Building for Communication

Established as 2RN in 1926, Radio Éireann had been broadcasting since 1928 from increasingly cramped quarters in the General Post Office, O’Connell Street, Dublin. With the advent of television, a change was required. The acquisition in 1958 of the Montrose estate provided the space for a new radio and television complex, and made the proposed move of the national broadcaster part of a wider institutional shift to the south Dublin suburbs that would also see the relocation of St Vincent’s Hospital from St Stephen’s Green to Elm Park and the transfer of UCD from Earlsfort Terrace to Belfield.

In 1960, Raymond McGrath, Principal Architect with the Office of Public Works, who had worked on the BBC headquarters building in London in the 1930s, prepared outline proposals for administration and studio buildings at Montrose. Additional facilities, including a concert hall would be added as required. However, the Radio Éireann Authority, which had been established on 1 June 1960 (and which became Radio Telefís Éireann in 1966), awarded the development of the masterplan for the campus to Michael Scott & Associates (Scott Tallon Walker from 1975). Within the practice, responsibility for the project fell to Ronald Tallon, who initially proposed a single, expandable, radio and television studio block, work on which began in 1960. Tallon was subsequently awarded the RIAI Triennial Gold Medal for 1959-61 for what became the Television Centre. In response to the rapid growth in RTÉ staff numbers and a subsequent increase in the campus area, Tallon revised his masterplan in 1963 and again in 1974. It is the 1974 iteration that is illustrated in this sketch.

The 1974 masterplan allowed for the expansion of the Television Centre and the 1973 Radio Building, while three linked office buildings would tie the campus together and maintain its architectural discipline. That discipline was rooted in a 6.1 square metre grid, to which all structures at Montrose related, and a design philosophy informed by the American architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Indeed, the RTÉ campus is widely regarded as one of the finest expressions of Miesian architecture anywhere.

The Age of Mechanical Reproduction?

Kevin Donovan

Allegedly, on Easter Tuesday, 1916, the Irish Republic was declared via the world’s first radio broadcast from a building near Dublin’s General Post Office.(1) A decade later, Dáil Éireann placed the State’s first radio station (2RN – a homonym of ‘to Éireann’) under the care of a newly founded Department of Posts and Telegraphs. As the technology of telecommunication developed over the early years of the State, it was harnessed to cement a place for this new country in the world, often in material form through objects and buildings. The country’s first high-power transmitting station was opened in Athlone in 1932 to coincide with the International Eucharistic Congress, its two 300-foot-high antenna towers allowing the event to be reproduced on wireless sets at the far end of Europe (27.1). The station building was reconfigured and reopened for public service the following year by the President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, Éamon de Valera, who declared it ‘the new bridge of Athlone, a bridge between the Irish in Ireland and the emigrant Irish’.(2) For the next twenty years, Athlone was to represent Ireland the world over, lodged on radio dials among cities such as Moscow, Hilversum and Vienna.

The development of telecommunication in the modern period is guided by a desire for accurate reproducibility: the message received at a distance, whether through the phone, radio or newsreel, should be as near identical as possible to the one transmitted. This had been an ambition of the earliest forms of mass communication. As architectural historian Mario Carpo reminds us, the advent of the printing press is considered revolutionary as it meant that ideas in textual form could be serially reproduced in accurate copies.(3) The twentieth century saw a similar drive towards authentic reproduction in different mass media; the progressively refined muffled voices and grainy images of early sound and image recording. It was possible to envision this refinement because of a key characteristic of the age; the modern period was, as philosopher Walter Benjamin famously pointed out, an ‘age of mechanical reproduction’.(4) Industrialisation increasingly facilitated the identical reproduction of objects. Instruments like transmitters, receivers and cameras could be faithfully copied from industrial prototypes, and these could be relied upon in turn to make faithful reproductions of sound and image, often in multiple copies for mass markets.

Though the as-built scheme omits some parts of the drawn proposal, the realised elements still communicate an idea of a universalised architecture in a language of repeated parts. These buildings were designed and erected when the future of the new medium of television and its technological requirements were unpredictable, though there was real confidence in its capacity to communicate universally. The buildings were made in an idiom to suit this ambition. Their dominant external feature is a prefabricated curtain wall of repeated, Swiss-engineered, serially produced, glazed aluminium panels stiffened with C-shaped mullions to protect the elements both in situ and in transit (27.5). The panels are identical and interchangeable, and the façade was designed to be demountable in case the building required future extension. The result is a building exterior that communicates an identicality, universality and adaptability commensurate with the medium of telecommunication for which it is designed. Here, the message and the medium seem very close, with both the national broadcaster and the building itself sending out signals of connection with a wider technical and cultural context.

