In Donnybrook, an inner suburb of Dublin, the studio complex of Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), the Irish national broadcaster, is dominated by five buildings that exemplify late modern architecture in Ireland. The masterplan for their strictly rectilinear combinations of concrete, steel, and glass was laid out by the architect Ronnie Tallon in 1960, following which Scott Tallon Walker (STW) designed the various buildings in the subsequent twenty years. When first opened, they were celebrated for their cutting-edge aesthetics and engineering, combining functionality and beauty on an integrated campus that advertised Ireland’s modernity [1]. Today the buildings are under-appreciated, though they were added to the Register of Protected Structures (RPS) in 2019 [2].

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Recent controversy has once again put a spotlight on the future of RTÉ, including its campus architecture. Twelve months on, the organisation may now be recovering, with a ‘New Direction’ strategic plan and several reports on its governance and finances providing a roadmap for reform [3]. The Irish government provided the national broadcaster with €56m of emergency funding in November 2023, but this is a small fraction of RTÉ’s needs. It has a long way to go to persuade a doubtful public and politicians of its sustainability, and future funding has been made contingent on organisational changes that may or may not work, including a 20% reduction in the broadcaster’s workforce, a redistribution of some activity to smaller studios in Limerick and Cork, and increased outsourcing of its productions to independent companies.

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Though downplaying it, the strategic report keeps open the possibility of a partial or total sale of RTÉ’s studios to improve the company’s finances and its corporate size and shape. It calls for “a streamlined RTÉ … operating on a smaller footprint within the Donnybrook site and with more modern facilities that require less maintenance … enable modern working and production practices and meet regulations, compliance requirements and sustainability targets”. It admits that “relocating RTÉ off the current Donnybrook site … does not appear to be economically viable” but it remains open to “exploring options for the vacated areas or land sale”. Politicians and independent media producers have often asked if we might ‘lift and shift’ RTÉ’s headquarters to a less prominent location, and in 2017 RTÉ sold 8.64 acres of its Donnybrook site for €107m as a temporary solution to its long-running cashflow crisis. Its latest plan notes that its remaining 24 acres are currently valued at only €100m due to challenging conditions in commercial real estate and the addition of RTÉ’s most important buildings to the RPS, but the possibility is left open that a higher price might be achieved in the future.

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Of course, in a capitalist economy, most properties are disposable, and our built environment rapidly changes. Nonetheless, further sale of RTÉ’s lands would be a bad idea. Its Donnybrook base is not only a group of world-class buildings but an internationally important centre of cultural production. Elsewhere, similar studios are accepted for their specialised engineering, their need for frequent capital investment, and their skilled workforce that cannot be easily replaced. Some major studios have been repurposed – for example, the recent conversion to apartments of the former BBC Television Centre in London’s Shepherd’s Bush. But the BBC has been under siege from private media conglomerates and frequently hostile governments for forty years. In other cities, especially in the EU, public service broadcasters have kept studios running, modernising in situ, sometimes with nearby additions. Hence, the longevity of the Maison de la Radio in Paris, the RBB Television Centre in Berlin, and the Via Teulada studios of RAI in Rome, all originating in the 1930s-60s and transformed for the digital age.

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Even in Los Angeles, the famous CBS Television City, designed by William Pereira, continues to grow in studio buildings first opened in 1952, while Sony, Fox, and Paramount operate studios that were founded in the 1910s and 1920s, with many of the original buildings still in use today. Los Angeles has less prominent public service media and more property speculation than most cities, but its studios remain central – economically, culturally, and geographically – while modernising, densifying, and diversifying. Unfortunately, RTÉ has been caught in an unproductive financial tug of war in which citizens and public representatives praise its work but question its value for money. Competing private sector media companies naturally call for the state broadcaster to be restructured. However, the international history of studios should encourage us to protect not only RTÉ’s buildings but its Donnybrook site as a whole – an invaluable concentration of talent, expertise, equipment, and services that is in prime metropolitan real estate for good reason.

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The economic geographer Allen J. Scott highlights the distinctive ‘clustering’ of media industries around dense networks of specialised facilities, skilled workers, and suppliers that are often unique in a given region or country. Scott’s influential analysis of Hollywood emphasises the long-term benefits of integrating media industries in large cities – as does the recent PwC report The Role of the BBC in Creative Clusters (2022) [4]. Relocating RTÉ would run counter to their findings, dispersing a cluster instead of consolidating it. In Ireland, we have relocated large public facilities – moving UCD to Belfield in the 1960s, moving TU Dublin to Grangegorman – but those moves centralised disparate units. Efforts to decentralise – for example, government departments – have proven much more controversial. The high value of RTÉ’s estate is sometimes cited to argue for its sale, but this misunderstands the industry. Media studios are not like other manufacturers for whom large amounts of mass-produced inventory account for much of their total value. RTÉ’s physical estate makes up a greater proportion of its worth because the commodities it produces are relatively small, unique, and transient: digital images and sound, not objects made of metal, plastic, or timber.

