Public monuments today must engage notions of democracy as well as of artistic excellence. With the dissolution of communal beliefs in political, religious and scientific hierarchies and with the concomitant, often discordant multiplicity of approach to all art forms, it is very rare indeed for one singular object to harness respect, affection or awe from a general populace. But such, in essence, is the task facing The Spire of Light now finally installed with considerable civic splendour in the middle of Dublin’s O’Connell Street (Figs 1 &3).
The Spire, or Spike, has the further nuance of rising from the site previously occupied by Nelson’s Pillar. The Pillar, a Doric column upon a robust cubic pedestal, topped by Thomas Kirk’s statue of the deceased admiral, was not only a vertical pivot from which the social, economic and transportation web of the capital seemed to emanate (Fig 2). It was also a recognisable type in the classification systems of neo-Classical architecture. Dubliners need not have approved of the bellicose sailor, 130-something feet above the surrounding cornices and parapets, to assimilate the Pillar itself as an important urban element.
Columns have of course long been used to signal formal or authoritarian regimes; they are believed to denote strength and perfection and to make allusions across centuries to times past. Thus parliaments, banks and other institutions often present themselves to the public realm through colonnades, pilasters or porticoes. Francis Johnston, who almost certainly realised Nelson’s Pillar based on an initial competition design by the British architect William Wilkins, chose the Ionic order for his three-storey-high portico of the General Post Office, next to the Pillar on what was then Sackville Street. The Pillar was built between 1808 and 1809, the GPO between 1814 and 1818.
London’s comparatively fussy Nelson’s Column does not have the elevated viewing platform of its earlier, and lower, Dublin cousin. By coincidence it sits in Trafalgar Square amid the stone lions and all-too-alive pigeons before the best-known work of the same William Wilkins. His unduly squat façade to the National Gallery (1832-38) has in recent years been extended as a kind of stone curtain or Mannerist billboard by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. These are the American architects most associated with Postmodern ideas of architecture as communication and of culture as an eclectic fusion of styles. The Spire is something much more pure.

Monumentality Past
It is now difficult for Dubliners to remember or even imagine an early 20th-century Dublin with its many statues of British royal, political and military figures. Most of these Imperial representations were removed after independence, although some - such as Prince Albert on Leinster Lawn or the Boer War arch at the entrance to St Stephen’s Green - remain. These monarchs and generals rampant were in places usurped by Nationalist icons but discerning visitors may today detect some discrepancy between the formal matrix of Dublin’s streets and buildings and that accumulative layer of statues, busts and plaques that typically enliven and explicate the fabric of cities over centuries of use.
It was Dublin’s aldermen who determined the erection of a memorial to Nelson soon after his victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. If much of its populace supported French supremacy in Europe, or at least Franco-Irish accord, Dublin’s administrative and commercial elite aspired to a cessation of violence and, it has been said, a resumption of trade. That perennial if at times sardonic duality of war and profit. In fact the site chosen for Nelson’s memorial was already occupied by a bronze effigy of Lord Blakeney, that now-forgotten Hero of Menorca - this the work of John Van Nost who also created the extant statues of Justice and Mars at Dublin Castle.
Horatio Nelson had little connection to Dublin but Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, did, having been born in what is now the Merrion Hotel. After his martial triumph on the field at Waterloo, a further subscription and architectural competition lead to the superb 205-foot Wellington Testimonial in Phoenix Park (Fig 7). Designed by Sir Robert Smirke, architect of the British Museum, the Testimonial is again a recognised type, in its case an obelisk, derived from antiquity. Thus late-Georgian Dublin could boast two Ur-monuments, a giant Doric column on its principal thoroughfare, an obelisk in its bucolic urban park.
The commemorative column dates back to Trajan’s Column which not only marked the Emperor’s subjugation of the Dacian people - thenceforth ‘Romanians’ - but re-presented his victory in a sculpted frieze spiraling upward about the shaft. In the Christian era, a statue of St Peter usurped Trajan’s place with its panoramic scrutiny of Rome.
An extremely slender cone (three metres in diameter, 120 metres high), the Spire of Light is typologically closer to the blade-like obelisk than the static column (Fig 4). As their diameters decrease upward, the Spire and such obelisks as that in Paris’ Place de la Concorde, Cleopatra’s Needle in London, and the Washington Monument on the Mall in Washington D.C., direct the eye to where their apexes fuse against a potentially metaphor-laden sky.
With its specific Egyptian ancestry, the obelisk alludes to a very ancient civilisation. In Renaissance Rome, during the papacy of Sixtus V, obelisks and other historic fragments were used as markers in an evolving urban scenography. They served both as physical markers visibly interconnected at the end of new axial vistas and as allegorical objects that lent the Church, nobility and certain Humanist institutions some token of meaning and historicity. To Modernists like Le Corbusier, who seemed to divine some Masonic provenance in geometry, such elements operated as spatial stimulants, moments of purity to be revealed in sun or electric light.
As designed by Ian Ritchie, an architect active at the interface between architecture, structure and new technologies, the Spire rises with one contiguous surface transferring at high altitude from stainless steel to a final translucent finial, a conical light that functions in part to caution pilots. This is a metal architecture fabricated, in Dungarvan, to extremely fine tolerances feasible only using the most up-to-date technologies. If one recognises the Spire as an object of remarkable craftsmanship, it is not immediately clear what this monument is meant to signify. This very openness, however, is surely deliberate, in an increasingly multicultural if not secular age.

