"It is not a beautiful object," said W.B. Yeats of Nelson's Pillar. He also said: "The life and work of the people who erected it are part of our tradition". The almost 75 years since these remarks were made have seen the work of those people subsumed into a dynamic new tradition, and the destruction of that particular monumental symbol. The dynamism, however, has all too often been fractured and without vision.
Fortunately, this has not been the case with the thinking behind the reformation of O'Connell Street, the neglected central street of the capital of Ireland.
Dublin Corporation formulated the design brief for the public competition for the new monument. I was one member of the selection jury. This design brief formed an integral part of the ambitious Dublin City Development Plan in 1999. O'Connell Street is to reassume its place as the central street of the capital. Whatever replaces Nelson's Pillar will become the signature of Dublin city in the 21st century in much the same way the Eiffel Tower is for Paris or the Opera House for Sydney.
To be successful, it has to work architecturally, aesthetically and socially. It must be strongly vertical to counterbalance the great horizontals that compose O'Connell Street, and that verticality must be simultaneously elegant, contemporary in design, and harmonious with the look of the street's original 18th-century design. It has to be durable, of low maintenance, and it must fix "the central points of the street beside the General Post Office, enclosing the vistas from north, south, east and west".
Ian Ritchie's Spire brilliantly meets these requirements in the unanimous judgment of the selection jury.
Elements in Ireland's built world include vertical standing stones and obelisks such as stand on Killiney Hill or in the Phoenix Park. Spires reach into the sky across our landscape symbolising power and aspirations to transcendence. Such forms inspired Ritchie's submission, in which the Spire's "height is its power, the light is its message".
Extraordinary, almost ethereal, qualities characterise the Spire and, despite much publicity, these bear repetition. Its base has a diameter of just three metres. The cone then rises 120 metres in the most beautiful sweep to a diameter of just 0.1 metres at the top. To put this in context, the thinner of the two chimneys at the Poolbeg power station is 207.5 metres high, rising from a base of 14 metres and tapering to a diameter of 4.9 metres at the top. The transmission mast at RTE in Donnybrook is 110 metres high, rising from a base of 18 metres and tapering to 1.2 metres at the top where its transmission dishes are positioned. The utter simplicity of the Spire, shorn of all obvious associations of an historical character, make it an ideal emblem of the current time.
But this is no empty anodyne symbol given its other qualities, key among which are its capacity to reflect light and its ability to occupy the most important civic space without crowding or oppressively dominating it.
The finish on its perfectly polished stainless steel is designed to reflect the ambient light of Dublin during the day, its shadow functioning sundial-like to mark the passing of the day and of the seasons. At night, its luminous potential will be most fully realised when the glass tip is illuminated from within, and the whole spire will be lit from below. It will be like a finely engineered compass needle (rather than a quite different sort of needle!) positioning the heart of the capital from air and sea in an elegant and discrete manner. No other capital city in the world has anything quite like this marking its centre, and that alone will strengthen its power as Dublin's new signature.
The Spire will not stand alone in an unchanged street. Dublin Corporation wants Nelson's replacement to work radically to improve the entire city centre. The meridian of O'Connell Street around the spire will be redesigned to calm traffic, and landscaped to provide a new inner-city oasis within which pedestrians can stroll or sit and watch the world go by. Unlike Nelson's Pillar, and many of the designs competing with the Spire in the public competition, the new monument will not block views from the streets at the intersection of which it will stand. Most importantly, it will not dominate in the way that traditionally-conceived replacements would have done. Instead, it will stand within the street, be part of it in an integral way, lifting rather than weighting its surroundings. Its simplicity, elegance, reflectivity, and engineering brilliance make it a monument for Dublin that has enormous potential for becoming what is needed rather than something overly deferential to the associations of past traditions. Of this monument I have no doubt that W.B. Yeats could confidently say: "It is a beautiful object."
Vivienne Roche is a sculptor and member of Aosdana. She is currently working on projects which include the major public art works for the Jack Lynch Tunnel in Cork and for the new headquarters of Fingal County Council
