this year's model

Matthew Beattie

Fingal County Hall, Swords Bucholz McEvoy Architects [in association with BDP]

The most successful achievements in sustainability possess the concentrated impact of clear intentions made elegantly manifest. The elemental precepts underlying sustainable design do not literally translate into an easily disseminated and replicable architectural style but rather, by their very nature, constitute a conceptual template which informed by a sensitivity to local conditions can guide the design process towards not just energy efficiency but a profound and integral connection to place. Consequently, the wider application of sustainable design principles requires thoughtful, innovative models that, by force of example, clearly demonstrate both their efficacy and the potential for sustainability to firmly ground the practice of architecture.

In the recently completed Fingal County Hall [by Bucholz McEvoy Architects in association with BDP] there is much convincing evidence that sustainable design principles served not merely to impose limits on the scope of architectural possibility but rather inspired the design process from its inception.

The sculpturally contoured soffit of a precast slab, to take one notable example, extends an invitation for daylight to be gently diffused, augmented when necessary by an integrated uplight, and evenly distributed. In a sophisticated fusion of the poetic and pragmatic, the allied desires to both exploit the moderating influence of exposed thermal mass and to provide open plan office space with ambient natural light are given clear and robust form.

Extending an analysis of the daylighting strategy to the outside of the building envelope, however, the external elements highly articulated brise-soleil cum light shelves appear brittle by comparison. The cumulative impression conveyed by the building's multiple fa�ades incorporating an array of cladding systems and variations on applied components is more of a highly technology-reliant building privileging tectonic expression than a manifestation of sustainable design principles.

This tendency towards figurative expression in the building's external envelope seems related to the means through which the design attempts to fulfil its civic role and, by extension, to engage with its immediate context.

These efforts are concentrated in the dominant element in the complex a tall, thin bar linking the three rear office blocks whose long facade presents a concave glass curve to the main street of Swords. This arc, in addition to facilitating the preservation of mature trees that screen the building from the street, is intended to formalise a relationship between Fingal County Hall and the adjacent castle and through this gesture, to create a public plaza.

At present, this plaza remains largely hypothetical, accentuating the sense of placelessness that dominates the town centre of Swords and feeling more like a void pushing the building to its periphery than a defined public space marking a symbolic centre the forces at work centrifugal rather than centripetal.

The backdrop to this geometric figure is furnished by a 32m-long by 18m high glass curtain wall, braced against the elements by a cats-cradle of tensioned steel cables and floating oak spars. Ostensibly intended to embody the democratic transparency of local government, the glass wall while an impressive feat of engineering seems more reflective of ambitions to economic status arguably incompatible with the admirable intentions manifest at the core of the complex. In the final analysis, this apparent conflict between sustainable intention and the expression of civic ambition, principally enacted in the articulation of the facade, threatens to compromise the integral clarity demonstrated elsewhere in the design.

Fingal County Hall represents an accomplished instance of sustainable design in Ireland, and as such, both merits and rewards close study. Given its conflicting objectives, however, one questions whether it transcends its immediate mandate to constitute a clear model of sustainable best practice, one whose lessons might instructively serve to inspire standard practice to aim for a higher measure of environmental accountability. Ultimately, it remains to be seen if Fingal County Hall can demonstrate the capacity to exert the lasting and meaningful influence through which this year's model becomes future precedent.

Matthew Beattie is an architect and is currently working with Grafton Architects.
photographs Michael Mescal, first-year architecture, ucd.