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. Turning these pages feels like looking through an old family photo album. It is intimate, surprising, nostalgic. 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 created 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 (intro)
Hardback