First published in Architects Journal July 2011 / Copyright Stephen Best

his then firm NORD LLP, a young Glasgow-based practice. Its design was chosen from a shortlist of six, culled from almost 100 international entries.

Set on high ground a mile out of town, the new building forms part of a public-service campus for 3,000 people, which includes the regional hospital and recently built Department of the Environment. The approach route is at first unpromising; a wide, soulless, traffic-engineered entrance road is squeezed unceremoniously between a stained concrete retaining wall and the hospital’s drab mêlée of mono-pitches. But then unexpectedly, the road drops away to reveal the most magical view.

A modernist pavilion sitting on a limestone plinth atop four broad terraces, the building’s prospect could almost define the picturesque. Its panoramic view stretches from the broad estuary, rimmed with a necklace of dark green woodland, past a stage-set of gently rolling hills, before terminating on the distant horizon, broken by the purplish silhouette of Mount Leinster and the Wicklow hills beyond. It makes a truly breathtaking setting, in which the building commands the landscape and urbanises the suburban context.

In a council headquarters civic building like this, the problem of the dichotomy between public and private is handled simply and clearly. The building comprises six brightly lit open-plan departmental blocks, pushed to the perimeter of a large public room and separated by four external courtyards. Its low horizontal form, expressed as blocky massing behind which lurks a ghostly assemblage of heavy geometric shapes, rises in parts from a two-storey datum to five stories at the entrance.