Building for Work I: Factories

Alan Hope was born in Liverpool in 1909 and attended Liverpool University School of Architecture for five years, graduating in 1932. In his President’s inaugural address to the Architectural Association of Ireland in 1952, he described the architecture course as he knew it: ‘I was trained in the rather rigidly classical school of architecture at Liverpool where we did the orders and the Renaissance and so had an answer to all design… I’ve no regret having the training I had, though perhaps with a different course I should not have been so long in freeing myself of the incubus of the Renaissance – then the acme of all great architecture’. After qualifying he came to Ireland where he worked in the office of Vincent Kelly and, from 1934, that of Frederick Hicks whose practice he continued after Hicks retired in 1945.

Hope certainly broke free from the rigid classicism of his training when he designed a new factory for Aspro (Ireland) Limited at the junction of the Naas and Kylemore Roads in Inchicore, Dublin. As presented in this perspective drawing, a fairly standard factory building (just visible on the right ), where aspirin would be manufactured, was to be fronted by a white-rendered, flat-roofed, administration block, its Modernist credentials visible in the bands of horizontal glazing, the curved double-height entrance, and the glazed tower bearing the factory name.

When completed in 1949, the Aspro Factory was very close to the design set out in this sketch. Only the glazed tower was omitted. The name was spelled out instead in letters perched on the parapet of the administration wing. The factory won Hope the RIAI Triennial Gold Medal for the period 1947-1949. This accolade was not enough to save the building however, and it was demolished in 1988.

A purifying architecture

Gary Boyd

Viewed from the south west, the Aspro (Ireland) Factory displays its svelte, modernist credentials in a raking perspective composition: the horizontality of its principal lines and strip windows; the singular white planarity of its walls; the sweeping curve of the oriel containing the celebrated staircase (21.1); the vertical interplay of the glass tower bearing its name; and the presence of a motorcar, since the 1920s the enduring modernist cypher of clean functionalist design invested with a dash of glamour and speed.

The urban inner-city landscape of the Inchicore of 1940s Dublin is elided, and little other context is given. A figure, drawn for scale, stands between the motorcar and the building. Behind the figure is a hedge. But then there is also a tree. A tree conspicuously in the middle of the drawing, leaning slightly rightwards but otherwise bifurcating the view of the building, its ethereal overstory companioning the transparency and verticality of the tower.

We can only assume that this tree is the salix genus, the willow tree, whose bark contains the compound salicin which, in its synthesized form, is realised as acetylsalicylic acid or aspirin, both the reason for the building and the productive process which it contains. The latter most likely takes place under the double saw-toothed roof – a more conventional factory form – that creeps into view on the righthand-side: a north-facing, light-filled clerestoried space where, under sanitary conditions workers press and pack tablets into tubes and boxes.

The idea of a modernism of reassurance is present at Aspro. And is functionally apt. The Aspro factory was a public building designed to be seen from the street (21.4). Its form and public façade was part of a company identity – one ranging across scales from buildings to newspaper advertisements to the precise and uncluttered packaging of its products and their typefaces (never burdened by the presence of a serif), colour and design – that concerned the reassuring of a public that these products, ingested and used so intimately within the body itself, were both safe and effective. As seen from the drawing, at Aspro there is a modernism that is progressive but not avant-garde; up to date and dynamic but without risk nor obvious experiment; contemporary but with the presence of the salix genus connected with time-served traditions; civic, solid and yes, conservative, but also transparent, bright, clean and illuminated: a public front to evoke and express the professional application of scientific and hygienic methods taking place to the rear of the site where (21.5), unseen to the public eye, white pills were being hygienically made and packaged to assume the form of Aspro products and be released to the population.

There was, however, one final group for whom the architecture of the Aspro factory also evoked reassurance within a spirit of modernity – the factory workers themselves, whose conditions of employment included the use of a canteen; a stage, performance space and dancefloor; a lounge; the presence of nurses and the provision of healthcare which included periodic radiographic screening (Ellen Rowley, Housing, Architecture and the Edge Condition (Abingdon, 2018), 28): a mid-century landscape of care and welfare within the workplace that can be described as paternalistic but remains, perhaps, in times of employment precarities a highly relevant paradigm for the social valuing of labour and the cohesion that this can bring. All the more lamentable then that this building, through which so many strands of international modernity and modernist social, technological and aesthetic aspirations, concerns and thinking flowed, that this Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland Triennial Gold Medal winner of 1950, that this significant piece of local, national and international heritage, should have been lost through careless destruction in 1988.

Gary A. Boyd is Full Professor of Architecture at University College Dublin and leads the Architectures of Coal in Modern Europe (ACME) project, a European Research Council Advanced Grant (2025-30).