print this article | 
e-mail this article
comment 
Gleneagles Community Centre The Gwinnett Environmental and Heritage Center International Criminal Court San Jose City Hall Byron G. Rogers U.S. Courthouse U.S. Post Office and Courthouse Brooklyn U.S. Census Bureau Limerick County Council Redmond City Hall
Limerick County Council Headquarters
Bucholz McEvoy Architects creates a contemporary, green county seat in the suburbs near one of the Emerald Isle’s largest cities.
The Limerick County Council Headquarters belongs to an impressive series of new local government buildings erected throughout the Emerald Isle during the past decade, structures that gather council offices together, for the first time, in signature buildings. It was designed by the American/Irish duo Merritt Bucholz and Karen McEvoy. This husband-and-wife team established their practice in Dublin after winning a competition to design Fingal County Hall [record, August 2001, page 98]. Just before the completion of that, their first building, Bucholz McEvoy Architects was awarded the Limerick commission through an interview process.
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.
Limerick’s new county hall gathers together nearly 300 local government officials working in nine departments that were previously scattered across several locations. In addition, the building provides a council chamber for 29 locally elected representatives. Computerization, increasing informality, and a less homogenous society suggested a more open architecture than in the past. Located in Dooradoyle, a suburb of Limerick, the County Headquarters is surrounded by the vast parking lot of a shopping center, across a busy road from tract houses. Like many places in Ireland, the site was rural until 15 years of the Celtic Tiger’s rapid economic growth transformed it. Bucholz McEvoy considered its project in the context of this evolving landscape. The resulting design focuses at the scale of both the suburban context and that of individual workstations. Natural ventilation, lighting, and climate control all aim for new environmental standards in Irish governmental architecture.
The architects set the bulk of the building back from the road, dividing the interstitial ground into parallel strips. Alternatively landscaped or used for parking, these striations tilt up and down, partially concealing the automobiles within this new
terrain. A pierlike entry pavilion juts toward the road from the building’s primary mass; an adjacent volume, clad in terra-cotta tiles, houses the council chamber at the southernmost corner of the site.
Rising from its bipartite base, the bulk of the council headquarters presents itself as a four-story, concrete-framed structure clad in an expansive glass curtain wall. Facing southwest, the upper three floors are screened by an external assemblage of steel and laminated Scots pine that folds, in plan, to protect the interior from summer heat and solar glare. The facade system tilts inward so that the sky is reflected in unexpected ways; it rests, above, on steel prongs whose shape inspired Bucholz to nickname them “hockey sticks.”
Formal name of project:
Limerick County Council Headquarters
Location:
Dooradoyle, Ireland
Gross square footage:
76,424 sq. ft.
Total construction cost: $30.9 million
Completion date: September 2003
Owner:
Limerick County Council
Architect:
Bucholz McEvoy Architects
Unit C Mountpleasant Industrial Estate
Upper Mountpleasant Avenue
Rathmines, Dublin 6, Ireland
353-1-496-6340 tel.
353-1-496-6341 fax
About the people and products behind this project
Subscribe to Get Free Architectural Record newsletter | Architectural Record in print | Back Issues | Manage your subscription | Get Architectural Record digitally
Reader Comments:
