The Irish Architectural Archive, in association with the Irish Architecture Foundation and Temple Bar Cultural Trust, presents a series of photographs of Temple Bar, taken just over twenty-five years ago, on the eve of the quarter’s regeneration.
The Temple Bar of the late 1980s was a place of narrow streets lined by mainly nineteenth-century industrial, commercial and domestic structures. Signs of neglect and urban decay were everywhere, engendered by the intention to develop the area as a major bus transportation hub. The building stock was allowed to slip into disrepair, and a significant number of structures were removed altogether. Many of the remaining buildings – however run-down – were rented out on cheap short-term leases which in turn brought to the area an increasingly bohemian fusion of culture, cafés and small-scale commerce. Out of this eclectic mixture an alternative vision for the future of the area emerged. In 1990 the Temple Bar Area Renewal and Development Act was passed, leading to the creation of Temple Bar Properties, the development company for the area, which organised the 1991 framework plan competition.
These photographs were mainly taken in 1985 by the Irish Architectural Archive as part of an Inner City Survey project. They date from a period when the transformation of the Temple Bar area into a bus station was very much a live proposal. When shot, therefore, the photographs were assumed to be a record of streets and buildings which would shortly no longer exist. Instead, they have become a portrait of Temple Bar on the eve of transformation. They show just what it was that all those who entered the framework plan competition had to deal with – an urban landscape which, humming as it well may have been with cultural and artistic vibrancy, was most obviously characterised by decomposing buildings and surface car-parks.
The framework plan competition was won by Group 91 Architects, a collective of eight young Irish architecture practices – Shay Cleary Architects, Grafton Architects, Paul Keogh Architects, McCullough Mulvin Architects, McGarry Nà Éanaigh Architects, O’Donnell and Tuomey Architects, Shane O’Toole Architects and Derek Tynan Architects. Central to their winning proposal was a recognition of the need to preserve as well as transform. Consequently, much of what stood in 1985 still stands. This gives the Temple Bar depicted in the photographs an odd resonance, at once almost unrecognisable and yet immediately familiar.
