Dublin City Council is reported to be about to buy into the semi-developed Camden Yard building site on Upper Kevin Street in Dublin. Other reports suggest it could relocate there from its ghastly campus on Wood Quay, and that new civic offices would be built on the Camden Yard site, along with 300 public homes.

This news might raise the hope that Sam Stephenson’s half-built architectural monstrosity and the later ugly building on the quayside, which houses some of the council’s 6,000 workforce, will be demolished half a century after its erection.

Doubtless there will be experts who argue that the brutalist concrete melange at Wood Quay has some perverse architectural merit, which requires its preservation. And I confidently predict that the green lobby will insist that demolition at Wood Quay is environmentally unsustainable due to the carbon consequences of its destruction.

We are told that the council must get out of Wood Quay to comply with a European Union requirement that all public offices must be zero-emission structures by 2050........

© The Irish Times