• Nicola Gordon Bowe
  

• Evie Hone
  

• 
  Autumn 2013
  Volume 30. No. 3

Design
Evie Hone
Government Buildings Dublin
Nicola Gordon Bowe
Stained Glass

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How many State visitors photographed at the foot of the main staircase in the entrance hall of Government Buildings, Dublin notice the imposing full-length stained-glass window (Fig 1) towering behind them? Unless the light is behind it, the emblems of the Four Provinces of Ireland may not be immediately decipherable, only the shimmering colours of the glass on which they were boldly painted in 1938 by the 44-year-old Irish artist, Evie Hone, her first major work in stained glass (Fig 2). They may not realize that this ceremonial ‘imperial’ staircase was erected only in 1989 when the central lecture theatre of the former Royal College of Science was ‘scooped out’ of the domed central block of the early 20th-century university building as part of its radical refurbishment into Government Buildings by OPW architects, Klaus Rolfe, David Byers and Angela Rolfe. Rolfe had been offered Hone’s exceptionally long rectangular window in 1986 out of OPW storage when she was working on the adaptation of Dublin Castle into an international conference and reception centre. Measuring 21 by 8 foot, it turned out to be too big to install in the large staircase window beside the new conference hall. It reverted to OPW storage until three years later when Rolfe realized how effectively it could be installed between two clear windows lighting the beechwood staircase she had designed for what was to be the high profile, high security and high cost epicentre for the Taoiseach, his Department, Government Information Services and Dáil Deputies’ offices. And there it has remained since 1991, in pride of place.