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Several film and television studios now operate outside of Dublin – Ardmore Studios in Wicklow, Troy Studios in Limerick, Titanic Studios in Belfast – and new studio construction has been having a moment worldwide, driven by demand for new product from streaming media services, government incentives, and institutional investors looking for new opportunities at a time when other kinds of commercial real estate are in difficulty. But reports suggest the trend may be slowing; the most recent new studio planned for Ireland – Hackman Capital Partners’ Greystones Media Campus – has been delayed by the recent actors’ and writers’ strike in Hollywood [5]. So new studio construction does not always go smoothly. And all of these are private sector companies mostly making movies or television dramas, often for overseas clients, frequently subject to seasonal or economic fluctuations in activity and not heavily involved in broadcasting, news gathering, or live entertainment – so not directly comparable with a public service broadcaster like RTÉ.

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RTÉ did have an ambitious investment plan for Donnybrook, Project 2025, but it was shelved during the financial crisis circa 2010 [6]. It would have provided a large integrated multi-functional studio facility with state-of-the-art technology, greater floorspace and production capacity, and a better environmental rating. However, shockingly, it would have required demolition of most of STW’s original buildings which, it was claimed, could not be modernised or upgraded to the standards required by digital media – an unconvincing claim given comparable developments in other countries (eventually RTÉ did manage a relatively modest but effective upgrade of its Studio 3 building for television news in 2019). A substantial revision of the Project 2025 plan now could strike a better balance between innovation and preservation while serving the needs of RTÉ and the Irish public. Reduction or closure of the site should be ruled out, and the studio buildings should be renewed. Though still photogenic, they are not in good condition. RTÉ’s small but elegant modernist canteen was closed several times last year by rat infestations and its other buildings also need repair. This costs money but would give the country a flagship media facility of enduring value.

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To this end, RTÉ would do well to make its Donnybrook site more approachable, and this might aid the company’s PR. Studios are usually secure and secluded from the public – to protect their intellectual property, for the privacy of celebrities, and to encourage a sense of mystery and audience anticipation. Nevertheless, comparable studios run popular studio tours, on-site physical archives, and performance venues. Some of these were anticipated by Project 2025. Adding them now – as well as, say, a museum and educational centre – could enhance public understanding of RTÉ, improve media literacy, and protect RTÉ’s campus and buildings for successive generations to enjoy. Ancillary benefits might include independent media companies leasing some of RTÉ’s site but maintaining the media cluster, and improved pedestrian street life between Donnybrook village and UCD, which have densified over the years. Relevant international comparisons suggest we should double down on RTÉ’s Donnybrook site rather than reduce or vacate it.

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This would also serve environmental priorities. It is increasingly recognised that the ecological cost of growth is often high. To ‘lift and shift’ RTÉ to a new location, rather than update and expand its current facilities, would consume a lot of building materials and energy while disrupting supply routes and workers’ commutes, increasing RTÉ’s carbon footprint. This would contradict its sustainability goals, which include a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. Since Project 2025 was launched, the tide of international opinion has turned against demolition, as adaptive reuse initiatives such as House Europe and the New European Bauhaus demonstrate [7]. RTÉ’s sustainability goals could be better achieved by maximising its options in situ. Another way the state might do this would be to buy back the portion of RTÉ’s campus that was sold to a private company for residential development. The state often buys land for strategic infrastructure, and the land that was sold has been idle since 2017. That sale was first proposed in 2002 at the height of the Celtic Tiger property boom and it would arguably never have happened if RTÉ had been properly funded in the first place. Instead, its revenue shortfalls, which have now been constant for twenty years, were a function of neoliberal trends towards deregulation and privatisation that have since come in for scrutiny in Ireland and worldwide. We now have a chance to address these for the good of our media and built environment alike. Even Tánaiste Micheál Martin recently opined that RTÉ should not rush into further land sales because “very often selling land is something you will regret later” [8]. This is not to argue for a state monopoly – Ireland needs a thriving, diverse, creative, and entrepreneurial media sector. But it also needs vibrant public service media anchored in vibrant public places.

In the privileged and privately owned site of the Pumphouse in Dublin Port, architectural students spent a week thinking about alternative means of building public space through appropriation, without the limitations of traditional building and material supply chains.

