RIAI | Irish Architecture Awards

Citation

Eastern (over €300,000)

A courageous project, taking an existing building of great presence and using muscular, modern and supremely well considered interventions to adapt and enliven it.

Architects Comment
The new works are the result of an open competition held by the Office of Public Works in 1996. They comprise a new entrance podium, and exhibition area within the castle vaults and a new stairway to the upper level of the keep.

The new podium re-orientates the entrance to the keep towards the main street in Maynooth. It is built from ‘Harvest Gold’ granite on a concrete base, with bead blasted stainless steel handrails and railings.

The two vaults at the base of the keep will house an exhibition describing the history of the Fitzgerald family and the castle itself. The display is to be hung on granite standing stones, which are cantilevered vertically from the floor. The stones are generally 2650mm high x 1700mm wide by 110mm thick, honed on the front and gables and bush hammered on the back. They are lit from the top by halogen lamps housed in polished stainless steel fittings. The same granite is used on the floor of the exhibition area with granite sets completing the floor where it abuts the castle walls. The four window openings are re-formed with granite cills and perforated copper screens.

The first floor is reached by a new concrete staircase, enclosed at the upper level within a glass, copper and stainless steel structure. It is intended that the upper levels will be developed further as a subsequent phase, as was proposed in the competition entry which envisaged a new roof enclosing the upper levels and reached by a steel staircase.

Client Comment
The interest in ancient monuments is a comparatively recent one. They were seen as a convenient quarry for building stone, as site to be treated with superstitious caution or as relics of a barbaric age best forgotten.

Today we talk in terms of national heritage, tourism potential or whatever. But the view of the great Victorian, William Morris, captures best the approach of the conservation movement. At the time he was protesting against what he regarded as the destruction of many ancient buildings by the restoration boom of the period. Our ancient architecture, he wrote ‘bears witness to the development of man’s ideas, to the continuity of history, and, in so doing, affords never-ceasing instruction, nay education, to the passing generations, not only telling us what were the aspirations of men passed away, but also what he may hope for in time to come’. The implication of this was, as he put it, that we are ‘only trustees for those that come after us’. The over-restored building loses its history…its ‘history has become a book from which the pictures have been torn’.

The objective of this project was to provide a facility and attraction for the town while respecting the history and development of the castle.

Willy Cumming, Senior Architect,

Dúchas The Heritage Service