Landmark new buildings designed by Bucholz McEvoy at Elm Park on the Merrion Road have created a new skyline for south Dublin. Emma Cullinantalks to Merritt Bucholz

If you walk along the south wall in Dublin (or float out to sea) and look back at the city you will see how its southern skyline has changed. On Merrion Road, in a former field that sits between a golf course and the main road and sea, is a vast structure (actually six buildings sliding past each other).

It's not as if we hadn't noticed them going up: Elm Park has been on site for almost six years now and its animated façades - rippling windows, chromatic and mirrored glass and lozenge-shaped timber stilts - have always indicated that something exciting was happening here.

The hotel, clinic, three office buildings and two residential blocks (as well as community centre, cafés and pool) have been built on the former field sold by a religious order, who stipulated that senior citizen housing be provided somewhere on the site.

A number of architects were asked to come up with initial schemes by the developers, Jerry O'Reilly, Bernard McNamara and David Courtney (as Radora Developments), who asked the practices to see how much they could get onto the site in a form that was acceptable to planners.

Bucholz McEvoy managed the most with 100,000sq m (over 1m sq ft) and many discussions with the planners followed. While the original concept about the buildings' form remained the same, the developers didn't originally intend to have a mixed use scheme, says Merritt Bucholz.

The resulting buildings raise, push and twist the bar beyond the designs of many other commercial developments and show how an architectural practice that is more used to working for state organisations can bring a certain design integrity to such a project.

It is also true that some developers find it easier to get planning permission, publicity and recognition if they have a respected designer on their team: if you want to build big, tall and on sensitive sites make sure you have a Santiago Calatrava or Cesar Pelli on board.

Elm Park began in 2001 and from the start Bucholz, who was just finishing Fingal County offices at the time, wanted a sustainable project. "There was no discourse about energy efficiency back then, it was seen as a leftist thing. It was the beginning of low-energy architecture but award-winning sustainable buildings here were mainly straw bale structures for a particular sector of the market," he says. Bucholz wanted the energy efficiency to be such a key part of the design, for instance, by having a double-skin facade to enable natural ventilation, that no one would be tempted to retrofit, perhaps by adding air-conditioning plant to the roofs.

The developers brought in Matthias Schuler of Transsolar, a Stuttgart-based climatic engineering firm that has worked with Frank Gehry, Helmut Jahn and Stephen Holl among others on integrated sustainable designs. "He believes that working with the best architects will help to spread the word about sustainability," says Bucholz.

Schuler's work on the site began with the usual landing into Dublin airport which involves bouncing on the west winds as you cross from sea onto land.

Touchdown established that the low lying Elm Park site was swept by westerlies heading to the Irish Sea, which is why Elm Park's western-most block is the only one that sits on the ground - the rest are raised on piers - and its curved roof ushers much of the prevailing wind up and over the rest of the site, with enough air left over to naturally vent the buildings.

Transsolar calculated all parts of the buildings' fabric before going to planning, ensuring that all of the sustainable elements were in place before permission was sought.

The buildings are narrow, to optimise natural ventilation and daylighting; electricity and hot water are produced on site by wood-chip boilers in the underground car park; the buildings' floors and ceiling slabs are in thermal-storing concrete.

All of the buildings, from the curvy, snake-like five-storey hotel and clinic at the entrance, through the three eight-storey offices and two residential blocks that slightly slide past each other, run from north-to south.

The dual aspect apartments are laid out so that morning sun from the east shines into bedrooms and evening sun in the west hits livingrooms. The apartments have generous, glass-enclosed balconies, or "sky conservatories".

The fact that the buildings are laid out in linear blocks on piers could certainly cause nervousness about their urban planning now that current thinking has re-evaluated and revalued Georgian, Victorian and even medieval streets patterns. Courtyards are back in vogue, often acting as the rear, private areas of a scheme whose fronts will face the public "street". This is often achieved by having buildings around the perimeter of a site, unlike the rows of blocks in Elm Park.

There are slight reminders of Corbusien ideals here: in 1923 Le Corbusier wrote in Towards an Architecture (now issued in a new translation by John Goodman, published by Frances Lincoln): "At the foot of the towers, parks unroll: greenery extends over the entire city. The towers are aligned in imposing avenues; this is truly an architecture worthy of the times." While Corbusier had incredible building design ability, his urban planning has been called into question following the social failure of such housing schemes.

"The problem with Modernism is that the building meets the ground with the same form as there is at the top of the building," says Bucholz. While Elm Park is laid in linear blocks, it does benefit from being a mixed use development and having much animation at pedestrian level.

"When you are in the scheme it doesn't feel bulky," says Bucholz. "There is a lot of variation at ground level and a good flow of people because there are nice pedestrian ways through."

He points out that with the landscaping, planned benches as well as the low buildings and canopies between the large blocks, there are things of interest at ground level. Pedestrian and park users also need not worry about cars, which are parked beneath the ground.

Bucholz took account of the height of the buildings - 36m - and related them to the space between, at 37m, to create the feeling of a square.

The trees and landscape on this site are designed to create a sort of flood plain. "It was a field when we got here and we are replacing it with a field," says Bucholz, who wanted a continuous garden through the site.

AT THE tops of these buildings the glass façades, gauze vents behind timber shutters and balconies provide views of the sea, mountains and city, a wide vista that contrasts with the pedestrian scale below.

Part of the animation at ground level in this scheme are the woven, fat timber legs that support the buildings' outer skins by plunging into the ground on sturdy high-heeled "shoes". Halfway up the building they sneak in beneath the glass, offering impressive examples of nature to insiders. The neater timber profile up here allows more light into the tops of the buildings.

These concrete-framed structures dance in so many ways, from the timber shuttering systems, the sky conservatories, cantilevered rooms, red windows, atria with high, nerve-tickling walkways and views from offices right down the glass façade, all eliciting an emotional response, from the high that comes from mild vertigo to the pleasure that is derived from appraising various forms that can be gradually pieced together and understood.

These buildings are gorgeous but just how did Bucholz McEvoy conjure up such magic?

"The design followed from the basic fact that buildings are made by hand," says Bucholz. "No matter how big a building is there should always be evidence of that: not necessarily in an Arts and Crafts way, because hand-made things can also stem from incredible technology. Even rockets are made by hand, because they are the result of calculations by humans."

He is echoing the words of brilliant Irish engineer Peter Rice (who worked on the expressive Pompidou Centre and Sydney Opera House) who believed that buildings should retain "traces de la main".

Every detail at Elm Park was modelled on computer, and drawn and made into actual models in the office. There is a fantastic level of detailing in the buildings, something that reflects Bucholz's tirelessness. On a recent tour of the scheme, Merritt raced a group of architects right across the site, up and down two of the buildings and down into the underground car park to check out the wood chip plant.

He not only runs the practice, with his wife Karen McEvoy, he also heads up the school of architecture in Limerick and has young children. He recently gave a lecture in New York, returning the same evening, working through the night flight on his computer before heading to a meeting in Dublin on his return (this story didn't come from him, because he probably thinks that it is normal).

While the impact of these buildings' layout will be watched closely by urban planning aficionados, the design of them is awe inspiring.