Crushing time at the County Hall

THE 16-storey Cork County Hall was built in the pioneering age of skyscrapers when architects had no computer-generated drawings to aid them.

It was a spectacular achievement by its architect, Patrick McSweeney.

It was completed in April 1968 and cost a mere £500,000.

The great cost-saver was the extension of the floor area beyond the outer walls which for the most part were glass curtains and some masonry on the north and south elevation.

Each successive floor became the work platform with 28 support columns in the form of 14-inch beams and reinforced concrete floors six inches thick. In this fashion a new concrete floor was completed every two to three weeks.

The character of the mammoth glass facade was clearly visible with its reinforced tracery in a cruciform spanning the building.

The deducing tips of the cruciform did not quite meet each other to allow for the swaying, expansion and contraction of the entire structure.

Each cruciform weighed about half a ton; the dressing was mounted on four giant metal bars that were set into the concrete of each floor.

The remains of these bars can be seen where they were cut off with angle-grinders this year and lifted off carefully with the giant crane that reached up to the top of the 15-storey building.

While some of the cruciforms showed evidence of damage and corrosion many of them looked to be in near perfect condition - yet they all ended up in the crusher.

All the experts, as well as councillors, planners and managers, seemed unable to come up with an idea for their re-use as building materials in a way that local authorities have been preaching to the building industry as a whole.

Recycling building materials at the lowest possible level only recycles the ills it is trying to cure.

Yet Patrick McSweeney saw fit in 1967 to use cruciforms in the most public room in the building - the council chambers - where they were used as columns.

With advances in technology, reinforced concrete and steel framing now allow the stresses in a building for the most part not to be carried by the walls, but by the frame arranged in a series of steel boxes allowing for buildings to be constructed much more cheaply and simply.

In Ballymun in Dublin some 480 flats, including two tower blocks, are being demolished manually with the aluminium from the window frames being recycled, ie, melted.

An island nation cannot afford to be as wasteful with its resources as the managers of the County Hall facelift.

Tomás Ó Scannláin

Woodbrook Road

Bishopstown

Cork