AER Rianta put on its customary Christmas cheer at: Dublin Airport, rolling out the red carpet for returning emigrants; few other airport authorities go to such trouble to make transient airline passengers feel's welcome. But all the twinkling high could not conceal the fact that the State's most important gateway is visual disaster area.
And with major new developments in the pipeline - including the controversial passenger terminal planned by the McEvaddy brothers for a privately owned site on the airport's western perimeter - now is as good a time as any to question the kind of image it projects of Ireland. Surely it is the classic example of what we do best making it up as we go along?
Dublin Airport is a mess. Some years ago, I asked an architect friend what he made of it, and he replied with an apt enough metaphor. "It's like if you invited over a foodie friend to cook dinner in your house and you go into the kitchen afterwards to find half peeled onions, mushy tomatoes and dirty pots, pans and crockery ala over the place."
With this image of chaos in mind, I asked a senior Aer Rianta official if by any chance there was a master: plan for the airport. His reply, too, was revealing. "They tell me that: there is but I don't believe them!" he said. So even the people who run it seem to accept that the airport will continue to grow haphazardly, as it has for years.
The ad hoc nature of the accretion of buildings at the airport is not so readily perceptible as you enter it from the main road. But it is cruelly exposed for all to see from the recently opened Northern Cross section of the M50 "CRing" motorway. Visually, it appears as a totally incoherent complex, randomly arranged on the landscape.
Nearly every time I use Dublin Airport, it seems something new has been added to it. The squat, elongated two storey car park, opened in 1991 and painted white as if it were in Marbella, recently spawned a much larger five storey curvilinear extension, yet its own atrium - a shopping mall in the making - remains cold, drafty and underused.
The ad hoc nature of the accretions of buildings at the airport is not so readily perceptible as you enter it from the main road. But it is cruelly exposed for all to see from the recently opened Northern Cross section of the M50 "C Ring" motorway. Visually, it appears as a totally incoherent complex, randomly arranged on the landscape.
Nearly every time I use Dublin Airport, it seems something new has been added to it. The squat, elongated two storey car park, opened in 1991 and painted white as if it were in Marbella, recently spawned a much larger five storey curvilinear extension, yet its own atrium - a shopping mall in the making remains cold, drafty and under used.
The last time, I noticed that Aer Rianta had built a wrap around extension to Pier A that utilitarian 1960s curtain walled structure which juts out from the original building. Even the extension has since been extended to accommodate a shop, and this improvisation: is so bereft of aesthetic content that it is hard to believe anyone designed it.
Some years earlier, a suite of silver framed executive lounges had been plonked of Pier B, the sloping, tinted windows. There was at least one precedent for this vertical extension: the two storey link building from the early 1970s, between the two tiers has a row of "temporary" offices in timber huts on its roof.
And God knows how many celebrities potentates and sports stars have been whisked into the VIP lounge, through a red post modern portico with a pair of columns: that don even touch the ground. Red is the colour of Aer Rianta's livery and, needless to say, it clashes madly with the green of Aer Lingus and its designer slanted shamrock.
Arriving passengers make their way through this corporate battlefield, via red painted air bridges and downstairs into the immigration hall, with its green framed partitions, red carpet and orangey brown seating. Then, it's upstairs to a long corridor with big picture windows and downstairs again to the oppressively low ceilinged baggage hall.
Departing passengers do not have to take a similarly irrational up and down route. They go through a door set in a makeshift red framed partition into the duty free shopping area (poorly laid out apart from the drink and tobacco section), and on: to the boarding gates in Pier B via an ultra kitsch - but hugely popular - version of Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge.
This bizarre "feature", completed with trickling water, is part of a conscious effort by Aer Rianta to humanise the airport through a programme of "Dublinisation". The Bewley's cafe and Guinness pub in Pier B are also designed as part of this theming - to reinforce the impression that it is "the friendliest land most welcoming airport in the world".
