Cork City Council New Civic Offices

The design for the new Civic Offices for Cork City is the product of a ‘Design and Build’ competition set by Cork City Council in Feb 2004. The project was completed in Feb 2007. The brief required that the successful scheme maximise the economic potential of the site while providing an administrative building of the highest quality. The completed building provides 9,200m² of office space, together with 140 car park spaces at basement and roof top levels.

The site was a surface car park located to the rear of the existing 1930s City Hall located on the edge of Cork city centre. It is bounded by a fire station and multi-storey car park to the south, the City Hall to the north, and two busy roads to east and west.

The three facades of the existing City Hall provide independent access to a variety of civic functions: a concert hall accessed through the north façade of the existing building facing the River Lee, a Lecture Hall accessed from the east, and the Council Chamber entered from the west.

Strategically, the building creates a new administrative entrance for the council to the south, ‘revealing’ the ‘back-stage’ elevation as the new, fourth facade to visiting public.

The project is structured around two dramatic spaces: a top-lit Civic Hall and a narrow Stair Hall, formed between the existing classical façade of the City Hall and the new building.

The Civic Hall, conceived as a new heart to the City Hall, engages in an existing diagonal public route across the site, forming a new covered street for the city. The space is of a scale and dimension equivalent to that of the existing Concert Hall. Approached via a gently inclined forecourt, the stone-paved Civic Hall extends the city pavements for the citizens of Cork, allowing this administrative centre to become an event within urban fabric, a place for the citizens to conduct business and to witness the process of local government in action. The space also serves as a ‘grand foyer’ to the concert hall. Here, the public can gather during intervals in performances, receptions can be held, and exhibitions displayed.

The Stair Hall, separated from the public atrium at ground floor by an enfilade of glazed meeting rooms, which mark the meeting of public and administrative space, contains the principle vertical circulation. This hall acts as the principle orientating space for staff, connecting the various levels, and facilitating social interaction. This hall reveals the fourth elevation of City Hall and marks the meeting of new and old.

The building form is composite, consisting of masonry and glass volumes. It forms a bridge between the set-piece of City Hall and the freestanding blocks that stand along Eglington Street and Anglesea Street. The solid, ‘masonry’ block is conceived of as a carved volume, eroded in response to the adjacent City Hall and city edge condition. It embraces or ‘clasps’ the projecting backstage of the City Hall, forming a link with the existing structure. L-shaped in plan, it creates a new street edge to the east and a central court into which projects the curved form of the crèche garden. It also fulfils the function of a ‘service block’, containing the principle services for both the existing City Hall and the glass volume - lifts, plant, canteen, staff resource centre, Comms room.

Photograph: Dennis Gilbert