Dr Carole Pollard - Rise from Tumbledown Decay - Dublin's office buildings of the 1960s and 1970s
Central Bank, Dame Street, Dublin under construction in 1974. Sam Stephenson of Stephenson Gibney & Associate
Rise from Tumbledown Decay - Dublin's office buildings of the 1960s and 1970s
A talk by Dr Carole Pollard
Monday 6 July 2026, 7.00pm
at the Alan Baxter Associates Gallery, 77 Cowcross St, London EC1M 6EL and online.
Docomomo members go free. To book a member’s ticket please click here. To become a member see here.
Tickets for attendance in person and online are available here. Tickets will also be available on the door for £15. For online attendance, please book your ticket before 18.00 on the day of the event. A link to watch the talk online will be sent to attendees before it begins.
This is the third lecture of the Summer 2026 Series - Irish Modernism in Architecture. Read more here.
Office blocks of the 1960s and 1970s are hard things to love for many people. The popular narrative is that office blocks of those decades were ill-conceived, destructive to their locales and poorly built. However, the story is much more complex than that. In Dublin, those office blocks tell a story that is uniquely of the city and of Ireland’s C20th evolution. Carole's presentation looks at the transformation of Dublin during this tumultuous period through the prism of the legacy of Andy Devane and his contemporaries.
Dr Carole Pollard is a graduate of Dublin School of Architecture at TU Dublin and holder of MA in History of Design from NCAD and a PhD from the School of Architecture, Planning & Environmental Policy at UCD. She is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland (RIAI) and served as RIAI President for 2016/2017. She is the Convenor of the recently reestablished RIAI Professional Practice Examination programme.
Carole was researcher and co-editor of the three-volume book series More Than Concrete Blocks, Dublin city’s twentieth-century builidng and their stories (2016, 2018, 2023) and co-editor of Irish Cities in Crisis (2024).
Stephen Court, St Stephen's Green, Dublin (1973) Andy Devane of Robinson Keefe & Devane Architects