Though the transmitter shown in the drawing is an instrument rather than a building, it forms a coherent part of the built ensemble by also denoting structural strength and technological ambition in metal construction. It is emblematic of the five, giant steel masts erected across Ireland in the 1960s to support the emerging television network. These were located on mountain ranges to provide the greatest coverage possible, to broadcast most widely, and so became prominent as technologically sublime elements  in the landscape, and significant of connection to a wider network in the minds of those who encountered them.

Behind this projection of industrial, serial production, however, lies a more complex reality. The concrete frame on which the aluminium façade is hung was precast, so standardised, but was then plastered by hand on site with cement and small stones, using an ad-hoc dry-dash technique.(6) This labour-intensive, craft-based finishing aimed to produce a surface as visually consistent as that of the machined windows sitting above then. The concrete frame projected an image of standardisation despite its manual craftsmanship. Similarly, the transmitters in the landscape, ostensibly highly engineered and wrought in the design language of anonymised, identical parts, were, in fact, made up in a relatively small workshop in Gorey, Co. Wexford, to bespoke designs using a combination of hand tools and machines.(7) Yes, they were industrially produced, but not in the standardised way their appearance might suggest.

Under scrutiny, then, the RTÉ buildings and structures, communicate mixed messages, not entirely unlike those of the earlier telephone exchanges. While the drawn image of the Television Centre promotes an architectural language of impeccable, industrially produced, serialised and standardised elements, in line with developments in the technology of telecommunication, the reality of the building’s making is partly one of hands-on experimentation, even ad-hoc tinkering.

As building for communication developed in the modern period, so did communication for building. Tallon’s perspective of the RTÉ Television Centre is crafted by hand, but reproducible for publication through the architectural press. The construction drawings of the project were supplied to the contractor in printed copy. Communication of the project straddled craft and technology. In the case of the Athlone transmitting station, it was photography that guaranteed accurate communication with the architect. During its construction in 1932, the Dublin-based design team relied not on constant site visits but on photos of the works taken by the foreman and sent to the architect by post (27.1).(8) In a period when site photography was still relatively uncommon in Ireland, the information exchange around this project relied increasingly on the emerging technologies of mass communication.

The world of telecommunications has changed radically since the turn of our current century. The digital turn has meant that information is now recorded, stored and disseminated in rapidly changing ways, and is supported by new forms of communication and physical infrastructure, including buildings. Were this essay to be re-written at the turn of the next century, how might it reflect differently on the relationship of building for communication?

Footnotes:

1  The claim is made widely, including by Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1964), 304. The contents of this essay are partly a reflection on an earlier piece of work, Kevin Donovan, ‘Media: America at Home – The RTÉ Television Centre’, Gary Boyd and John McLoughlin eds, Infra-Éireann – Making Ireland Modern (Dublin, 2015).

2  <https://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/681-history-of-rte/683-rte-1930s/290028-rte-radios-athlone-station-and-transmitter-officially-opened-6-february-1933/> (accessed 15 Feb 2026).

3  See Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorythm (Cambridge, Mass, 2011).

4  See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (translated by Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay), Hannah Arendt ed. Illuminations (New York, 1969).

5  A uniselector is an electro-mechanical device that routes telephone calls. The English word ‘standard’ is used in French to mean ‘switchboard’.

6  Recounted in an interview with Ronald Tallon by the author in 2013 in advance of Infra-Éireann: Making Ireland Modern, the Irish pavilion for the 14^th architecture biennale, Venice, were the Television Centre was exhibited.

7  < https://www.rte.ie/archives/2012/1022/342672-building-a-national-television-network/> (accessed 15 Feb 2026).

8  IAA T. J. Byrne Photographs Collection, Athlone Broadcasting Station Construction photographs, April-October 1932 (2012/21.4).

Dr Kevin Donovan is an architect and researcher in the architectural humanities, with a complementary background in textual and visual studies. He teaches in the School of Architecture, Building and Environment, TU Dublin.