Architecture is the most visible of all the arts. We live with it, for good or ill, every day of our lives. Sam Stephenson was one of its foremost practitioners in his heyday, an awe-inspiring architect of powerful conviction. He was also never afraid to defend even the most controversial of his designs - notably the ESB headquarters on Fitzwilliam Street, the Central Bank on Dame Street and the first phase of the Civic Offices at Wood Quay. These were all buildings of their time. In the 1960s, with a public thirst for modernisation, few but Micheál MacLiammóir and the Irish Georgian Society were sorry to see 16 Georgian houses replaced by a purpose-built office block. It was only later, in the battle to save Hume Street, that the tide of public opinion turned against the wanton destruction of Dublin's heritage.
However, the compromise reached in the case of the twin corners of Hume Street and St Stephen's Green - modern office buildings masquerading as Georgian houses - ushered in a new era of pastiche "architecture", with far too many original buildings on Harcourt Street and Lower Leeson Street replaced by changelings devoid of architectural authenticity. In that context, Sam Stephenson's bold contemporary building for Bord na Móna on Lower Baggot Street showed a new way forward, as an award from An Taisce said, by respecting its context while simultaneously making a modern statement. So did his Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies on Burlington Road; its serenity is a rebuke to some of the architectural dross inflicted on this area, then and since.
The muscular Central Bank may look "out of place" in the Temple Bar we know today, but it was designed in the 1970s at a time when the area was being earmarked for demolition to make way for a transportation centre topped by hotels, office blocks and shopping malls. And in the case of the Civic Offices at Wood Quay, those solid blocks with deep recessed windows - "the bunkers", in popular parlance - matched the defensive mentality of Dublin Corporation, dug in as it was against the city and its citizens. By contrast, the second phase of the scheme (designed by Scott Tallon Walker) seems to encapsulate the relative transparency of civic administration under Dublin City Council from the mid-1990s onwards.
Sam Stephenson did many other things in his life, but it is fair to say that Dublin would have been a different place without him and his collaborator, the late Arthur Gibney. They were both great raconteurs, whose stories - tragically - were not recorded for posterity. All we have now are the recollections of friends and associates and, of course, the often challenging works they left to us.