Welcome to RIAI “Public Choice Award” 2010
The Public Choice Award is an important part of the RIAI Annual Irish Architecture Awards. The public are invited to vote for their favourite building from the 55 on this year's shortlist. The building which receives the most votes, will be the winner. Voting closes on Friday 18 June.
The Public Choice Award will be announced on 21 June 2010 as one of the RIAI Irish Architecture Awards 2010.
2010 Public Choice Award Shortlist:
NickKane-150x100.jpg)
Project: Bord Gáis Above Ground Installation
Architect: John McLaughlin, Dublin Docklands Development Authority
Project: Engineering & Informatics Building, Athlone IT
Architect: McCullough Mulvin Architects
Project: Heberton - Fatima Mansions Regeneration
Architect: Anthony Reddy Assoc / Metropolitan Work Shop
-150x100.jpg)
Project: Two Sites - Two Clients - Two Architects
Architect: Robin Mandal Architects and Fitzpatrick & Mays
1 Strawberry Hill, Sunday Well
Jack Coughlan Associates
A reinforced concrete box clad externally in timber defines this house. The site is on a hill in the inner suburban area of Sundays Well, with Strawberry Hill forming the eastern boundary. The elevated site has outstanding southern views across the Lee Valley to the University and the city beyond.
107 Rinsgend Park
Boyd Cody Architects
The project involved the re-planning and refurbishment of the existing house and the construction of a new addition to the rear. The ‘cube’ holds the master en-suite bedroom at first floor with a view to the park and the kitchen at ground floor has a view to the river. The ‘tube’ accommodates the dining area at ground floor and the staircase leading from the hall to the first floor landing.
12 Temple Villas
Ailtireacht
The new extension is bright and connects the house to its surroundings. The basement, though fully underground feels like part of the garden. The extension is elegant and timeless.
31 Carysfort Road, Dalkey
ODOS Architects
Originally No. 31 Carysfort Road was a mid-terrace, one bedroom dwelling, with a single storey rear return and small back garden. The existing dwelling has been refurbished and the connection between living areas and external space has been improved while providing as much extra floor space as possible.
4 Harcourt Terrace
Boyd Cody Architects
No 4 plays an important role in one of the finest Regency set pieces in Dublin. In this structure, a small kitchen and garage were discovered and it was out of these two spaces that a new kitchen and family room were created.
4 Mastmaker Road
Brady Mallalieu Architects
The project contains 199 homes contained in two towers and five low rise buildings organized around two south facing courtyards. Integrated into the project are a cafe/retail space and a community centre with allotments and rooftop sports pitch. The building is connected to the nearby Barkantine Estate Combined Heat and Power network and includes greenwalls, bird boxes, bat boxes, insect bricks and biodiversity roofs which contribute to its ‘Very Good’ EcoHomes rating.
A Wall for the Queen
Denis Byrne Architects
Queen Victoria's visit to Dublin in April 1900 caused an outbreak of public and private decoration. The side wall at 33 Gardiner Street Lower, nobly modelled in the then-fashionable Roman cement, is a reminder of that time. Seriously deteriorated by the early 2000s it has now been restored to commemorate a private gift to public grandeur. The new building volume was carefully designed, to provide a symmetrical completion to the internal courtyard and to recede from the line of the retained Queen’s wall.
NickKane-660x480.jpg)
Alzheimer's Respite Centre
Niall McLaughlin Architects
The Centre is built in an 18th century walled kitchen garden. The building has been placed to frame views of new garden spaces created between the new construction and the old enclosure. Each garden is orientated in a different direction and intended to be experienced at different times of the day. Users can move around rooms in the interior like a clock, experiencing change throughout their daily journey. There are courtyards, orchards, allotments and lawns.
An Gaeláras
O'Donnell and Tuomey
An Gaeláras was designed as the Irish Language Cultural Centre in the city of Derry and designed for public life and community involvement. The landlocked site is contained on three sides with one narrow end facing the street. A continuous terrazzo floor connects the footpath to the building interior, minimising the barrier between outside and in.
