an invitation that no longer exists, whether to a B&B or something else.

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