The Spire of Dublin is "probably the best civic monument" to be constructed anywhere since Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC, according to the director of the Netherlands Architectural Institute. Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, reports.
Mr Aaron Betsky said its abstract form "gives lie to the often fussy complexity of most current architecture, and its shiny skin stands in strong contrast to the dreariness of the street out of which it rises to such majestic heights".
The well-known critic made his remarks in an essay on the Architectural Association of Ireland (AAI) awards for 2004.
What astonished Mr Betsky as a first-time visitor was "the poverty and emptiness of Dublin's physical environment...the uncontrolled miasma of traffic and the quick descent of Temple Bar from new cultural district to boozy neo-Soho". The city had "a sense of forlornness that no decoration or references to James Joyce could take away".
However, he joined other members of the AAI jury in awarding the Downes Medal, the main award, to Grafton Architects, a relatively small architectural practice headed by two women, Ms Yvonne Farrell and Ms Shelley McNamara.
Mr Eddie Conroy, deputy county architect with South Dublin County Council, who also served on the jury, said the medal for Grafton's entry, A Way to School, would "lift the whole game" for school design.
Ardscoil Mhuire in Ballinasloe, Co Galway, and the North Kildare Educate Together Project in Celbridge were both designed within Department of Education budgets.
Of the seven other awards, two went to projects on UCD's Belfield campus - the medical research laboratories by O'Donnell and Tuomey Architects, and an extension to the virus reference laboratory by McCullough Mulvin Architects.
McCullough Mulvin won an award for the Tubbercurry library and civic offices in Co Sligo. A fourth went to dePaor Architects for a utility building on the seafront in Clontarf.
The others went to Hasset Ducatez Architects for a double glass house, also in Clontarf; Denis Byrne Architects (Cigar Box apartment building in North Great George's Street) and FKL Architects (Brick House by the River Dodder in Milltown).