• Frederick O’Dwyer
  

• 
  Summer 2012
  Volume 29. No. 2

Architecture
Architecture & Design
Architecture
Dublin Airport
Frederick O'Dwyer

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In Ireland the subject of airport architecture has always been associated in the public imagination with the original Dublin Airport terminal at Collinstown (1937-42), an exciting International Style exemplar, harmonizing aesthetics and functionality with its curved plan, tiered viewing terraces and external spiral staircases. It won the RIAI gold medal for the young Desmond FitzGerald (Fig 7), airports architect of the Office of Public Works, in 1943. While its construction was due to the enlightened policy of Seán Lemass, minister for industry and commerce, the design was kept under wraps until after the end of the war, creating a mystery about its origins and indeed doubts that FitzGerald, who never designed another building of such quality, could have done it unaided. Sean Rothery, who had worked with FitzGerald as a student in the post-war era, found him reluctant to discuss his inspiration for the airport or indeed his young assistants, when he interviewed him in 1985. In his later book, Rothery stated that many contemporaries believed that he was ‘not the main author of the design but that it was largely the work of the young team under him’ though he conceded that this view was not conclusive.  It was certainly very different from an RIAI prize-winning 1934 airport FitzGerald designed as a student project, a conventional brick-faced rectilinear structure placed tangentially to a circular airfield of the type then popular in Germany.