Happy Anniversary Dublin Studio

David Brennan

Head of Dublin Studio The Dublin studio has been a busy design hub for half of our 60 year history. As a cosmopolitan and progressive European capital it has been a terrific base to grow an interdisciplinary team of architects, urbanists and engineers connected to Ireland’s culture and identity.

We are placemakers; quite literally, creating people centred neighbourhoods with connected urban spaces and new green infrastructure for communities to enjoy - at city, town and village scale. One of our largest projects to date is Bonham Quay in Galway – the precursor to Augustine Hill - which together make up a new waterfront community reconnecting the historic city with its maritime setting. Dockside creative workspace, city centre living (including our tallest building yet) and a series of new spaces for leisure, including a green hill esplanade, the scheme adopts One Planet principles to embed truly sustainable thinking. Over 30 years we have treasured our lasting relationships with clients and collaborators. The masterplan for the University of Limerick, a green, connected, student-centred environment which won the Best Irish Student Campus award several times, reflects our enduring and creative partnership. Education has been a very important and rewarding aspect of our work. Together with schools, we have worked with the most significant third level education campuses throughout Ireland.

Wren Hotel, Dublin

Our work in healthcare has advanced; from Bon Secours Healthcare Village, nestling in the green hills above Cork, we are now busily collaborating with the practice’s wider healthcare team on Dublin Children’s Hospital, one of the largest social infrastructure projects in the country. A city scale project in its own right, the design breaks down the staggering metrics of this nationally important project into a sensitive series of human scale experiences for the children, their families and the staff. At circa 300 metres, the biggest rooftop garden in Ireland is over double the length of the pitch at Croke Park and forms the centrepiece of the building - symbolically as well as physically - aiding the children’s recovery as an essential part of their patient journey.

As leaders in sustainable design, the studio has won more than 40 awards and has delivered some of Ireland’s exemplary low energy buildings, including the zero carbon Wren Hotel in Dublin city centre. The culmination of a decade of thinking is the soon to be completed Electricity Supply Board Headquarters. The circular economy is giving rise to rethinking building use, such as in Drogheda where civic offices are being reimagined as creative hubs. At Coonagh Cross in Limerick an abandoned shopping centre is being converted into a sustainable educational facility for future engineers with maker space to foster alliances between industry and education.

As well as working on our own interdisciplinary projects, our established thought leadership on future-proofing buildings against climate change has helped crystallise best practice and disseminate ideas, leading to diverse commissions with external architectural practices. The refurbishment of the iconic National Gallery of Ireland achieved energy performance levels comparable with any newly constructed art gallery within the confines of a protected heritage structure. A recent focus for the studio is the drive towards liveable towns and cities; mixed communities and social neighbourhoods. Designing compact scale aparthotels such as the small but clever Wren Hotel has been a rewarding design challenge and we currently have 600 apartments in design.

Post-Covid we look forward to inviting clients, collaborators, creatives, students, local entrepreneurs and interested parties to join us at our home in Smithfield in the heart of Dublin. We are committed to debating the issues that matter, such as climate change, social value and providing better housing and healthcare; we want to share ideas about ways to shape our cities and towns to improve quality of life.

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Aparthotel, Dublin

Our ambition is to continue to produce innovative world class designs focused around people, and to ensure that Ireland continues to progress through sustainable means as the best-in-class European experience from education to workplace, wellbeing, work-life balance, health and environmental quality. Come and join or visit us; we are ready to offer that famous Irish welcome.

Augustine Hill, Galway – a new community enhancing quality of life