Any good building constructed in Ireland during the 1940s must be seen as almost heroic. That bleak decade of the Emergency and the post-war depression was not conducive to producing great architecture, yet it left us with the original Terminal Building at Dublin Airport and the foundations for Busaras.
The mid-20th century was also an era that witnessed the construction of hospital buildings, bright and airy TB sanatoriums, cinemas, national schools dotted all over the State, peat-fired power stations with huge cooling towers and those beautiful housing estates in some of the Midland towns built by Bord na Mona.
And probably because Ireland was so poor and things had to be made to last, most of what was built at the time was built well. Despite the repressive social culture, most of it was also surprisingly forward-looking, fleshed out in the progressive forms of modern architecture rather than in some pastiche or parody of the past.
This was certainly true of the industrial alcohol factories built in counties Donegal, Louth, Mayo and Monaghan during the mid-1930s, in the earliest concerted effort to bring industry to rural areas. They were designed by Dutch architects and built by Skoda, but not one of these curious elements of Irish social history is still standing. Dublin's Gasometer and vertical Retort House, a remarkable building in the constructivist style, are also gone, although the Gas Company's art deco headquarters survives. Some of the peat-fired power stations are gone, too; their cooling towers, once the marvels of the Midlands, took up to three years to build and just three seconds to blow up.
Have a look at the massive scale of the power stations built at Ringsend and at the Guinness brewery in James's Street in the late-1940s. Or at the early 1950s building on the Heytesbury Street frontage of the Meath Hospital, with its strikingly tall staircase window. What will happen to this, now that the hospital has moved out to Tallaght?
Archer's Garage on Fenian Street, demolished illegally on the June bank holiday weekend and now certain to be rebuilt, was not only an attractive mid-20th century building; in some respects, it was revolutionary - as the first in Ireland to be built of reinforced concrete and to be fitted with fluorescent lighting.
Although only two storeys high, it was a landmark largely because of its chunky corner tower, where even the sign was done in reinforced concrete. Fortuitously, sufficient drawings and photographs exist to help create a facsimile of the building. Its upper floor, ringed by steel-framed windows, might make a good restaurant. Jammet's Grill Bar, designed in 1945 by Noel Moffat, has long since been replaced by Lillie's Bordello. The facade of the Adelphi cinema survives, but only to frame the breeze-block jaws of a multi-storey car park. And there's barely a block of Corporation flats from the 1930s and 1940s that still has its original steel windows.
Still extant as such Dublin examples of the same period are the concrete shelters on Clontarf's seafront, the derelict hulk of Blackrock Baths, the Clarence Hotel (now much altered and upgraded) and the International Style houses on Howth Road and Bushy Park Road, most of them now defaced by aluminium or PVC windows.
The former Kodak building in Rathmines has fared a lot better. After being looked after for years by Quirke Lynch, the upper levels were recently refurbished and inventively reordered by Paul Keogh Architects to provide stylish new offices for an advertising agency. It was one of the winners in this year's RIAI Regional Awards. Too many early modern buildings in Ireland have disappeared. The Imco building, which splashed art deco style along Merrion Strand, was one of the first to go - demolished in the late 1970s to make way for a much inferior office block with floor plates as big as football pitches and occupied for many years by Telecom Eireann.
Another irreparable loss was the former Aspro factory on the Naas Road, which won a Gold Medal for its English-born architect, Alan Hope. This fine industrial building, which was earmarked to be listed for preservation, was pulled down to clear the site for another metal-clad retail warehouse, a type now common in the area.
Much more recently, in 1990, the former Hospitals Trust offices in Ballsbridge - where the Sweepstakes draw was held every month - was replaced by a retro residential development complete with conical towers. The original building, with its immensely long and low-front elevation in the International Style dated from 1938.
One of the most tragic and avoidable losses of the past decade was the former CIE road freight offices on Bachelor's Walk, built in the 1930s as headquarters for the Dublin United Tramway Company. It was demolished by Zoe Developments, with Dublin Corporation's approval, and replaced with a crude pastiche of the original building.
As for what happened on the retail front, Sean Rothery, the architect, author and historian, is convinced that his 1978 book, Shops of Ireland book, provided a demolition hit-list. Casualties include Lochner's pork butchers in Bray, dating from 1948, and Femina in Wicklow Street, Dublin's finest piece of art deco design.
His more recent work, Ireland and the New Architecture (1991), showed that this was far from being an architectural backwater, as is often assumed. Indeed, architects in the fledgling Free State looked beyond Britain to be inspired by the exciting modernism of France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Germany and Austria.
That we have not recognised the importance of what they created here at home, even in the worst of times, Sean Rothery puts down to "the old, old story of always being 50 or 60 years behind." He remembers the time when Victorian architecture was sneered at because its decoration was seen as degenerate and says it takes a while for fashion to catch up. "Irish buildings of the middle years of this century are very important from a social and political point of view. The original Terminal Building at Dublin Airport is not just a beautiful building. What makes it really interesting is because it was a prime example of a new State trying to push itself forward as a modern, progressive country."
He cites the example of Berlin, where there is no question of pulling down the Stalinist era apartment buildings that line Karl Marx Allee. "These are part of the city's cultural fabric and help to tell its story." Similarly, in Ireland, buildings of the mid-20th century "tell us where we were and what our aspirations were. We can't just get rid of them."
It is only in the last decade or so that local authorities have begun to list modern buildings for protection or preservation. For years, they had been told about the importance of preserving Georgian and Victorian buildings, so it is hardly surprising that the lists are dominated by these periods; it has taken them longer to catch up with the modern era.
Dr Rothery believes that the Archer's Garage saga could mark a turning point in official and public appreciation of mid-20th-century architecture. His argument is simple: good buildings of all periods need to be protected, and not just on aesthetic grounds; in a very tangible way, they tell us something about the society that produced them.