The Irish Times

Any good building constructed in Ireland during the 1940s must be seen as almost heroic. That bleak decade of theEmergency and the post-war depression was not conducive to producing great architecture, yet it left us with the original Terminal Building at Dublin Airport and the foundations for Bus Áras.

The mid-20th century was also an era that witnessed the construction of hospital buildings, bright and airy TB sanatoriums, cinemas, national schools dotted all over the State, peat-fired power stations with huge cooling towers and those beautiful housing estates in some of the Midland towns built by Bord na Mona.

And probably because Ireland was so poor and things had to be made to last, most of what was built at the time was built well. Despite the repressive social culture, most of it was also surprisingly forward-looking, fleshed out in the progressive forms of modern architecture rather than in some pastiche or parody of the past.

This was certainly true of the industrial alcohol factories built in counties Donegal, Louth, Mayo and Monaghan during the mid1930s, in the earliest concerted effort to bring industry to rural areas. They were designed by Dutch architects and built by Skoda, but not one of these curious elements of Irish social history is still standing. Dublin's Gasometer and vertical Retort House, a remarkable building in the constructivist style, are also gone, although the Gas Company's art deco headquarters survives. Some of the peat-fired power stations are gone, too; their cooling towers, once the marvels of the Midlands, took up to three years to build and just three seconds to blow up.