‘The East-Link Toll Bridge is the ugliest bridge in Dublin by a long way’

When Dublin’s Tom Clarke Bridge was being built in 1984 (formerly the East-Link Toll Bridge), it was designed purely with cost in mind. It is the ugliest bridge in Dublin by a long way. It’s ugly to use as a cyclist, a pedestrian and a vehicular driver. As the city has moved towards the Tom Clarke Bridge, we’ve suddenly realised we’ve got all these beautiful bridges on the river but right at the end we’ve got this ugly one.

Right now I’m designing a pedestrian and cycling bridge to go parallel to the Tom Clarke Bridge – in many ways to hide it from view, but also to give extra capacity for pedestrian and cyclists. When you’re on the Tom Clarke Bridge, the views of the city are spectacular, so the new bridge – which will open in maybe three years’ time – will allow you to stop and look at the city. It’s a wonderful opportunity to help disguise an existing ugly bridge, but also to produce something kind of magical next to it.

Bridge design is a little bit more than just a structural exercise of spanning from one side to the other, it’s the idea that you can bring a bit of magical meaning to the bridge.

I’m 62, an architect and from a load of places. I grew up in Germany until the age of 12, where my Dad was working as a musician, and then lived in Portstewart, Co Derry, until the age of 18.

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I remember the day I decided I wanted to be an architect. At the age of 13, I was taken by my parents to an absolutely beautiful modern church called St Aengus’s Church in Donegal, designed by architect Liam McCormick. I remember sitting in this circular church thinking: “Wow, this is just incredible.” It gave be goosebumps.

In the 1970s I was the first person from my parents’ families to go to university, and studied in UCD and Edinburgh. Between the two degrees I spent an incredibly formative year in Connemara building drystone walls, classrooms, learning to speak Irish and playing traditional music. In a way it was kind of my gap year. In other countries people join the army, but I decided my national service was to do this. After spending time there, you have a renewed appreciation for shelter. You appreciate every wall you can build.

When I started working in London, my boss singled me out to design a bridge. I really loved the experience.

When I moved to Dublin – not really knowing anybody to tell you the truth – I had this fantasy that I would love to design a bridge over the Liffey. Pure fantasy. I started a practice in partnership with James Howley and we won the competition to design the Millennium Bridge. It was finished four days ahead of schedule only because we built the foundations when the tide was out and we could see bedrock. I cross that bridge every day.

I started my own practice and was subsequently commissioned to design numerous bridges including the Rosie Hackett Bridge, and more recently a bridge in Galway city and Athlone.

It takes an enormous amount of energy to build anything, and there’s a big carbon footprint anytime you build housing, bridges – whatever. It’s really important that you get it right so that nobody feels the need to knock it down in the future, and that means you’ve got to get people to have an emotional connection with the bridge. In a way, that will keep it alive for hundreds of years. A really good example of that is the Ha’penny Bridge. It’s more than 200 years old, loved, become a symbol of the city, and it’s as good to use now as it was in 1816 when it opened.

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My favourite bridge in Ireland would be the Peace Bridge in Derry. I was the architectural judge in that competition and it just jumped out as a really magical design that has great symbolism, elegance and beauty – and was much needed to connect the two banks of the city. I don’t think you need anything high-kicking, peacocky or frankly over the top. The best bridges are the ones where money is an object. You are forced to make the structure more refined, and the bridge will end up looking more elegant.

When you’re an author, somebody can choose whether to open your book and read it or not. When you’re an architect designing bridges, everybody sees what you’ve done. Everybody can use what you’ve designed. So the responsibility to get it right is absolutely enormous.

The majority of the work at my practice isn’t bridges, it’s social and affordable housing. We’re doing 1,000 houses and apartments around the country at the moment. That’s incredibly important to help the ease the housing crisis.

As an architect, you’re juggling 1,000 things in the air at once, and the design process takes many months. If you’re cooking a really good soup, it’s much tastier on the second or third day in the pot than the day you’ve cooked it because the flavours need time to merge into each other. Good design is about that, but time costs money. When you have very competitive fee bidding between architects, you can get a race to the bottom with lower fees. Sometimes this doesn’t give the winning architect enough time to spend on the design process. In the end, something that might take another two weeks to design at the beginning is going to be there for 200 years. It’s worth spending the time at the beginning to design something properly.

– In conversation with Conor Capplis