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Scale & Façade in County Limerick - Mícheál de Siún

The September AAI site visit to two schemes in Co. Limerick albeit by happenstance, juxtaposed two very different schemes, operating at two very different scales, with very different architectural contexts. The first holding council on the edge of a city fringe shopping centre, was Bucholz McEvoy's County Hall at Dooradoyle. The other lost in a Co. Limerick tidy town was O'Donnell Tuomey's Social Housing scheme in Galbally near the Tipperary border. While intrinsically different in brief, ambition, scale and context both schemes invested their greatest attention and energy in the construction and crafting of the Façade.

Bucholz McEvoy's Limerick County Hall, a sequel to their much acclaimed County Hall at Fingal, operates on a very simple planometric diagram. A North South orientated rectangle, with the council chamber expressed separately facing the main approach. Open plan offices view over a large volume atrium space running the full length of the rectangle's western façade. This space operating at ground level is intended to afford easy pedestrian links through the building from its current and future surroundings, including the adjacent Limerick County Library and later commercial developments. Indeed maintaining an openness and ease of access analogous to a shopping mall was congruent with the underlying concept of an open democratic civic institution.