Architects Studio, Pearse Street
Henry J Lyons Architects
The building accommodates the design studios of a prominent architectural practice, within a new 6 storey building which incorporates a terrace of Georgian buildings organised around a new atrium. This atrium provides clear articulation between the refurbished protected structures and the modern studios, while bringing light and ventilation into the heart of the building.
Athlone Army Memorial
Keith Williams Architect
Custume Barracks in Athlone is the headquarters of the Western Brigade. The new Army Memorial, situated at the base of Athlone Castle's walls with their own proud 800 year military history, provides a powerful backdrop for the new monument, erected in memory of soldiers of the Brigade who have died in action on missions abroad.
Bord Gáis Above Ground Installation
John McLaughlin, Dublin Docklands Development Authority
The installation is a gas pressure reducing station which transforms the national network distribution pressure of 19 Bar to the area network distribution pressure of 4 Bar. The station is highly ventilated through the sides of the building and is located in the open space of the campshire on the Liffey quayside to minimise risk. It was designed in collaboration with an artist called Martin Richman.
Burlington Plaza
HKR Architects
The scheme is comprised of two office buildings, Plaza 1 and 2 which are linked at lower ground by a landscaped podium garden with basement level below. Both buildings are set in a shared plaza at street level that provides a high quality arrival space for both buildings and allows views down into the sunken garden space.
COMMON GROUND
GKMP Architects Ltd.
The project comprises the reconfiguration of the urban spaces around Kilkenny Castle to consolidate their public function. It is a constructed landscape; it makes background rather than building-as-object, a continuous condition in which old and new elements and materials combine to underscore diverse individual and collective inhabitation.
Civic Precinct - Courthouse, Area Office, Limerick
ABK Architects
This Civic project, is intended to reinvigorate the social and cultural life of the market-town of Kilmallock, by concentrating a series of key social functions - a District Court, a Branch Library and Local Area Office, so as to form a new Civic Precinct. The Library and Local Area Office form a single entity which is set back to maintain the building line of the town and defers to the existing workhouse building which was refurbished and extended to form the third public element, the courthouse.
Community House
EDEN Architects
This housing for a charity is located in an architectural conservation area and replaced a house subdivided into bedsits. The ethos of the charity is to encourage independent living and support among tenants. Each tenant has their own independent apartment separated and connected by the central access hall and staircase.
Cork County Library HQ
Shay Cleary Architects
The library is phase two of the Cork County Council Civic Campus. It is the headquarters for a 22 branch county wide network of local libraries and provides administrative offices and a large book processing facility for Cork.
Doctor's Surgery & Primary Care Centre
MacGabhann Architects
This consists of a fit out of a speculative office building with a deep plan, but with a central high-level skylight. It was decided to locate the patient waiting area along the full height glazing to the perimeter, so that waiting patients benefit from natural light and the distracting views over the town. The reception counters and administration offices are therefore located in the centre of the plan and receive natural light from the central skylight.
Dunshaughlin Pastoral Centre
McGarry Ní Éanaigh Architects
The site, Main Street (N3) Dunshaughlin accommodated St Seachnaill's Church, parochial house and carpark. The new Pastoral Centre was positioned compositionally as 'binder' between existing unrelated buildings and as new 'destination'. The pedestrian route created from Main Street, terminating in the Pastoral Centre, slipped between church and house. Congregations emerge onto it, gathering into the Centre for refreshments after Mass.
Eircom HQ, Heuston South Quarter
Anthony Reddy Associates
The building consists simply of 3 main office plates of 15.0m depth over 6 floors on each side of a central atrium street. The office plates are separated by “service zones”, cores containing lifts, escape stairs, toilets, vertical risers, comms rooms with tea stations and print stations located closest to the main circulation routes and bridges. The company’s move from cellularisation and partial open plan to a full open plan working environment has been well received by staff and management.