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The Pumphouse sits in the Alexandra Basin within Dublin Port, a space offering residencies and opportunities for cultural and public events. A large, mostly empty, pseudo-public space left over from the remnants of a filled-in graving dock, the site consists of a historic industrial structure and an open paved area, under the shadow of vast infrastructural elements, cranes, silos, and passing ships. It was once a site of maintenance and repair for ships coming to and from Dublin Port. The pump houses, after which the nascent cultural space is now named, would drain and refill the water from graving docks to allow workers to access below the hulls of ships. The older pump house of the two, where our workshop took place, is now considered a site of historical interest, while the other remains a concrete remnant, inaccessible to the public, perhaps also quietly waiting to be granted historical significance.

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The week's workshop however, could be indiscriminate – with an arsenal of temporary paints, and a collection of borrowed, rented, and waste materials from sites around the city, we could occupy the site as we pleased, with the understanding that everything could be taken away shortly after, leaving no trace. These materials would be bound together with removable and demountable connecting elements – the connecting elements being the only new parts purchased for construction. The site was free to become a testing ground; for methods of community construction, public space interventions, parasitic and guerrilla architectures, and to facilitate the performance of construction without the implications and consequences of long-term interventions.

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Inside the older of the two pump houses, the back corner was set up to host lectures from international speakers and members of the workshop, on a borrowed monitor and speakers facing rows of leftover solid wood benches. Behind us lay a backdrop of materials gathered from recycling centres, construction schools, salvage yards, building sites. The workshop’s initial exercises allowed us to familiarise ourselves with these materials, first as individual shapes, then as relational objects, and finally as broken still lifes, stacked and arranged outside on a grid previously painted over the tarmac. These compositions formed the first temporary imposition on the space, necessarily functionless, forming spatial relationships between building, space, body, and material.

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The exercises shifted between scales, from 1:1 assemblages to analytical and experiential drawings which zoomed out to the scale of the site. The painted grid overlaid on the site accented its abstract nature as an empty and previously un-intervened upon space, a piece of land reclaimed from the sea, distant from the dense architectural narratives layered upon the nearby city centre. From the vantage point of an opening on the first floor of the pump house building, we discussed these surveys which were drawn on 1:25 representations of the painted grid. The grid, 25m squared, formed a referencing tool to quickly and easily survey important conditions on site, outlining the primary workspace, presenting opportunities to work in the margins, major and minor spaces, imposing a temporary order onto the site which we encouraged students to disregard, engage with, or undermine as they saw fit.

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Reflecting on the idea of building out loud, a term coined by the Belgian artist and designer Jozef Wouters, in which building and designing occur simultaneously in dialogue with one another, we engaged in a process of making, discussing, drawing, revising, dismantling, and making again; while also devising a brief and negotiating spatially between a series of undefined proposals. Given that many of the materials needed to be returned at the end of the week, and encouraging a general principle of demountability, a system of connecting disparate objects needed to be established. Through using a stock of ratchet straps, threaded rods, nuts and washers, clamps, rope, and bungee cords, a language of combining and dismantling objects was developed. As the proposals materialised, some began to form standalone objects, which could be moved and placed on site; erratics of disjointed scrap timber, blocks, and rubble. Framed by the grand and imposing space, these oddities were defined, given importance as monuments which became emblematic of the work built throughout the week. Other proposals were more deliberate in their functions: a bench, wall, roof, table, lantern, or seesaw.

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A closing event drove the direction of the design – considering how visitors might engage with the objects, where to gather, to dance, to sit and talk, where a DJ could stand. With the constraints of the amount and size of existing materials, the challenge became unifying disparate constructs into one proposal for occupying the Pumphouse. Methods of connecting were shared and re-used across different designs as each participant found their own ways of building with the materials gathered; techniques for threading rope, stacking blocks, or making clamps with threaded rods became a common language in many instances. This was important as the materials themselves were so varied – the challenge became how to unify them and build a public space containing our own individual ideas, to be used in conjunction with one another.

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As the week came to an end, the act of designing through making paused. A process which might otherwise continue to revise and resolve problems through testing and altering froze in time. As tools and equipment were taken away, the aberration of a proposal presented itself, the result of an experimental process engaging critically in ideas founded on public space in the city represented now as an assortment of objects, imprinted onto the large open space between the two pump house buildings. The immeasurable quality of the old graving dock is briefly given definition, engaging with these ideas of the city in this elsewhere space. As the final evening progresses, the interventions seem to settle in as they are leaned on and danced around, one structure being carried inside by the party’s attendees, enclosing late night conversations and cigarettes against a backdrop of an active port – simultaneously in the centre and the fringes of Dublin city.

