Building for Transport IV: Airports

In 1936 the twenty-six year old Desmond FitzGerald (1910–87) was entrusted by T. J. Byrne, chief architect at the Office of Public Works, with the design of a new airport for Dublin. FitzGerald had received a cosmopolitan education in Switzerland and Germany before studying architecture at University College Dublin (where his thesis project was an airport) and town planning in London. For the project, he assembled a team of talented young architects, including Charles Aliaga-Kelly, Dáithi Hanly, Dermot O’Toole, Kevin Barry and, later, Harry Robson. The contract was placed in 1938 and the building was completed in 1940, though the outbreak of the Second World War meant that it was not publicised until 1945.

This image of the terminal building was taken in 1954 by amateur photographer Hugh Doran. St Malachy, one of the Aer Lingus fleet of Douglas DC-3 aircraft, then approaching the end of its service life, is in the left foreground while a small crowd, some in deckchairs, observes the airside activity from the liner-like observation deck. The image evocatively captures the distinctively curved facade, extensive glazing and tiered massing which made Dublin Airport the most important International Style building in Ireland. Influences on the design were many, ranging from the planning system developed by Albert-Bernard Duval – the curve was seen as optimal in allowing the largest number of aircraft to be served from the smallest building – to the horizontal detailing characteristic of Erich Mendelsohn, while prototypes have been identified from as far afield as Burbank in California, and Lydda, then in Palestine. At Dublin, these strands and stimuli were synthesised into a building which fully exceeds the sum of its parts. In 1943 FitzGerald was awarded the RIAI Gold Medal for best building in the period 1938 to 1940.

Cosmopolitan Modernity

Lisa Godson

Curves, technology and the glamour of international travel are emphasised in Hugh Doran’s photograph of Dublin Airport. The Douglas DC-3 in the foreground provides a compositional counterpoint to the Terminal Building, and together they express something of the source and expression of a modern design language. The airplane’s exposed rivets and metal panels are firmly – even ‘honestly’ – of the machine age, while the suave building bends away in a swoop of white ‘snowcrete’ render and expansive glazing.

For architectural historians, Hugh Doran (1926-2004) is probably best known for his documentation of urban Dublin and eighteenth century architecture, particularly in collaboration with the Irish Georgian Society who engaged and encouraged him to photograph a built culture that seemed ‘suspended between previous prosperity and terminal decline’.(1) In later life, Doran volunteered in the reading room of the Irish Architectural Archive and his work was the subject of an exhibition in the IAA (June 2007-April 2008). His collection had been donated to the IAA after his death in 2004 and described as ‘one of its single most important acquisitions in its thirty-year history’.(2)

Planned by the Office of Public Works (OPW) from 1935 and constructed during the Second World War, Dublin Airport only came into general use for passengers in the late 1940s. It soon became a site for leisure and entertainment as well as a transport hub (22.1). Doran’s image dates from 1954, the year Aer Lingus added a number of Vickers Viscount planes to their fleet. Press reports of ‘the coming of the Viscounts’ suggest the importance of the airport to the general non-travelling public as ‘thousands of spectators’ were granted entry to the grounds and balconies of the terminal to witness the first of the new airplanes land and be handed over in a ceremony that included live music and was preceded by demonstration flights over the city.(3)

The design of the terminal, with three volumes stepped up to the central control tower and then stretching out on two ‘wings’ of cantilevered balconies, took its cue from airplanes themselves (22.3). As well as the plan, aerial photographs showing planes parked at the terminal building emphasise the symbiosis in form between building and aircraft (22.4). As materialised in the horizontal emphasis, chimneys, decks and curved external staircases, the airport also partook in the architectural language of ocean liners that informed the design of other notable modern buildings such as Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff’s De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (1935) and Michael Scott’s Geragh in Sandycove (1937). In a celebratory 1947 essay about the airport for Country Life British architectural critic Christopher Hussey wrote: ‘as the plane circles in, the stream-lined building is made to look even more like a ship by the people – friends of passengers or spectators – gathered on its upper deck below the control tower, which itself resembles the bridge of a liner’. With its convex side facing the airfield, the building’s curvature also afforded greater surface area. Hussey asserted that this meant ‘one and a half times as many aeroplanes can pull up in front of a curve as in front of a straight line, so that a curved terminal forms a natural apex to a flying field’.(7) The design of the airport followed a certain typology, and precedents with similar plans can be located in various built and unbuilt schemes that were widely disseminated through the architectural and aeronautical press.(8) Dublin is a particularly elegant exemplar, partly due to its proportions. The building was twenty metres high by 122 metres long, and organised on a grid of two feet four inches (0.71 metres), but monotony was stymied by the interplay between the concave and convex sides (22.5).

