(continued)

Interventions, such as the external French doors, find themselves spliced unapologetically into the inherited terrain of old brick walls and garden devices.

The mews house inserts itself between crumbling lines of stone as a purist white object. But Tynan is also sufficiently at ease to augment the stone where necessary, to add stone strips as spatial delineators, and simultaneously to deform or warp the new massing about specific moments in the plan or connections to the outside.

In both houses, painted metal rails guide the hand about the intricate interior. The rails both stand from the floor and hang from the ceiling as if free from gravity.

Fifteen years ago, the proposition that Dublin might foster integrated urban design would have seemed unlikely. Even more far-fetched would have been the idea that the city itself, its form and self image and its circuits of activity, might be positively reconfigured by architectural intervention.

Today in the Printworks, there is a glamorous reality at John Rocha's very serious place of work of supermodels donning designer knitware behind freshly grafted or inserted facades, of Naomi Campbell in a Corbusian parti. But there is also the more modest and fundamental prospect of city dwellers beginning to inhabit previously unwanted patches or unrecognized gaps in the urban structure.

Whereas in 1974 the city was deplorably hemorrhaging, today's sensibility — and to a certain extent the economic thrust — is to repopulate and densify the existing fabric through the addition of fragments. Through this syncretic and potentially populist methodology, the Printworks, and by extension Temple Bar, is an allegory for Dublin as a whole, the city as an evolving manifestation.

City in Recipro-city

Derek Tynan and the architects in Group 91 are self-consciously aware of belonging to a generation which both rejects the destruction of historic cities and has found new energy in the language of classic Modernism. In this, they share preoccupations with such approximate contemporaries as Steven Holl and David Chipperfield.

Holl's Hybrid Building at the new, Neo-Classical town of Seaside in Florida has a similar podium-and-pavilion strategy to the Printworks but also an idiosyncratic poseur quality (with its apartments for the melancholic personalities of "a tragic poet, a musician, and a mathematician") which appears too proscribed when compared with Tynan's desire for adaptation over time.

Chipperfield's work in Japan (the TAK building in Kyoto and the Gotoh Museum in Chiba) may be closer to his material and haptic aspirations. These are dense agglomerations with Spartan if elegant detailing, deforming with respect to context (directed views outwards, and inwards) as much as being formed according to any a priori diktat.

While the Cubists explored abstraction, they were not nonrepresentational. The Printworks takes elements that already existed on the site, elements perhaps influenced by objects or surfaces in the neighborhood, and new elements derived from the architect's own history, concerns and analyses.

That is all in the spirit of collage or, in three dimensions, of assemblage. Tynan has to date steered clear either of playfully exposing the thinness of layers (although in the Rocha workspace, the ceilings hover as almost Eisenman-like plates) or of presenting found objects as Townscape or (if provocative) as surreal sculptures.

This is due to a rigorous adherence to the current Dublin credo (for others, unduly fashionable and fixed) of composition. The Oxford Companion to Art (1970) notes that the "Latin word compositio usually represented the Greek synthesis, the most general term for structure or arrangement."

If collage for the Early Moderns heralded an evolution from analytic into synthetic Cubism, composition for Tynan suggests a holistic balance within the city of systems and volumes and artifacts of differing values.

Composition Used Freely

The Cubist mask and the Purist half-object embedded in its field or surround set up reciprocal relationships through their respective placements.

Much like James Stirling's German projects of the middle and late 1970s (on which several of Group 91 directly worked), it is not possible to read which surface is positive and which negative, to determine whether the solid or void is paramount, to be absolutely sure about age.

Like the small stairwells that hang from apartments to shape the ceiling of John Rocha's cutting room, they have a fluctuating inside-outside nature which deliberately seeks to infect but not dominate their contexts.

Composition can have a deadening, academic significance but, when used freely and in an already rich environment such as the Inner City, can liberate aspects of what is already there. Was this not also the aim of many of the Modernist writers, to reposition the public participant — James Joyce's Citizen, a memory of another Ithaca — through experience and sensual critique in the contemporary world?

At its best, Tynan's work has both typological essence and a residual ease. From a design point of view, this is characterized by a Purist envelope or topology which does not seek to fill every site — indeed, it may derive from excavation — but to set up potent relationships. It's often white, has curves or splays for softness but also sudden cuts (such as through the mews or at the Printworks entrance) for relocation.

This host is then inhabited by the necessary machined or tactile elements. It's to do with the reading and appreciation of components rather than any miniaturization of forms. As Wiel Arets has praised the Rocha space for its "positive conflict between the old and the new," Tynan's larger planning strategies are aimed at reinvigorating the Irish urban inheritance through form and the acceptance of difference.

The Printworks, as his first built fragment of city, augurs well for rectifying, unsentimentally, that erosion of Dublin's tissue which the Architectural Review recognized in 1974.

It makes the urban intervention of the architect one of mutual reciprocity.

This article began with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and concludes here with Part 4.

Raymund Ryan is an architect teaching at University College Dublin. He edited the Round Table Discussion of The Havana Project (Prestel, Munich, 1996) and acted as design consultant for the refurbishment of Berlaymont, the European Commission's headquarters in Brussels.

This article originally appeared in arq (Architectural Research Quarterly), Vol. 3, No. 1, 1999, published by Cambridge University Press and is reproduced here with the consent of the Editors. For arq subscription information, contact Cambridge University Press, 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, 914-937-9600, 914-937-4712.

View from the lane of the Rathmines mews house by Derek Tynan, 1995. Photo: John Searle Axonometric drawing of the Rathmines mews house. Image: Derek Tynan Architects Entryway of the Roebuck Library with new construction to the right. Photo: John Searle Plan of the Roebuck Library extension by Derek Tynan, 1995. Image: Derek Tynan Architects Section of the Roebuck Library extension by Derek Tynan, 1995. Image: Derek Tynan Architects Interior of Rocha design studio with a crevice-like, double-height space and stairways to the duplex apartments above. Photo: John Searle   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.