The Location
CityArts moved to its new home at 15 Bachelor's Walk adjacent to the right bank of the River Liffey on Dublin's north-side April 2010. The organisation purchased a late 17th Century merchant's townhouse in 2007 and it is one of the few remaining original buildings on that stretch of the Dublin Quays, which was originally conceived by the Duke of Ormond in the 17th Century.
Bachelors Walk, Dublin
Funding for the purchase of the property came from proceeds of our sale of the former premises at Moss Street with assistance for conservation work from the Arts Council, the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and Dublin City Council.
An Introduction to the architectural brief for the conservation and redevelopment of 15 Bachelors Walk by Niall McCullough of McCullough Mulvin.
The Bachelors Walk project provides new accommodation for City Arts, a dynamic community arts organisation who wished to provide meeting ,exhibition and office spaces in the heart of the city. The site is a narrow Georgian house on the North Quays, facing South over the river, part of the essential scenography of Dublin. When the project started, the interior had effectively been removed, leaving a narrow rectangular framework of external walls- a shell effectively emptied of meaningful space through extensive alteration over many years- a tissue of fabric enclosing a space which implied, but did not deliver on, a dense structure of panelled rooms.
The brief was for a small meeting space/theatre, a bar reception room and offices with storage and some rooms to rent; the building was to be open and accessible to all - part of the ordinary nature of the city - and working to bring art into the lives of all citizens. The project response was twofold. The first was to conserve and carefully restore the remnants of the existing fabric - which included the external walls and the front façade to the Quays; this was washed down and repointed; the original shopfront was retained and repaired- not 'cleaned-up' but left almost as a piece of urban archaeology. The second was to make modern 'interventions' into the fabric which would be sympathetic to the idea of the original but allow a new use to develop. In a way, the scheme plays with issues beyond its scope-extending lines of enquiry beyond the envelope to ask more general questions about the way we live in Dublin and use its existing fabric.
The rere section of the building was rebuilt with stairs and lift behind a striking hidden facade; the scheme included a new room extending over the roof to form a periscope - a craning eye sharing the sun and view, creating the atelier/roof world which Dublin should have but does not have - this was omitted for budget reasons but may take place at a later date. A new theatre/performance space 'box' was created between ground floor and basement, a tall timber room that has its own integrity- and can be seen through the front elevation across the river.
Internally, the rest of the rooms are a careful mixture of old and new. Existing surfaces were repaired and exposed; some of the original wall panelling was found and replaced on the walls, the combination of exposed materials and new materials acting as 'wayfinding' to create a new legibility in the plan. The scale of the building is small. Part of its fascination is the way such a small space will be intensively occupied as social and performance space; the increment will be that of a group of individuals rather than a massive crowd, which will rebound on the way it is considered and used.
Our practice, McCullough Mulvin Architects, is an architecture and urban-design practice based in Dublin combining construction with exploration through writing and research. We have designed several arts projects which work to define a new public realm in a changing society, pursuing modern architecture for particular contexts, reflecting a specific response to the physical and cultural geography of landscape, cities or existing buildings. There are many co-existing and quite exclusive Dublins which all need new buildings and spaces for modern life.
The centre of the city - which has a very particular character built up over centuries - is characterized by a kind of 'increment'- a unified relationship of small gestures between urban design, public and private architecture based on the narrow Georgian plot. The opportunity to work at the scale of the Georgian house that makes up the grain of the city is important for lots of reasons- not least because we have forgotten as a society how to make significant and useful work at this natural level.
