• James Howley
  

• Darmody Architecture
  

• 
  Winter 2023
  Volume 40. No. 4

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At one time, the sea wall ran along the eastern side of the East Wall Road, marking roughly the halfway point in the steady march of land reclamation that saw Dublin Port extend in two large fingers from Gandon’s Custom House far out into Dublin Bay. The story of how a muddy tidal estuary was transformed into an international port can be summarised in the construction of the city embankments and the two Bull Walls, which also facilitated the land reclamation and created Bull Island.

For many years, the East Wall Road has been one of the dullest thoroughfares in the city, marked at one end by a tunnel and at the other by the traffic jam at the East Link Bridge. Anonymous, unbroken walls conceal wide expanses of little-used railway sidings, container storage and warehouses. While the 3Arena, the Exo Building and the Point Square complex have brought a little corporate and cultural life to the Liffey end of the East Wall Road, the remaining stretch has been a desolate and neglected thoroughfare, with only the Dublin Port Company building rising above the walls to provide any sign of life. This late-Brutalist essay by Scott Tallon Walker rises to seven storeys and is set behind a high stone wall on the dock side of the road. While it was a bold move by the Port Company to build here in 1980, the rather bland building, with its simple frame, heavy top and deep-set glazing, did little to improve the public realm on East Wall Road. Beyond the building stretches the main working port, where the ferries, cruisers and many of the container ships dock.

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