The lightness and clarity of the exterior was matched inside. The use of reinforced concrete and T-beam construction enabled expansive spaces with different zones marked by the structural columns, with cantilevered staircases either side of the concourse backlit with glass blocks.(9) This cool airiness was warmed up by coloured stucco, wood, bronze and travertine finishes and enlivened by a ground floor lounge and a restaurant on the southern end of the first floor terminating in a circular dance-floor. To some extent, the airport was conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk as the fittings were bespoke, and accessories such as ashtrays and cutlery specific to their setting. Aer Lingus took visual and material culture very seriously, and have been figured as key agents in the professionalisation of design in Ireland due to their patronage of influential Dutch figures such as the graphic designers Guus Melai and Piet Sluis whose advertising and other work for the airline was of a piece with the modern surroundings of Collinstown.

Within a few years of Doran’s photograph, the pressure of passenger numbers led to the construction of another ‘northern’ terminal designed by Leo Carroll, and bearing a charming zig-zag roof profile (1959). There was an inevitable accretion of further structures including Andrew Devane’s wonderful Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven (1964) (22.6), Terminal 1 (1972), also by Carroll, which if unloved as a building at least had adjoining strongly sculpted ‘spiral’ ramps, and then Pascall + Watson metal-clad Terminal 2 (2010). The earlier structures, such as the church and the original terminal building, are somewhat buried amidst these later developments, and Corballis House was demolished to make way for Terminal 2.

Although the original terminal can still be glimpsed when arriving and departing, the singularity and legibility of the scene in that 1954 photograph seem impossible now. The demands of security and commerce are such that entering any airport today is to be subject to predetermined procedures, routes through retail environments, and restricted agency. Contemporary airports exemplify what Marc Augé christened the ‘non-places’ of late modernity which are ‘there to be passed through’. Spatial experiences are crushingly predictable and tied in with a loss of self. But Doran captured in his image, as the OPW manifested in their building, a time when visiting the airport was to partake in the excitement of cosmopolitan modernity, even if only from a noisy concrete deck seven miles from Dublin city.(10)

Footnotes:

1  Erika Hanna, Snapshot Stories. Visuality, Photography and the Social History of Ireland, 1922-2000 (Oxford, 2020), 124. See also Hugh Doran lecture notes, IAA 2005/023.1/3/12(i).

2  Ros Kavanagh, ‘Making an Entrance’, Irish Arts Review (2007), 80-3, 81.

3  Irish Press, 8 March 1954, 1.

4  See Air Navigation and Transport Act, 1950 Sections 10, 11, 12 for some of the land acquisition details.

5  National Archives (Ireland), OPW F99/16/1/36.

6  See IAA 87/88.

7  See Christopher Hussey, ‘Dublin Airport. How Architecture Can be Modern and Classical Too’, Country Life, 7 March 1947, 420-1, 420. My thanks to Candace White for this reference.

8  See for example Graham Dawbarn, ‘Some Aerodrome Buildings’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, XLIII, Third Series, (4 April 1936), 582-92 and the discussions in Rolf Loeber, Hugh Campbell, Livia Hurley, John Montague and Ellen Rowley eds, Art and Architecture of Ireland Vol. IV: Architecture 1600-2000 (New Haven and London, 2014), 163-4; Frederick O’Dwyer, ‘Ahead of the curve: Dublin Airport and the Duval Plan’, Irish Arts Review vol. 29 no. 2 (2012), 114-9.

9  See Irish Builder vol. 89, 6 June 1947 and Architectural Review vol. 94 (1) 1947, 7-8 for structural details and description of the interior.

10  Marc Augé, Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London, 1995), 104.

Dr Lisa Godson is a cultural historian and Programme Leader of the MA Design History and Material Culture at NCAD.