Áras Chill Dara
Nass, Ireland
Heneghan.Peng.Architects

Heneghan.peng, with Arthur Gibney & Partners, creates a new Irish Modernist icon, sensitive to the boundary between city and country.

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By Raymund Ryan

Áras Chill Dara represents the latest in an impressive series of county halls built across the Irish Republic during the past decade. The Irish word áras can denote both a formal edifice, such as Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of Ireland’s president, or simply a large building, such as Busáras, Dublin’s central bus station completed by architect Michael Scott in 1953 and one of the nation’s few iconic Modernist structures. Áras Chill Dara aims for its own iconic presence, one that communicates a newly confident political and civic culture.

Chill Dara, or Kildare, was a county long known for agriculture and horse racing but now manifests the growth of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy. The highway connecting Naas, the county seat, to Dublin sprouts high-tech office parks—signs that the capital city is engulfing farmland and smaller satellite towns. Áras Chill Dara sits slightly removed from Naas’s main thoroughfare, adjacent to a former British military barracks, where new apartments and hotels ring the older core.

Consolidating both county and town authorities, the building contains a chamber for the County Council as well as offices for more than 400 civil servants. The competition brief requested a structure that displays a clearly urban presence, as well as a sense of invitation toward the public. At the western edge of the site, a tower left over from the barracks, known as the lantern building, will be renovated for cultural uses as part of a new civic park and gardens.

Profiled in record’s 2003 Design Vanguard, the Hiberno-Taiwanese architects Róisín Heneghan and Shih-Fu Peng met as graduate students at Harvard and relocated to Dublin after winning the Kildare competition in 2000. They worked with associate designer Arthur Gibney & Partners on this project.

Áras Chill Dara rises from a gently tiered lawn as two wings tethered by a tall, transparent umbilical link. This is its external ideogram or iconic image: two bars of pristine office space tilting outward, not quite parallel to each other and shunted slightly in plan. The designers set the two bars with a height difference of half a story between them: lower to the east, where the main entryway extends to the public street, higher at the west, level with a parking lot.

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Formal name of project:
Áras Chill Dara

Location:
Nass, Ireland

Gross square footage:
121,632 sq. ft.

Total Construction Cost:
$55.7 million

Owner:
Kildare County Council and Naas Town Council

Architect:
Heneghan.Peng.Architects
Clarendon House
33-37 Clarendon Street
Dublin 2, Ireland
353-671-4077 tel.
hparc.com

In association with
Arthur Gibney & Partners
20 Harcourt St.
Dublin 2, Ireland
353-478-4300 tel.
353-475-2092 fax
www.agparchitects.ie

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