Monumentality in the Present
Many traditional monuments, for example Trajan’s Column, Nelson’s Pillar, and the Wellington Testimonial, concerned themselves with victory in war. After World War I, after that unprecedented convergence of technology, terrain and mortality, it fell to the Edwardian architect Edwin Lutyens, until then best known for Arts and Crafts houses, to commemorate the dead. His subsequent memorials, including the garden at Islandbridge by the Liffey, typically fused Classical geometries with a sophisticated sense of landscape. In London’s Whitehall, Lutyens constructed the Cenotaph with tapering lines of projection such that, conceptually, the flanks of this curiously enigmatic object emit from, or converge upon, a point several hundred metres in the sky.
At Thiepval, in the Killing Fields of the Somme, he erected a giant portal in brick and stone, a multidirectional descendent of Roman commemorative arches (Fig 8). By then the ethos of such monuments had changed from glorification to an evocation of loss (49,000 Irish men killed in British Army service between 1914 and 1918). Coincidentally, many of Ian Ritchie’s projects from the 1980s and 1990s were realised in the adjacent Somme region. A prefabricated pharmacy pavilion, a primary school with fabric canopies, and a communal sports and cultural facility all characterised by structural economy and wit (Ritchie, an architect, was a founding partner of Paris-based engineers Rice Francis Ritchie RFR). Although based in London, much of Ritchie’s built work is on the continent.
At Thiepval as at Islandbridge, one recognises the power of landscape in the evocation of memory and emotion. With the Irish Hunger Memorial however, inaugurated in summer 2002, nature becomes a kind of Postmodern quote. That Memorial parachutes into Manhattan real, i.e. indigenous Irish plants and even a ruined stone cottage moved from Mayo onto a tilted ersatz landscape. Below are a series of walls with hunger-related texts and a passageway inspired by Newgrange. This is a project trying to do too much.
An earlier controversial monument in the U.S., now one of the most respected, is the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial on the Mall in Washington D.C. Designed by Maya Lin (she won the competition while still an undergraduate at Yale) the Memorial consists of two shining black walls stretching out towards the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, walls on which the names of all American personnel killed in Vietnam are carved. The great lawn of Washington D.C., (a project of the Franco-American Enlightenment) swells and dips down towards the valley of Lin’s V-shaped walls: the visitor descends slowly towards the names into an ostensibly natural haven.
Nature has also its place at the Spire of Light. The lowest of the stainless steel sections has been sandblasted such that an abstract but nevertheless organic pattern emerges, an overlay of the surface texture of a rock sample retrieved from far beneath the site and the double helix of DNA, the very essence of life itself (Fig 9). This dado-like ornament is also a practical device providing a more robust surface than that of the reflective steel above. Yet the real success of the Vietnam Memorial, a design initially derided as indeed was Paris’s Eiffel Tower by many in authority, is the informal manner whereby the families and friends of those lost in Vietnam furnish the wall and surrounding ground with flowers, photographs, cards, and momentoes of love.
This is another manifestation of nature, the human component that allows architecture or sculpture be appropriated by everyday citizens whether Dublin characters of times past congregating at the foot of Nelson’s Pillar (Fig 6) or the astonishing, spontaneous display of solidarity in Lower Manhattan (Fig 5) after the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
Can architecture both function as building and simultaneously be a monument with future meaning? Ian Ritchie is an architect, not a professional artist. The siting of the Spire was predetermined by the footprint of Nelson’s Pillar. The adjudicating jury made an important decision that this monument for the Third Millennium would not have public access, would have neither a viewing platform nor the now obligatory, and cumbersome, attendant elevators and escape stairs. Thus this vital new element in Dublin became one of rare slenderness, with a finesse associated as much with industrial design as architecture per se.
We may be awed by its scale but to Ritchie, long interested in theories of energy and natural science, its emission and reflection of light is paramount. Neither commemorating an historical event nor appropriating museological artefacts, the Spire of Light is about the future. Its elemental shape and allegories of illumination have complex antecedents, but the Spire may fundamentally act as a metaphor of energy, a visionary object achieved using an Irish workforce today.

Raymund Ryan is curator at the Heinz Architectural Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was Commissioner for Ireland at the 8th Architectural Biennale, Venice in 2002