Other thoughtful touches include the series of blown up Malton prints of Dublin's most famous buildings and the historical town maps which decorate the car park's circulation areas. The airport also has a sculpture trail, including Richard Enda King's soaring Spirit of the Air piece on the roundabout, and its grounds have been softened by lots of greenery.
But the main terminal, with its vertical concrete fins and tacked on helter skelter car ramp, is a sad legacy of the early 1970s, which was admittedly the worst period for modern architecture. By any standard, it is a terrible building and nothing can be done to improve its appearance short of a complete re cladding to cover it up.
AT Dublin Airport started out so well. The original terminal, completed in 1941 but kept under wraps for five years by wartime censorship, is a supremely elegant example of 1930s' modernism, in the International Style. Indeed, as Sean Rothery has said, it reflected a desire by the new Irish Free State to create and project a modern, progressive image.
With its curvilinear form - convex on the air side and concave on the land side - cantilevered balconies and French doors, with billowing curtains in the dining room, it perfectly evoked the romantic era of fair travel. Even though it is now used only as offices and its slender steel windows have been replaced by chunky aluminium, it remains a marvel.
Architecturally, the airport has been degenerating ever since. Apart from Andrew Devane's Catholic church, an oasis of tranquillity amid the hub bub, it contains hardly an buildings of real merit. Look at thy dreadful block which serves as the headquarters of Aer Lingus, the way once stately Corballis House has been left stranded in the alien clutter.
Nobody would deny that Dublin Airport must expand to survive. Just before Christmas, Aer Rianta announced that passenger numbers ford 1996 had reached nine million - an all time record. This level of traffic puts enormous pressure on the existing terminal facilities, which are almost literally bursting at the seams, especially on the busiest days.
All major airports in the world are expanding to cater for the boom in air travel. London's Heathrow, everyone's favourite nightmare, seems to be undergoing constant reconstruction - a fate which is nearly inevitable for many airports, large or small. After all, as the Architects Journal once observed, airports need to change over time.
"Air terminals are buildings for processing people gathering them in from other modes of transport, sorting them, relieving them of their baggage and delivering them to their planes," it said in 1991. As passenger numbers grow, more space must be added to process them, but this need not happen in an ad hoc way; a master plan is required.
In Munich, they simply abandoned the old city airport and built a much larger, cool white high the airport further out. Barcelona's airport, was remodelled by Ricardo Bofill for the 1992 Olympics and, with its succession of triangular piers, projecting from a long, straight terminal, it presents a suitably stylish introduction to this design conscious city.
The Japanese went even further, building an artificial island for the new airport in Osaka, which has a mile long terminal building designed by Renzo Piano. London's Stansted, though much more modest in scale, is a futuristic vision by Sir Norman Foster, aimed at enhancing people's experience of air travel by eliminating all those endless corridors.
Even Manchester, our nearest "hub" airport, has shown what can be done. Its Terminal 2, completed in 1993, is both cheerful and elegant, with a space framed entrance, glazed concourse, good colour scheme and generous circulation areas. A pedestrian bridge links the new terminal to a quite dramatic Calatrava inspired, split level railway station.
Aer Rianta is banking on Dublin becoming a hub, too. Over the next few years, it plans to invest at least £100 million in the airport, boosting its capacity to cater for 15 million passengers per year by 2005. Work is already under way on a £32 million extension to the air side of the main terminal along with a new, slightly cranked Pier C, to the south east.
Due to be finished before the end of his year, it will become the airport's London pier catering for passengers travelling on what is still by far the busiest route, with 50 flights per day in the peak season. Designed by Henry J. Lyons and Partners, the terminal extension will provide much needed additional space for check in desks and baggage handling.
Also under construction, on part of the existing long stay car park, Dublin Airport's second hotel - an Aer Rianta owned Great Southern which will have 147 bedrooms. Located opposite the existing Trust House Forte, hotel, dating from the early 1970s, it could become part of a "hotel strip" as passenger numbers at the airport continue to grow.