Engineering & Informatics Building, Athlone IT
McCullough Mulvin Architects
The development comprises six blocks of three storeys with a series of internal and external courtyards. The accommodation consists of classrooms, lecture theatre, offices and ancillary functions appropriate to a modern school of Engineering. The Engineering and Informatics Building incorporates facilities for six departments within an environmentally responsive envelope achieved through the exploitation of orientation and materials.
FLITCH
Donaghy & Dimond Architects
This project refurbished a late Edwardian House, opening it to the garden by redistributing elements of accommodation to embrace the outdoor space and draw the outside in. The work is more intension than extension, the floor area is reduced while the garden is extended into the living areas. A new edge is made which wanders from one party wall to the other making an indented envelope stepping inside and out catching the sun as it passes through the day.
Farmhouse, Ballymahon
ODOS Architects
A collection of 18th century farm buildings sit central to woodlands outside Ballymahon, Co. Longford. The existing buildings originally formed three sides of a courtyard with an old crumbling stone wall completing the courtyard. A new single storey wing replaces the old wall and provides open plan living kitchen and dining accommodation.
Father Collins Park
MCO Projects / ArArq Ireland
Father Collins Park is a 55 acre contemporary urban park at the centre of a new urban quarter called Dublin’s North Fringe. Father Collins Park is the first self-sustaining park in Ireland with the vast majority of the power requirements for public lighting, security, maintenance vehicles and water features being generated on site by 5 turbines. The project will take a lead in Ireland for demonstrating the integration of sustainable technologies into the design of public spaces.
Heberton - Fatima Mansions Regeneration
Anthony Reddy Assoc / Metropolitan Work Shop
Located close to the city centre, the regeneration of the former Fatima Mansions, integrates 505 residential units of mixed tenure, open space, leisure, community, and retail into the locality and has developed strong physical and spiritual links with the bustling city centre of Dublin.
Holiday House, Hawkesbury River
Lindsay Johnston Architect
This house is only accessible by boat and is located on a steep promontory on the Hawkesbury River, 40km north of Sydney. The climate is coastal temperate Australian with highs of 38˚C and lows of 8˚C. It is a holiday house with living/dining/kitchen overlooking the waterfront with four self contained bedrooms accessed from an open veranda, each with a view of the river from the bed.
Hollowed Out
Lawrence and Long
This terraced Victorian house on a steeply sloping site is extended into an earthen bank at the side. The new accommodation connects to the house at the lower levels so that the new roof can be reclaimed as outdoor space, connecting at first floor level.
House - Garden - Graft
Donaghy & Dimond Architects
This project re-inhabits and rehabilitates a protected 19th century end of terrace house and garden to create a family home oriented to the garden. The garden extends on to new green roofs. The roof of the original house drains via the new study roof and garden wall to a cistern containing fish and watering the south-west facing vegetable plot stretching to the mature apple tree and mews beyond.
House 1 + House 2
Taka Architects
These two new homes house two generations of the same family (a renovated Victorian house for the parents sharing a rear garden with a new mews house for one of their daughters). The grown-up family had recently moved out of their long-term family home and wanted these new houses to maintain some sense of continuity with their former lives. The memories of the family are used as a conscious architectural driver throughout both houses. Typical domestic objects are distorted in material and scale to form a psychological landscape specific to the occupants.
House by the Paddock
Garbhan Doran Architects
The design attempts to provide a dwelling in character with its surroundings by utilising its environment and applying a relatively traditional agricultural building language in a modern architectural style.
Inverted House
Sarah Heery
This house is a city cottage, a familiar part of Dublin's late 19th century housing stock. Accessed directly from the street, with a yard to the rear a mere 2 metres deep to extend into, a new response was required for the re-working of this house type. The existing house which was 35 sq m is now a house of 68 sq m. The previously unusable rooms have been replaced with two bedrooms and a spacious flexible living/dining area and courtyard.
