Site Specific 2020: The Loos Bar - Open House Dublin 2024

Site Specific 2020: The Loos Bar

Trinity College, College Green, Dublin 2

Dates & Times
Tour type
  • Film

Hidden away in Trinity College, we explore a replica of a legendary Viennese watering hole. In the common room on Trinity College campus is a bar, inaccessible to the public, designed by deBlacam and Meagher in 1984. Modelled on the American Bar by Adolf Loos from 1907 in Vienna, this icon of classic modernity is reproduced as a mirror copy. Shane deBlacam, known as the godfather of Irish architecture, takes us through the story of how this became an offshoot to their refurbishment of the Dining Hall (Richard Castle 1741) after its near destruction following a fire in 1984.

Site Specific is a special commission of ten short documentaries by the Irish Architecture Foundation for Open House Dublin 2020. Dyehouse Films reveal the personalities, processes, complexity, creativity and transformative impact that surround the act of designed space. The protagonists: the site, the architect, the historian, the user, speak directly to the camera, they speak directly to us. Site Specific crosses the city, scales and building types from play parks, social housing, places of worship to a building not yet built. Taken individually, each 5-minute video has something of the condensed power of a short story. As with the best short stories, it is through the intense focus on the particular qualities of a particular space at a particular time, that much larger social and cultural themes are illuminated. Site Specific makes evident architecture’s great central responsibility – the shaping of the spaces that in turn shape society.

Editor Aoife Carolan, Director Bonnie Dempsey, Director of Photography Tom Comerford, Rerecording Mixer Nikki Moss, Producer Aimie Gavin, Grade and Post Production David O’Sullivan. Special Thanks Shane deBlacam, DeBlacam & Meagher Architects, Lisa McCaffrey, Dr. Edward McParland, G&T Crampton, Professor Joe Brady, D-Light Studios, Images The Irish Times, Alamy, Audrey Drohan, UCD Digital Library, Loos American Bar Vienna, Colum O’Riordan, Irish Architectural Archive Music by Woody Black 4 (Austria).

Produced by Dyehouse Films 2020 ©

Opinions expressed are the contributors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Irish Architecture Foundation or Dyehouse Films.


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