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AHGI Headquarters - Mc Cullough Mulvin Architects
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The competition was set up by the Department of the Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, AHGI, and run through the OPW as a two-stage process in 2000; McCullough Mulvin's entry was one of the final six. The brief was for a new Headquarters for the Department (as it then was) on the site adjacent to the Phoenix Park entrance - actually a river valley with a steep slope on both sides, one running up to Gandon's Department of Defence building. It was important that views of that building would be kept open. The site location at the boundary of the city opened up issues about its 'edge' status- the implication of introducing the country to the city etc.- in a sense the project was about the poetic possibility of representing that dammed-up power of open landscape stopped short of the tissue of city streets- like the lava flow from Etna in the streets of Catania. The building remains an extension to the landscape, extending the existing hill and filling and modelling the valley it inhabits; it fits the site yet has its own integrity of form, the two wings around an entrance space -the main one containing a series of narrow slit courtyards. The external spaces are buried- negative space- below the new ground level. The form of the roof over was folding and moving, gradually rising and returning to the summit like unfolded paper. This form is pinned by four towers- glazed lift shafts, water tanks and natural ventilation flues. The roof garden evolved into a landscape of routes, sculpture, habitats, fields planted with rare species of grain around the canteen and creche.