Fantasy wrecking ball: which Irish building would you demolish first?

The Irish Times office is a good place for a game of fantasy wrecking ball. Everybody’s got a least favourite Irish building. And here, on on Tara Street Dublin 2, we’re spoilt for choice.

Opposite us stands what is possibly Ireland’s least loved building: Hawkins House, home of the Department of Health. The phrase “sick building” could have been invented for this edifice, with its snot-green panelling, sickly-grey cladding and ill-fitting windows, of which it was once said that half of them don’t open and the other half don’t close.

But this is not the building I’d knock first. Partly because I’ve been inside it and quite like the generously proportioned offices and eye-popping views across the city.

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Its neighbour Apollo House, apparently vacant apart from a Department of Social Affairs office on the ground floor, resembles a giant breeze block with windows. Though smaller, it is arguably even viler than Hawkins House. But it’s not the building I’d knock first either.

Looking down Tara Street and across the Liffey is the tattered tower of Liberty Hall. Frequently now decked out with a giant political poster or charity message, Ireland’s “first high-rise”, built in 1964 was once a lone beacon of modernity in a backward-feeling town.

Now it’s a battered anachronism, whose current residents Siptu have sought to redevelop it as a higher, sleeker structure. There’s hope for it yet. So it’s not the building I’d knock first.

A little farther to the west, but clearly visible from here as it is from many points in Dublin, is Ireland's Central Bank. Sam Stephenson's creation caused controversy when it imposed itself on the capital's skyline in 1980, rising higher than its planning permission allowed. In an Irish Times reader survey of best and worst buildings in the early 1990s, the Central Bank made both lists.

The security railings added in 1999 made the plaza in front of the building less of a public space, but it remains a skateboarders’ mecca, and a meeting point for more than one generation of bored teenagers. For their sake, it’s not the building I would knock first.

The roof of The Irish Times building gives a clear view to the east of that skeleton of the Celtic Tiger, the unfinished planned headquarters of Anglo Irish Bank. Currently a monument to folly, and an ugly one at that, the building is soon to be completed as a new HQ of the Central Bank. It has the potential to become a symbol of Ireland's recovery and post-Tiger maturity, so it's not the building I'd knock first.

No, the one I like least is just visible from the top floor of the Irish Times. Looking up Pearse Street, towards Ringsend, close to Grand Canal Dock, is the 1980s red-brick Trinity Enterprise Centre, a low-rise mess of neglected-looking industrial units formerly owned by the Industrial Development Authority.

In the handsome Silicon Docks district, which boasts some of the best waterside architecture and planned buildings in Dublin, the Trinity centre is a sore-thumb structure, disfiguring what is arguably the city’s finest modern district.

I’d take a wrecking ball to the Trinity Enterprise Centre first, saving only the 1860s warehouse-tower at its centre. Then I’d demolish Boland’s Mill on the other side of the dock.

And then I might hit Apollo House.

What’s your least favourite Irish building? Phibsboro Shopping Centre? Sarsfield House in Limerick? The Civic Offices on Dublin’s Wood Quay? Ikeas North and South? Or the spanking new, loved-and-loathed Lexicon Library in Dun Laoghaire? Tell us in the comments field below.