8 April 2002
O’Connell Street Furniture, open design competition
Dublin City Council and the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland (RIAI) announced today, 8 th April
2002 at the Grafton Hotel Dublin, that London bloc Architects (known as ‘bloc’), with consultancy from
Buro Happold, has won the open design competition for O’Connell Street Furniture. In attendance at
the announcement today was An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor
Michael Mulcahy.
The competition organised by the RIAI, on behalf of Dublin City Council, was a two stage open com-petition
to design a family of street furniture structures to be repeated along the entire 550m of historic
O’Connell Street to enhance the public space ambitions of the capital’s premier street, and in time
come to be recognised and associated with the quality and ambition of the city.
The suite of furniture will include two cafes, a ticket and information offices, five retail units, two news
stands, two self-cleaning WCs, twelve public telephone boxes and nine bus or taxi shelters.
Following the announcement bloc’s David Hebblethwaite, commented, “This prestigious competition
win is very important to us and Buro Happold. The scheme allows us to work with some of the most
vibrant and important public space in a major European capital, and relates closely in ambition to our
other streetscape and public space projects that are beginning to take shape in Europe. We were
immediately interested in the approach taken by Dublin City Council in developing the design to act as
a catalyst for public space. bloc and Buro Happold’s interpretation of the brief was to find the maximum
generative effect with a very limited streetscape intervention”.
Edith Blennerhassett, group director of Buro Happold added, “We were delighted to be associated
with such an innovative architectural project which will be an important feature of O’Connell Street and
the urban regeneration of the city”.
To achieve the ambition of the competition, bloc and Buro Happold stretched each unit to create
superthin buildings, bordering on two-dimensional , orientated with the flow of people . Stone ends
are turned up from the street paving and pulled as far apart as possible. Stretched between them is
a thin film of glass and timber. This creates long facades, slender in the direction of traffic and long for
the general pedestrian flow. Each wide face opens to have a presence on the street up to two times
the plan size of the structure. A relief plan of the street is cut into the stone of each thin face and LED
lights are incorporated to orientate the public and provide both visual and Braille signage. The glass
walls and roof are wrapped in timber slats that act as shading and security, creating a glint, going
from opaque to transparent as the viewer moves along the street, revealing the use inside.
bloc Architects.
Founded by David Hebblethwaite in 1999, London bloc Ltd, Architects (known as ‘bloc’) were
formed out of a belief in the powerful role of public urban space. bloc shares a belief that the use
of such space can be a force for regeneration and the formation of community structures.
David Hebblethwaite is also an architecture degree tutor at the University of Bath.
for further practice information contact:
http://www.londonbloc.com
15 Wolsey Mews,
London,
NW5 2DX
Buro Happold
Press Office and Practice information at
Buro Happold is a multi-disciplinary international practice of consulting engineers established in
1976 offering civil and structural engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering, quantity sur-veying,
building services and environmental engineering, infrastructure and traffic engineering,
geotechnical engineering, façade engineering, fire engineering, computational fluid dynamics
analysis, access consultancy, project management, urban design and a range of specialist CAD
service