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‘It is indeed by uneasy steps that the pub has wandered through the paths of history, buffeted by storms of public controversy, assailed by the slings and arrows of temperance reformers, sometimes harassed, and sometimes supported by instruments of legislation. That it has survived in so ubiquitous a way is remarkable’ [1].

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The success of the architecture of Victorian Dublin is typically understood through the grandeur of the Curvilinear Range at the Botanic Gardens, the Reading Room at the National Library or perhaps the Museum Building at Trinity College, each an example of intricate architecture, engineering, and craftsmanship. Deane, Woodward, and Turner are rarely forgotten in the discourse around the built fabric of Victorian Dublin, nor are Harry Clarke, the O’Shea Brothers or Carlo Cambi. However, this article focuses not on such grand artefacts and their architects. Instead, it is inspired by Dublin’s sixteen remaining Victorian pubs [2].

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This visual essay takes The Swan Bar as a case study and aims to highlight the wealth of materiality to be found in these pubs, enjoyed by generations passing through. This map highlights the sixteen remaining Victorian pubs across the county of Dublin.

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‍The Sixteen Victorian Pubs of Dublin

1. The Hut
2. Gaffneys
3. Slattery's
4. Ryan's
5. The Norseman
6. The Palace Bar
7. Bowe's
8. The Stag's Head
9. The International Bar
10. Kehoe's
11. Toner's
12. Doheny and Nesbitt
13. The Long Hall
14. The Swan
15. Cassidy's
16. Finnegan's

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‍The Swan Bar (Lynch’s of Aungier Street)

The Swan Bar on Aungier Street in the heart of the city centre takes its patrons on a journey of materiality: mahogany, mirror, mosaic, clocks, brass, stained and tinted glass. Owned and run by the Lynch family for generations, the original materials which have remained in place from its 1890s refurbishment bear visible representations of the time that has passed. The tile and timber floor, patched in places, slightly sunken in others, is both a testament to its original craftsmanship and a palimpsest displaying evidence of former configurations. Quality materials not only last the test of time but often improve; a mahogany handrail is worn smooth by the million hands that have run across it. These architectural details were crafted with care and yet made to endure the thumping, scratching, cleaning, and polishing we have done for over one hundred years.

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Under the front window where there now sits a cosy snug, a tea shop once faced the street. A common feature of the Victorian pub was to lend its shopfront to the selling of groceries - further suggested by the call bells in brass on mahogany and pitch pine. Division and threshold are strong features of the Victorian pub, and The Swan is no different. Within the central aisle, a forgotten porch is inscribed on the tiling revealing a large depiction of a swan which one would otherwise encounter upon entry. This patina allows for immersive engagement with the pub's history, going beyond appreciation for the craftsmanship itself.

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It's an easy thing to romanticise Victorian craftsmanship. In reality, the maintenance of these buildings poses its issues, with contemporary publicans often having to navigate tricky legislation surrounding protected structures. The reasons for repairs vary, from obsolescence and natural decay, to wear and tear and intoxicated disregard. The manner and material of replacement speaks to the priorities, interest, and means of the owner. In the case of The Swan, the damaged yet original tile work tells of the stabilisation works undertaken beneath the ground floor, and a scratched mirror tells of blatant vandalism. While there is no lack of interest on the part of the owner, replacing triple bevelled mirrors and yellow stained glass panes, and bringing original brass pumps back into use is additional to the everyday demands of the service industry. Irish Licensing World claimed ‘A publican must be a democrat, an autocrat, an acrobat and a doormat’, in order to manage the wear of these pubs and fulfil contemporary conservation requirements; that list could continue [3].

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There is a balance to be struck between reconfiguration to fit current purposes and the erasure of former use. A surface on which to light a match can be rendered obsolete by the lighter, a cashier's kiosk by modern-day payment methods, a whiskey cask by bottled spirits. While these physical Victorian details may be anachronistic, they add to the experience, as do the clock hanging centrally above the bar and, importantly, the Scottish granite countertop to keep a resting pint cool. Whether functionally obsolete or not, their presence ought to be valued by the publican and appreciated by the patron. The decision to retain such details is not driven by nostalgia but by appreciation of craft, in seeing the hand of the craftsperson in the everyday. 

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As artefacts in themselves, in their ornamentation and craftsmanship, these pubs should be valued. The decay and destruction of the city in the lifetime of these pubs is starkly contrasted by their permanence both materially and in operation. Their provision of an ‘escape from bleak tenement life’ and ‘a surrogate domesticity’ suggest that they were as rich and lavish an oasis then as they feel today. These materials, explored in the photographs below, offer a window through which we can gain another perspective on Victorian Dublin, scarred, rounded and smoothed by time. It is through our patronage that these pubs will continue.

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