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Architecture

Architecture in Dublin

Dublin is a Georgian city that conserves hard, so its landmarks are the eighteenth-century public buildings and the glass that arrived along the docks after 2000. The best new work is on the water at the Grand Canal.

• Convention Centre Dublin

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  Completed 2010

  Kevin Roche

  A conference centre on the north quays, built by the Dublin-born architect who spent his career in America. Roche tilted a great glass drum out of a rectangular block toward the river, an atrium that leans over the quay and frames the city and the mountains beyond, and made it the first carbon-neutral convention centre built anywhere. The tilted cylinder is the whole idea. It was Roche's only building in the city he left in 1948, finished near the end of his life.

• Bord Gáis Energy Theatre

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  Completed 2010

  Daniel Libeskind

  A theatre on Grand Canal Square in the redeveloped docklands. Libeskind cut the glass front into sharp angled planes and let it lean out over a public square paved by Martha Schwartz with red glowing sticks and green polygons, so building and ground read as one jagged composition. The plaza does as much as the theatre. It was the anchor of a new district on the water, and it set the sharp-edged glass tone the docks then took up.

• Aviva Stadium

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  Completed 2010

  Populous · Scott Tallon Walker

  A stadium at Lansdowne Road, rebuilt on the oldest international ground in the sport. Populous and the Dublin firm Scott Tallon Walker drew the bowl and its clear polycarbonate skin as one curving surface that dips low at the north end so as not to overshadow the Victorian houses backing onto it. The wave of glass is shaped by its neighbours. It is a modern stadium squeezed into a tight suburban site and bent to keep the peace with it.

• Custom House

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  Completed 1791

  James Gandon

  The customs house on the north bank of the Liffey, and Gandon's masterpiece. He set a long Neoclassical front along the river with a central dome and pavilions at the ends, faced in Portland stone and carved with river-god keystones for the waterways of Ireland, sited to be read from across the water. It was burned out in 1921 during the war of independence and rebuilt. It anchors the quays it was built to govern, the finest eighteenth-century building in the city.

• Trinity College Old Library

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  Completed 1732

  Thomas Burgh

  The library of Trinity College, and the Long Room at its centre is the image the whole city trades on. Burgh built a plain block over an open ground-floor arcade, later filled in, and the barrel-vaulted Long Room above holds two hundred thousand of the oldest books under a timber ceiling raised in the nineteenth century to fit them. The Book of Kells sits below it. The working library became a monument, and the queue for the Long Room rarely stops.