Love them or loathe them, but don't knock them

Why do we love some buildings and hate others? Why have some become icons, while others will forever remain symbols of a hated regime? Do our relationships with buildings, even after demolition, help define them – or us?

SOMETIMES, AS the song goes, we don’t know what we’ve got ’till it’s gone; and usually it takes the threat of losing something to make us realise how much we are going to miss it. If this perverse streak in human nature is true in love, it’s also extremely common with buildings. Often, all it takes is a bit of time for buildings and monuments to grow on us, especially if they were shockingly new or different when they first made their appearance. Many of these buildings have gone on to become part of the world’s treasures.

The word “Gothic” as a description for such architecture as Notre Dame and Salisbury Cathedral, was originally coined as a term of abuse. Christopher Wren had St Paul’s Cathedral in London built under wraps in a partly-successful bid to prevent critics compromising his work. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Georges Pompidou were both initially greeted with disdain from many quarters, while Gaudí’s glorious Casa Milà (also known as La Pedrera) in Barcelona was unloved and neglected until the 1980s – it is now part of a collective of Gaudí buildings designated by Unesco as a World Heritage Site. In other instances, such as the Old Library in Trinity College Dublin, cities grow up to meet the scale of new buildings, so what was once hulking and dominating begins to fit in.

Politics can also put us off buildings. We'll probably always be iffy about the architecture of the Third Reich, or of fascist Italy (although I'm quite fond of such examples as Milano Centrale, the railway station that was started by King Victor Emmanuel III, but finished by Mussolini). On the other hand, the architecture of the Mall in Washington DC was also created to represent the awesome power of the state and is celebrated by many. The politics in question can also be a matter of the nationality of the architect. Sunlight Chambers, on Dublin's Parliament Street, with its Italianate friezes depicting the history of hygiene, was described by the Irish Builderas "the ugliest building in Dublin", but this was almost certainly because the architect, Edward Ould, was British – a problem that also hampered Lutyens.

The problem with waiting for time to heal the wounds of politics, nationality, or even of architectural innovation, is that we can be left without huge swathes of our built history. And while some might feel those histories are better demolished, the gaps they leave are irrevocable. Even a hated period of building tells us not only about those in power, but about our own relationship to them. In addition to this, the reversals that can happen in our ways of thinking can make those gaps something to be lamented rather than celebrated.

In Ireland, the Civil War saw the burning of many of our Great Houses, of which the surviving examples are now at the forefront of the Ireland we sell to international visitors. In the capital city, the Vicreregal Lodge and Merrion Square were slated for demolition by de Valera’s government. Plans were put on hold with the advent of World War II, and abandoned once the war was over. The Viceregal Lodge is now Áras an Uachtaráin.

Farther down the social scale, and more recently, picture-postcard stone cottages around the west of Ireland have slid into decay as bungalows sprout in the fields that once supported them. The streets of our country towns are similarly lined with neglected terraces of townhouses, their simple elegance falling into disrepair as new families rush to new suburbs. Seeing some restored in Carlow town made me realise what we are in danger of losing in so many other places.

MANY GEORGIAN BUILDINGS weren’t loved in time to save them and, as with other instances, it can take a demolition order or a calamity to bring out the partisans for such diverse examples of architecture as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (never fully let, and never fully loved until destroyed), Liberty Hall and Archer’s Garage on Fenian Street in Dublin. Archer’s was Grade 1 listed, but hardly cared for, until it was demolished. (The owner was compelled to rebuild it.) Such 1950s Art Deco buildings are just coming into their own, as a new glamour is attaching to this type of architecture. Cork city is particularly rich in it: see, for example, the AXA building on Oliver Plunkett Street, and the ever-expanding online directory complied by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH), buildingsofireland.ie, is a great place to look up examples. Another 1950s innovation around Ireland (you can see it from Nenagh to Sligo to Tyrrellpass) is the tin shed with an Art Deco front. I can’t think of another piece of architectural history that describes a time and place better – large farm or industrial sheds with the “glamour” of an avant-garde frontage, used as dance halls and cinemas in an Ireland emerging into modernity.

There are some architectural examples out there though that seem as if they will never become loveable. I’m possibly in a minority of one, but the curved, tiled façades of the Donnelly Centre on Dublin’s Cork Street, built sometime in the 1960s as a sausage factory, have a beauty, and make me think of an era when that part of the city was thriving with industry. Wait a few more years and they could become a beloved timepiece. Likewise, the Dublin City Council flats on Kevin Street, with their mosaics of Dublin’s buildings and mountains beneath the balconies, seem to be waiting to become reimagined as desirable.

Looking around our cities, towns and countryside, I can, of course, see many buildings I would wish demolished as soon as possible, but I also see some sliding into neglect that we may regret. It’s not that we have to preserve every single aspect of our past, but one day, however unbelievable it may seem at present, we may regret losing our buildings from the 1960s, or even (just imagine!) the 1970s and 1980s.