Building Of The Month - July 2017 - CIE Chassis Production Factory

But the existence of each was also threatened following the election of the first Inter-Party Government in February 1948, ending 16 years of Fianna Fáil rule. Busáras became an abandoned, ghostly structural shell for several years, its fate uncertain until it was eventually allocated to the Department of Social Protection; implementation of Donnybrook’s prototype experiment was cancelled and its reusable vaulted formwork destroyed; and Inchicore, although built, never made it into production, even as its machinery sat at the CIE Broadstone Works until it was eventually sold off, having cost almost as much as the factory building itself. Instead, a deal was struck with Leyland to supply bus chassis at cost to CIE, with the supplier recovering the profits on spare parts and stock supplied on a rolling basis. As Michael Scott later said, “[The government] scrubbed all the machinery and gave the factory to the Board of Works for storage.” Strange days indeed.

Yet the legacy of these three buildings is great. When commissioned, Michael Scott was working out of 29 Clare Street. With these three projects he transformed both modern architecture and the structural and mechanical and electrical engineering professions in Ireland by bringing the Danes, Ove Arup and Jørgen Varming, to Dublin, where they all set up together for a while in 19 Merrion Square. Scott also invested in younger architects. Buckley and O’Gorman was invited to design the adjacent mini-me Tool Room to manufacture precision tools for the factory. It seems James M Brennan, a former employee of Scott’s, was also involved, according to Aodhagán Brioscú, who oversaw the factory’s completion.

Noel Moffett once told me he worked for a while for Michael Scott, without offering specific details. (He said he saw the press posters announcing the outbreak of WW2 outside Scott’s office on Merrion Square; but he was in London then. Perhaps he meant the end of the war?) Some graphical tics that we associate with Moffett (BArch 1938) are apparent: in the perspectives, the stencil (sparingly used) and the proposal for a gatehouse, which displays an uncanny, if crude, affinity with his house designs for Brian Boydell and House Moffett of 1944, none of which were built. But the hand-lettered ‘f’s in the title block do not resemble Moffett’s. Still a mystery then. But the answer surely lies somewhere within these charmingly naïf handwritten title blocks.

The Chassis Factory is an elegant, rational, industrial building, its mechanistic qualities reflected in its steel frame, patent glazing (part aluminium, part steel), capacity for extension by 50% (westwards, where the concrete standing was omitted for this reason), under-floor heating, compressed air hoses incorporated within the stanchion casings, the sleek, triple-height, east-end crane bay, and a memorable water tower supported on stilts. The football-pitch scale of the bright, flexible interior – measuring 330ft by 150ft with a single central row of columns at 30ft centres, and its 12-bay, saw-tooth roof and western gables sheeted in Big Six corrugated fibre cement – remains impressive. According to Scott, it was considered for the RIAI Gold Medal (which he would later win for Busáras) for the period 1947-49, although the building was not actually handed over to CIE until May 1950.