Gandon Editions
HENRY J LYONS ARCHITECTS – The Early Years, 1917-1960
HENRY J LYONS ARCHITECTS – The Early Years, 1917-1960
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by Maolíosa Ó Floinn
ISBN 978 1910140 253 84 pages (hb) 23x25cm 78 illus
Few books on buildings speak as directly to the heart and soul of the citizen as this gazetteer of Henry J Lyons’ early architecture speaks to the Dubliner. Within its pages, there is familiar site after long-forgotten place, and turning these pages feels like looking through an old family photo album. It is intimate, surprising, nostalgic.
The emotional effect of a seemingly straightforward architecture catalogue was likely not its author’s primary intention. But in his gathering of archive photographs, never-before published drawings and newspaper accounts of the firm’s buildings from the 1910s to about 1960, Maolíosa Ó Floinn has inadvertently made a rich account of early to mid-twentieth-century Dublin.
Here we find a city in the process of modernising, and, as with all such transitions, the traces of an older world order seep through. In the end, the book presents a portrait of Edwardian respectability overlaid with more than a hint of jazz-hands modernism. A white sawtooth-roofed manufacturing building follows on from a four-storey, steel and granite department store, and all around are sweet factories, garages, filling stations and cinemas. Many are lost but some remain, relatively intact. — Ellen Rowley (foreword)
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CONTENTS Foreword by Ellen Rowley 6 |
