Civic dignity: part of a programme of imaginative municipal building in Ireland, these new offices inventively address concerns of form, site and environment.

With the construction of new local authority buildings all over the country, Ireland is undergoing something of a municipal renaissance. Encouragingly, rather than opt for lowest common denominator methods of commissioning and design, the Irish authorities have put the majority out to competition, thus raising architectural standards and presenting a younger generation of designers with a chance to tackle sizeable projects. Briefs emphasize openness, transparency and environmental responsibility, with reduced energy use in construction and operation. The outcome is a lively new coterie of civic buildings that confound and transcend the more familiar notions of municipal drabness.

Completed at the end of last year, Bucholz McEvoy's county hall and offices in Dooradoyle, County Limerick personifies this new Celtic wave. An earlier municipal building in Fingal (AR February 2001) represented an audacious coming of age for the Dublin-based partnership of Merrit Bucholz and Karen McEvoy, manifesting skill and style beyond their years (both not yet 40). And though this latest project is, as some critics have noted, the equivalent of that difficult second album, happily there seems to be no loss of energy or ingenuity in its conception and execution.

The site was unpromising: a typical nondescript, suburban edge condition where sprawling retail development marks the boundary between town and countryside. The new building's nearest neighbour is a huge, introverted shopping centre, but the presence of a new county library suggests an attempt to establish a decentralized node of civic functions that might extend beyond shopping. Rather than present an object marooned in a sea of parking, Bucholz McEvoy set their building 70m back from the road, taking advantage of a 2m drop in level across the site. Long earth berms conceal cars and animate the pancake flatness of the suburban topography. Over time, the banks of vegetation will mature to form a green edge along the road and connect with the open spaces to the east of the site.

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Despite being the political centre of the county, Limerick's local authority is an eclectic and evolving organization, with nine different departments. These were originally housed in the city centre, but had no clear sense of community or civic identity. Bucholz McEvoy's new building is a decisive riposte to bureaucratic anonymity. Glimpsed from the road, the squat terracotta tiled drum of the council chamber set against a delicate carapace of timber trusses, like the bleached skeleton of a prehistoric beast, powerfully proclaim the presence of something modern, different and self-assured.

The cylinder of the council chamber forms part of a secondary three-storey block that protrudes at right angles into the bermed car park from the main five-storey body of the building. Isolating the chamber in this way restores a sense of human scale within the more impersonal civic context. An earth ramp leads up to the main entrance, with visitors passing under the long, rectangular box of the secondary block which is propped up on slim pilotis. The feeling of compression generated by this approach is spectacularly dispelled by the generous proportions of the building's set-piece space, a soaring, quadruple-height atrium that runs along the entire length of the main block. Overlooking this civic forum are stacked floors of open plan and cellular offices. Light percolates through the timber exoskeleton that shades the angled glass membrane on the west side of the atrium, casting a shimmering pattern of striated shadows around the tall nave-like space.

Designed in collaboration with engineers RFR, the eye-catching brise-soleil ingeniously integrates structure and solar control.

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Structurally, it acts like a giant ribcage consisting of 25 vertically spanning timber trusses. Each 15m long truss is made up of glulam Scots pine members anchored to a vertical steel tube. Support is provided at the bottom by a horizontal transfer beam resting on sculpted concrete columns and at the top by steel members tied back to the main concrete frame. Together, the 25 trusses act as a composite structure 75m long, transferring horizontal loads from the glass facade. Vertical loads are carried by the steel roof structure. The angled members of the individual trusses help to optimize shading for both south and west sun angles without the maintenance bother of moving parts.

This sophisticated pleasure in the way things are made and put together is also reflected in the gently contoured underbelly of the office floors, created using special fibreglass moulds from a boat builder. (Prototypes for these featured in the Irish entry to the last Venice Biennale, AR October 2002.) On the more hermetic east facade, the concrete slabs project beyond the building line to form light shelves that reflect illumination back into the heart of the building. The thermal mass of the exposed concrete soffits also plays a key part in a strategy of passive environmental control.

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The building is entirely naturally ventilated, with fabric, structure and skin tuned to control the internal environment. The atrium is the engine of ventilation acting as a thermal chimney, taking air from the offices and exhausting it at the top. Narrow floor plates (17m wide) are easily cross ventilated from east to west or from offices to the atrium. Vertical louvres incorporated into the east facade allow for ventilation in the damp local climate.

Taking extensive soundings from the prospective occupants through questionnaires and discussion, Bucholz McEvoy evolved a set of guidelines for the formal and experiential character of the office interiors. Physical openness, which was considered essential for good staff communication and the building's environmental strategy, was balanced against the need for visual and acoustic privacy, and the need for individuals to have a sense of control over their immediate surroundings. The outcome is far removed from the monotony of generic open-plan prairies, with soft lighting, large sycamore desks and linen-clad partitions equipped with individual glare control screens made from fabric panels on moveable arms.

Against the background of an evolving workplace that must also act as totem of civic dignity and efficiency, Bucholz McEvoy's new building succeeds in intelligently resolving concerns of form, site, construction and environmental control. The partnership's difficult second album proved not such a stumbling block after all.