Architecture:It is a long way, in every sense, from the venerable home of the Irish bar in Henrietta Street, Dublin, to the skyscrapers of Chicago. Like many, I suspect, who have frequently passed the library forming part of the King's Inns complex of buildings, I had no idea, until I read this book, that its gable end was in the style of Louis Sullivan, who designed many of the Windy City's greatest architectural monuments.
Its designer, James Franklin Fuller, was one of a number of great Irish architects responsible for what Patricia McCarthy calls "a uniquely important group of 18th and 19th century buildings".
Of them the most famous was James Gandon, and he is a central figure in her absorbing and meticulously researched history of the building of the Inns. It was the only one of the three major public buildings in Dublin that he designed - the others being the Four Courts and the Custom House - to escape demolition or damage during the 1919-1921 period. It was also the last to be completed, but unfortunately the finished structure was not in accordance with his designs: two wings were added to each side in the mid-19th century which, it is generally agreed, distort the balance and harmony of the original. It is all the more regrettable since, according to his biographer, his design of the Inns was "a favourite study" of Gandon's.
The King's Inns was established in 1539, as the inn of court where Irish lawyers would be educated, on the site of the Blackfriars friary where the Four Courts now stand. It was not until 1793 that the site of the present buildings, flanked by Constitution Hill and Henrietta Street, was acquired by the benchers. At that time, Henrietta Street was the most fashionable street in Dublin, its magnificent houses - subsequently to fall into such decay - the residences of prominent judges, bishops, peers and MPs. Why then did Gandon's plan provide for a building with its back to Henrietta Street facing out to the rear of tenements on Constitution Hill? And why, with so large a site available, were the buildings to be erected on a relatively cramped space?
McCarthy suggests the answer is to be found in what was a recurring theme in the history of the Inns: the provision of chambers for barristers in its immediate vicinity. A drawing by Francis Johnston, who succeeded Gandon as Ireland's most important architect, showed a line of buildings for such chambers on the Constitution Hill side. But those plans were never realised and subsequent proposals for chambers in Henrietta Street also came to nothing as the bar became wedded to their collegiate life in the Law Library in the Four Courts.
The education of barristers, then as now, included the keeping of dining terms. The great dining hall occupies much of the space in one wing, the other being the home of the Registry of Deeds. The hall is the only large public interior by Gandon to have survived virtually intact and it has been compared with the chapel of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, with the design of which Gandon may also have been associated. The other great interior of the Inns, is that of the Library, designed by Frederick Darley and a superb example, in McCarthy's view, of a Greek revival interior.
The buildings have survived a number of threats over the centuries. In 1924, The Irish Builder proposed that it become the home of the new parliament of the Irish Free State: "very quickly accessible by tram and . . . just beside the Broadstone Terminus", they observed. The Abercrombie and Kelly plan for "Greater Dublin" in 1924 envisaged a cathedral on the site of Henrietta Street and other streets in the vicinity, with the rear of the Inns forming part of a piazza behind the cathedral. More ominously, from the 1930s onwards, the benchers were confronted with the necessity of carrying out major works to the fabric of the buildings. Fortunately, successive generations of benchers have ensured that the necessary works were done, aided by an unexpected source of finance in the form of the unclaimed suitors' funds.
This admirably written and beautifully illustrated volume is a splendid record of a priceless architectural heritage.
Ronan Keane is a former chief justice of Ireland. He is the author of a number of legal textbooks. The fourth edition of his book, Company Law, will be published shortly by Tottel Publishing
A Favourite Study: Building the King's Inns By Patricia McCarthy Gill & Macmillan, 116pp. €29.99