And that growth has been phenomenal. In 1990, Aer Rianta projected that the throughput for 1996 would be just six million - a figure which was exceeded by 50 per cent, largely because of the impact of Ryanair's cut throat competitions with Aer Lingus in forcing down airfares Over the past three years alone, numbers have grown by one million per year.
Over 8,000 people are employed at the airport, which makes it the State's largest single economic unit. The number of retail outlets has trebled (to 33) over the past 10 years. Altogether, no less than 106 companies are represented on the site, which covers nearly 3,000 acres of land between the Northern Cross motorway and Forest Little Road.
Having seen off Tony Ryan's plan to create a rival airport in Baldonnel, Aer Rianta is engaged in a do or die struggle with Des and Ulick McEvaddy over their plans to build a privately funded passenger terminal on the perimeter of the airport, just north of the main runway. This audacious scheme is now being examined by Fingal County Council.
The McEvaddys, who spent nearly £3 million between them on house purchases in 1996, are very well connected. Last summer, they hosted a lavish fund raising lunch for Fine Gael, with the Taoiseach as guest of honour. And they had the sword of former Minister for Transport, Michael Lowry that their airport plans would be seriously considered.
ACCORDING to Barry Conroy, of architects Conroy Crowe Kelly, who are designing it, the McEvaddy's Huntstown Air Park project is a real runner. It could bed built at no cost to the public purse and because of its central location the proposed terminal would enable Dublin to become the "hub airport for trans Atlantic, trans Europe air traffic".
Aer Rianta's own plans are no less ambitious. After the current works are completed, the next phase of its "Airport 1" scheme - a bid to make Dublin the world's No 1 airport, being another major extension to the north west of the existing terminal, enabling it to cater for at least 15 million passengers a year.
But since this extension is to be considerably lower than the existing terminal, it would have the effect of thickening the architectural stew. A crude model illustrating the overall plan also shows a very long two storey building extending north wards through Pier A which, if built, would almost completely obscure any airside view of the old terminal.
Longer term, Aer Rianta plans a parallel runway to the north of the main runway to increase the airport's capacity to a theoretical 40 million passengers a year. And if the model is to be taken at face value, there could be a "satellite" pier south west of the existing complex as well as an entirely separate second terminal, two miles further west.
But these are just indicative "concepts", which may or may not be: built in the configuration currently envisaged. The truth is that Aer Rianta has no three dimensional vision of what Dublin Airport will look like in 20 years time - and certainly no equivalent of the fully formed plan drawn up in 1965, which would have given the place some coherence.
It is regrettable that this plan, with its highly rational arrangement of three identical piers reaching out like arms from the central terminal, was only implemented in part; perhaps its vision, powerfully presented in a contemporary bird's eye perspective view, was too all embracing for the kind of ad hockery that passes for "planning" in Ireland.
Nonetheless, Dublin is now ranked fifth in an IATA league table of 37 European airports - a tribute to Aer Rianta's "hands on commercial approach" and the innate friendliness of the place. It might have scored even higher if it had what most other airports have a rail link to the city centre. But this, too, is being actively examined, however belatedly.
The best news by far is that the ground floor of the original terminal is to be brought hack into use this autumn as an airside lounge for passengers using the "low cost, no frills" services operating from Pier A, which now caters for 50 per cent of the airport's throughput. Depending on its design, this should get them a glimpse of the good old days.
For operational reasons, Aer Rianta has decided to install a new VIP lounge in the adjoining North Terminal, a decent modern building from 1959, which proved itself as a discreet and secure reception area for EU leaders arriving for the summit in December. Its location in a "quiet" art of the airport also means less disruption for ordinary passengers.
Dublin Airport is not a greenfield site, so it is perhaps impossible to rationalise at this stage. "We do things in a way that meets the needs of our customers, said one senior executive. "Sometimes we would like to do more, but someone has to a for it." However, it is surely not beyond the bounds hope that there would be some percentage for architectural planning?