LEAP - Training and Rehabilitation Building
Meme Architecture
Delta Centre, Carlow provides services to adults with learning disabilities. The new training building, LEAP, provides additional accommodation for the centre whilst simultaneously addressing strategic issues of access and hierarchy on the site. Although conceived as a stand alone facility, LEAP is also linked physically to existing buildings by a covered ramped walkway and a new landscaped space.
Lios na nÓg
A&D Wejchert & Partners
This project involved renovating and extending Cullenswood House to accommodate an 8 classroom Primary School. The site for the project is very small and so the challenge was to provide additional accommodation without compromising the existing listed structure. Architecturally it was decided that the extensions would be designed in a contemporary manner while the existing building was renovated back to its former glory insofar as was possible.
Lucky Lane
A2 Architects
Two terraced mews houses, and a further two under construction, mark the beginnings of a new street on an existing lane in Stoneybatter, Dublin. In all, ten identical terraced houses have so far been granted permission on the lane.
Moire Moire Moire
ODOS Architects
The site for these three mews dwellings is located on an industrial laneway in Dublin 8, previously devoid of domestic life. This industrial setting was instrumental in informing the architectural language of these dwellings.
Northern Exposure
Eden Architects
The extension was built as one space inserted under the existing return and is separated from the main house by a utility room and external yard with access to the basement. Internally it is subdivided into a larger dining-kitchen space and a smaller playroom space by a non structural demountable partition and sliding doors whose design maintains the sense of a unified space along the window edges.
One Grand Parade
OMS Architects
This new build office development replaces a demolished 1970s building. The building adjoins Charlemont LUAS station along the Grand Canal at the junction of Charlemount Bridge. The building is, from a client's perspective, striking, imaginative, very well finished and maximises the use of the site.
Opera Lane, Cork
Project Architects
This development comprises a triple height retail precinct with 3 storeys of residential accommodation above with lower ground and basement below. The development covers two city centre blocks with a new pedestrian street, Opera Lane, at its centre. This street links the city's main shopping precinct at Patrick Street with the cultural and historical area of Emmett Place.
Pearse Street Primary Care Centre
A&D Wejchert & Partners
This design and construction consists of a 3 storey Health Centre, serving the local community based in the Pearse Street inner city area. The building caters for 3 General Practitioners, various therapy clinics and other functions, as well as operating as a base for district nurses
Redevelopment of Newry Railway Station
Robinson McIlwaine Architects
Newry was officially granted 'City' status in 2002. The brief for this redevelopment included a new, purpose built railway station, with platform upgrades and a 300 space 'Park and Ride' facility.
Residential Development, Santry Demesne
DTA Architects
This development provides 75 social and affordable dwellings for Fingal County Council. With the use of robust materials the final design provides comfortable, low energy, low maintenance housing of high architectural quality with quality public and private open space and a natural sense of security and community. Residents started to move into the scheme in early 2010. Both Fingal County Council and the residents are very happy with the finished scheme.
Rockfield, Co. Meath
Consarc Design Group
Rockfield is a nine bay, three storey over cellar, 18th century country house, with a courtyard to the rear, stables and a walled garden. William Murray exhibited designs for the alterations at Rockfield at the RHA in 1841. These included reordering the front facade and the creation of a library at first floor level. The works required re-roofing of the main house, the stables and out houses.
Rush Library
McCullough Mulvin Architects
St Maur's Church dominates the village green on the western edge of the town of Rush. The local authority commissioned the architects to transform the church into the town library The work combined a careful investigation and conservation of the existing structure with a particular concern for the rescue of ordinary materials while making a distinctive intervention to hold the new facilities.
Sancton Wood Building
MV Cullinan Architects
The Sancton Wood Building occupies part of a redevelopment masterplan and consists of five buildings with 92 apartments of various type and layout. The apartments are dual aspect and employ mechanical heat recovery systems for heating and cooling.
