Capstones Shift

The early 20th-Century Irish revolutionary period left many legacies, not the least of which was its direct impact on buildings. From the loss of buildings destroyed to the debates about how to repair the city fabric and on to the rebuilding itself, there is ample scope to reflect on the physical impact of the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War, on central Dublin in particular. This exhibition draws exclusively on the holdings of the Irish Architectural Archive to focus on a selection of prominent Dublin buildings destroyed, or utterly changed, by the events of Easter 1916 and later. These buildings were central to myriad social, commercial, political and religious patterns of life. Their absence, or removal from use, would have had an immediate and disconcerting effect on the daily routines and interactions of thousands of ordinary Dubliners as they lived, moved, worked, prayed and entertained themselves in the post-Rising city: quotidian disruptions making unavoidable and unignorable the profound political phase-shift that had occurred.