Postal Garage, Sandwith Street Upper, Dublin 2.
Architect: John Matthew Fairweather, OPW
‘Is that you doin’ that graffiti?’ came a call from a woman in a doorway across the street as I was taking photos of the garage façade. ‘No I’m just interested in the brickwork’ I reply. The lady warms and proceeds to proudly tell me that it used to be a repair garage for the fleet of postal vans which would collect mail from the nearby Pearse St. railway station. It is now used as ad-hoc car parking and has clearly seen better days. Regardless of this, it is remains one of the overlooked architectural gems of the city.
The building’s façade is a curious mix of sleek Art Deco horizontality combined with rough brick materiality. The brickwork is warm and varied in colour but it is the texture which is the real showstopper.
‘Over-burns’ are bricks which have been fired too much in the kiln during production, which usually results in a slight blackening of the surface colour. Here an extreme version of the over-burn is employed where the bricks have been fired to the extent they have severely deformed. Typically these contorted bricks are discarded as imperfect, here they are celebrated as the defining characteristic of the building.
The random array of these individually bulging bricks combine to give the façade a subdued shimmering appearance, all held together by the insistent horizontal bands of concrete at the base and head of the window and door openings.
Although its most unique aspect, the façade is not the only element of quality in this building. Inside, the huge open space is elegantly spanned by a series of expressive steel trusses and illuminated via series of curious, clerestory roof lanterns.
The building was designed by John Matthew Fairweather of the OPW and completed in 1939, which astonishingly is a full decade before Alvar Aalto made this type of ‘overburn’ brickwork famous amongst architects by using it in his Baker House Dormitories for Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Perhaps equally astonishingly is that this, one of the most unique pieces of architecture in the city, does not feature on Dublin City Councils list of Protected Structures – thereby leaving it extremely vulnerable to demolition and replacement with one of the generic office buildings which now encircle it.
Cian Deegan is a partner in TAKA Architects, a tutor in Dublin School of Architecture and currently studying for a PhD by practice through RMIT Europe.
