Dublin - Architecture & Urban Design
P. Anthony Reddy

A RENEWED CITY
A visitor to Dublin in 1999 who travelled through its inner city i.e. the area bounded by the Royal and Grand Canals, could not fail to note the fundamental changes which have overtaken the city in recent years.

A city whose image has been portrayed, in literature and the press, as one of desolation and the gradual loss of its architectural heritage, has begun a process of regeneration. After generations of debate, frustrated plans and little significant activity, Dublin has become a city of cranes, building machinery and construction sites fuelled by the economic demands of the Celtic Tiger.

Not since the end of the golden age for the eighteenth century when the formation of the city's Georgian squares and streets with their urban terraces to the south of the River Liffey and Gandon's masterpieces, the Custom House and the Four Courts on the north of the river formed a prototypical model of urban classicism, has Dublin witnessed such an intense period of urban expansion and development.

When the Duke of Ormonde established Dublin as the ceremonial capital of Ireland in 1662 he established a tradition of building public works of grandeur which gives the city its architectural character. The influence of his time in Paris is evident in particular in the French neo-classicism of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham which he commissioned. The dominant model of subsequent ascendancy building was Palladian neo-classicism characterised by spareness and simplicity.

This process of adopting external models for its architecture and urban form establishes Dublin as a unique northern European city with its layering of Gaelic, Viking, Norman and Anglo-Saxon cultural influences.

The Act of Union of 1800 marked the beginning of the end to this activity. With the exception of the work of the Wide Streets Commissioners which continued until 1841 opening up new avenues through the existing urban fabric in order to link public buildings, there was a gradual decline in the city's development.

The Victorian era saw the exodus of the aristocracy to London and the onset of the middle classes to the fashionable suburbs of Dalkey, Killiney and later with tramways in the 1870s to the inner suburbs of Rathmines, Drumcondra, Glasnevin and Clontarf. The inner city was inhabited by the poor with over a third of the population living in dilapidated tenement accommodation.