Sandford Park Multipurpose Hall
DTA Architects
The brief was to provide a multipurpose hall for use by various school departments including; sport, music, recitals, theatrical performance, examinations, assembly and ancillary presentations. The hall was delivered to the client on budget and on programme and is enjoyed by both staff and students.
-660x480.jpg)
Shoreline House, Glengarriff
Wigham McGrath & Partners
To minimise this building's impact on this site, it was divided into three, one room deep blocks overlapping to suit views, orientation and sunlight, while recognising the north easterly aspect.
Sliabh Bán Housing
DTA Architects
The development comprises 54 mixed tenure residential units for Galway City Council on the periphery of an existing and well-established suburban community. The site is located 4km from Galway City on a steep northwest facing slope overlooking Ballybrit racecourse and the mountains of Co. Clare.
St. Malachy's Church, Belfast
Consarc Design Group
The construction of Saint Malachy’s Church in Belfast began in 1841 with the intention for it to be the Cathedral Church of the Diocese of Down and Connor. The grand Cathedral was remodelled to serve as the local Church and it was dedicated in 1844. Saint Malachy’s is regarded as one of the finest examples of late Georgian – Tudor Revival churches in Ireland, and is, perhaps, best known for its fan vaulted ceiling which is inspired by the Henry VII Chapel [the Lady Chapel] in Westminster Abbey. The church is Grade A listed by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency.
St. Patrick's Place
Scott Tallon Walker Architects
Located on a prominently elevated Victorian terrace to the north side of Cork City, this mixed use development presents a confident modern design, in harmony with surrounding heritage, avoiding a pastiche solution commonly adopted in such a context. With careful selection of materials, crafted detailing and sympathetic proportion, it presents a well considered composition to both Wellington Road and the lower city wide context to the south. Providing quality showroom, office and living accommodation and is a welcome addition to this historic part of Cork City.
The Criminal Courts of Justice
Henry J Lyons Architects
The Criminal Courts of Justice is the largest courts project undertaken in Ireland for over 200 years. Located at the eastern tip of the Phoenix Park, its siting continues the tradition of placing public buildings within sight of the Liffey. The circular form gives equal weight to both city and park creating a more definitive threshold to both.
The Ormond Building
DMOD Architects
The Ormond building occupies a prominent, but long-derelict island site, on Ormond Quay close to the Four Courts and opposite Dublin City Council Civic Offices. From the clients perspective the architects have produced a wonderful addition to the city quays.
Two Sites - Two Clients - Two Architects
Robin Mandal Architects and Fitzpatrick & Mays
Two sites, two clients, two architects, two builders with one palette of materials, one shared sensibility, one spirit of cooperation, one forgotten corner of the city transformed. The houses share access, services, foundations, geothermal bores, party walls and a palette of materials. Each was designed independently, responding specifically to its brief, location, the vagaries of planning and needs of its clients and architects.
VISUAL - Centre for Contemporary Art
Terry Pawson Architects
VISUAL – Centre for Contemporary Art and The George Bernard Shaw Theatre brings together into one building a 350 seat theatre with 5 art galleries specifically designed to accommodate large art works that otherwise could not be shown in Ireland due to their scale. The new building is set within the grounds of St Patrick's College in the centre of Carlow, facing onto an open green quadrangle that is shared by the College as well as the City Cathedral.
Westmeath County Buildings and Library
Bucholz McEvoy Architects
Westmeath County Council Headquarters is a low-energy, civic building located at the heart of an archaeological site, where a 12th century castle and subsequently a gaol once stood. It is an open and transparent expression of Local Government, a building of public service which is carefully woven into its historic context.
Works to a 1930s House
CAST Architecture
The idea for the project was to work only within the existing site dimension and building fabric, to build or add nothing, to find the hidden spaces and to make those spaces work better for contemporary life. A greater sense of space was encouraged by taking down walls, manipulating existing openings, allowing more light to fall on walls and floor, creating long and diagonal views, making connections between family rooms feel easier and more fluid.
