WEXFORD COUNTY manager Eddie Breen can barely believe his luck. Not only has the county council just moved into an architecturally astonishing new headquarters, but the building has been "shortlisted" for the World Building of the Year award – admittedly, along with 280 others, writes FRANK McDONALD
The new civic offices sit on a sloping site at Carriglawn, on the northern edge of Wexford town, with expansive views of the Slaney estuary and the Blackstairs Mountains, and brings together all the departments of Wexford Co Council that had been housed separately in the town centre – including the old jail.
It was the councillors who chose the site, despite its “severe diagonal pitch”, according to client representative Matt O’Connor, who oversaw the project, co-ordinating the work of Robin Lee Architecture and executive architects Arthur Gibney and Partners. Alternative sites in Wexford town were “prohibitively expensive” at the time.
Given the tight constraints on public expenditure nowadays, it is probably the last such public building we will see for many years. But its construction, at an all-in cost of €46 million, powerfully reaffirms the council’s enlightened decision in 2006 to procure its new headquarters by way of an open architectural competition.
It is a mark of how open this contest really was that the eventual winner was a relatively young practice from Glasgow called Nord, run by Robin Lee and Alan Pert. They have since split up (it happens in architectural circles too), with Pert retaining the Nord name and Lee setting up Robin Lee Architecture last April .
Married to DIT School of Architecture graduate Una Collins, whom he met while she was working in Glasgow, Lee has claimed ownership of the Wexford project; he visited the site in 2006 when it was a land-locked field, looked over the hedgerow at the stunning view and imagined its possibilities in an entirely new context.
Under the Fianna Fáil-led government’s daft “decentralisation” programme, the Department of the Environment’s supposed new headquarters was to be built in an adjoining field, but the design, by Scott Tallon Walker, was still unknown. So Lee had to rely on his own instincts and what he absorbed about Wexford.
“For us, it was about making a place here for 350 people and the wider population,” he recalls. “I knew the scale of Wexford, how its streets felt as I walked down them and also knew that the population of this building was going to be extracted from the town. That drove a lot of the ideas about the character of its central space.” Conceived as a “civic forum”, this elongated, double-height space could even be seen as a street, lined by six blocks housing different departments. Finance, which collects motor tax, was deliberately placed at the end, so that the motorists going to this most-visited department would get some sense of its grandeur.
On the day of our visit, we saw a man with a Pomeranian dog on a lead walking the full length of this “street” as if it were, indeed, a street. The space was also intended to provide a venue for civic ceremonies and other gatherings; client representative Matt O’Connor would love to see it being used for choral recitals.
Certainly, no private sector developer would pay for such a vast circulation area, paved in 1,200 x 1,200mm blue limestone flags and with its high walls clad in limestone panels, hung vertically for effect. Neither would a developer have countenanced Lee’s deep cantilevers over the departmental public counters.
There is no doubt that the building has a calmness, a sense of order to it. The blue limestone from Carlow, with its “serena” finish, gives the central space great dignity. Less impressive is the rather bare council chamber, glazed on two sides, which is accessed from a very grand staircase made from European oak.
The entrance is via an “open mouth” at the corner, with the floors above cantilevered to highlight it. Visitors enter through a long “ante-room” before encountering the central space. Meeting rooms are arranged to face onto this space, “offering the public glimpses of departmental activity”, as Lee says.
Upstairs, away from the public gaze, staff work in bright, naturally ventilated, open-plan offices (except for the senior officials, who all have their own) enjoying views out over the Slaney or into planted internal courtyards, with shallow pools.
There is also an expansive roof terrace, outside the top-floor staff canteen.
Robin Lee likens the deep, double-skin glazed facade to “a vitrine, a glass case containing multiple things, multiple experiences within a single envelope”. His idea was that this would reflect the “common endeavour” of an organisation, now finally unified, as well as encapsulating openness and transparency.
“If it was a corporate office building, it might be about power. But this seemed to be a valid aspiration,” he says. By arranging the offices in “blocks encrusted in limestone, looking into courtyards, where staff could have a sense of containment”, he was “playing a game between openness, security, hierarchy – all those things”.
The double-skin facade, central to its environmental agenda, was developed in collaboration with engineers Buro Happold. Not only does it provide protection on what is a very exposed site, but it also regulates the interior temperature – cooling the building in the summer and creating an insulating layer during the winter.
The facade is treated uniformly to “create a sheer envelope that gives the building a single, coherent identity and scale appropriate to its civic status”, as Lee says. Behind it is an array of windows at different levels, both large and small, with some recessed, and a stainless steel inscription of the council’s name in Irish and English.
Car parking is arranged in five terraces at the rear, enclosed by white concrete walls, and there’s one space for every staff member. As with other new local government headquarters, such liberal provision for cars tends to offset the gains of pursuing a “green agenda” for the building itself to reduce its carbon footprint.
Nonetheless, it would be difficult to disagree with Shane O’Toole’s verdict that the civic offices building programme of the past 15 years or so “is the most significant body of work in Irish architecture since the redevelopment of Temple Bar in Dublin in the 1990s”. Wexford is now part of this welcome legacy of the boom years.
Too busy for Main Street
GOREY, the north-Wexford town that exploded during the boom, has finally acquired a new civic centre, with a very well-used library, a courthouse, county council offices, a vocational education building and some social housing.
Built for €23 million, it was designed by Belfast architects Hall Black Douglas to form a new “space for everyone to share” – as director Stephen Douglas put it – in a backland area off The Avenue, not far from the town’s railway station and busy Main Street.
Next door is Gorey Shopping Centre, which is linked to the new public space from its upper level at the rear, with a sign on top. But whereas the shopping centre is the usual dressed-up shed, the civic centre is characterised by perhaps too many architectural flourishes.
There’s a suspended granite-clad wall dropping from the flat roof of the courthouse, with bubbly fountains in a pool beneath, pre-patinated copper cladding on the front of the council offices and an inverted angular wall at the end of the library with large cut-out glazing.
The big windows give fine views of Christ Church, while Gorey’s Catholic church is visible from the council chamber where town and county council committee meetings are held; it projects like a box from the copper-clad facade. There’s just too much going on here.
Some 500 people per day use the library, including many children and teenagers studying after school; it’s also open late two nights a week to cater for commuters. Librarian Hazel Percival says all the users, “from eight to 80”, like the brightness of its double-height space.
The plaza, with its glass balustrades, stainless steel handrails and limestone paving, is physically removed from The Avenue by two vacant sites, which were meant to be developed as apartments. One site is to be laid out as a pocket park and the other for car parking.
A public realm strategy for Gorey envisages a new link between the civic centre and the old Market House, opening up its arcade and creating a route through the backlands. But the proposal to put a chicane in front will visually disrupt the straight line of Main Street. – Frank McDonald
