Join us at Chapters Bookstore, to launch This Modern Love: Architectural Gems of 20th Century Ireland by architectural historian Emma Gilleece, published by New Island Books.
The book grew out of Emma’s 100 Buildings series for RTÉ Culture. The series looks at significant buildings across Ireland, most of them from the early to mid-20th century. It covers schools, hospitals, factories, churches, government offices and transport buildings. Readers will meet the original terminal at Dublin Airport, the Poolbeg Chimneys, the Padmore and Barnes boot factory in Kilkenny, the former Kildare Fever Hospital in Naas and the original CIÉ bus station in Clonmel.
Emma places each building in its wider story. She shows how the State’s hospital-building programme of the 1930s, the Free State’s drive for industrial self-sufficiency and the birth of Irish civil aviation shaped the places we still pass every day. Irish architects and clients took up international Modernist ideas and gave them a voice of their own, shaping the first century of a new State.
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