Journal •
Dublin Bay – Approach, Settlement & Relationship
The Bull Wall, stretching 3 kilometres into Dublin Bay, was built 200 years ago to help provide a navigable channel into the city. Tidal action since then caused the gradual creation of Bull Island, a 5km sand-spit running parallel to the north shore of the Bay. The Poolbeg Chimneys, rising over 200m above Dublin Bay, were built roughly 50 years ago as part of an electrical power generator to serve the growing city. Decommissioned in 2010, they remain a unique identifying feature of Dublin, clearly visible to those approaching the city by sea and by air.
Looking south-west from Sutton out across the expanse of Dublin Bay, these two features are the clearest examples of man-made structures shaping the physical and visual landscape of the bay, and the seaward entrance to the city itself. Evidence remains of people having lived here for at least 5,000 years. A dolmen dating from the megalithic era lies in the grounds of Howth Castle. The defensive mounds of a 1,500-year-old promontory fort are still visible on the approach to the Baily Lighthouse.
Our ancestors, who built the dolmen and the fort, looked out across the same bay then that we do now. The profile of Bray Head and the Sugar Loaf forming the horizon with the southern sky remain recognisable to us today. Our relationship with the sea has dictated positions and forms of many of the structures we have built around the bay.
The now-ruinous Mariners Church in Bayside, (and the adjacent graveyard), dating from the 13th century was a landmark for sailors entering Dublin Bay before the formation of Bull Island and the final resting place of many unidentified sailors whose bodies were washed ashore after their ships fell afoul of the weather and the sandbars within the bay.
The threat of a Napoleonic invasion from the sea resulted in the construction of Martello Towers ranged around the Bay at the start of the 19th century. The invasion never came, and the towers are now variously used as private homes, museums, and in the case of Sutton, as an Airbnb rental.
Our project at Four Winds on Strand Road has learned from the structures which people have placed around the Bay far back into pre-history. A house which had been in the same family for 3 generations, the project is conceived as a buttressing of the structure which was retained and the buttressing of a family’s connection to this place. Two exposed, heavy arrangements of columns and beams prop and run back from the retained front façade of the original house, framing the main living spaces of the home.
The soft grey colour of the concrete acts as a muted, but reassuringly massive structure into which the home and its spaces are wrapped. It is expressed externally and internally, giving the family a subliminal reassurance that their home will withstand all that the winds sweeping across Dublin Bay can throw at it. It creates an almost intuitive link between it and the older structures arranged around the Bay, creating a connection between the lives of those who lived here long ago, and those who now sit and look out at squalls and sunsets above that same familiar landscape.
Modernist concrete bathing shelters on Bull Island,
designed by Herbert Simms, © Brennan Furlong 
