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A new City Mortuary and Offices for the State Pathologist are to be located within a landscaped site at some distance from the 18th century Casino at Marino in North Dublin. The Casino is a tiny and delicate Portland stone pavilion - once with views to the sea and the mountains - part of the demesne of Lord Charlemont, incorporating pavilions, ponds, bonehouses and grottoes in a ‘natural’ landscape. Its parkland context is now whittled away. The lake was filled in, a Victorian Gothic school sprang up just 30m away, a 1920's garden suburb bisected the demesne, a nursing home, schools and a church ate away the edges. Within this disturbed landscape, a Conservation Plan has been prepared which seeks to make a microcosm of the original context of the Casino building. To one side of this, the new City Mortuary occupies a series of walled

gardens which discretely enclose its private functions, from arrival of a hearse to the private grieving of a relative in a garden. It is a place of stillness and sadness, where the building- walls, roof and ground plane- marks, with small depressions in the ground, a calm sinking back into earth for those who have died tragically, while framing a closure for those left behind. The depressions or eruptions of the ground plane are still water pools, lush planting, stone seats. Internally, the plan is programmatically marked off into rooflit autopsy rooms and ancillary functional spaces, with laboratories, offices and record holdings around a courtyard. A roof landscape has been developed as a further garden of lower, hidden spaces and raised green planting in a chessboard form. In collaboration with Todd Architects.
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Senior College Dun Laoghaire
 
 
 
 
 
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