Raymond McGrath
Four Dublin Sketches
1941
78/30
Raymond McGrath received his architectural education at Sydney University where his final year thesis was on Chinese architecture. He graduated in 1926. The following year McGrath left Australia on a scholarship to become the first research student in architecture at the University of Cambridge. Through works such as the remodelling of ‘Finella’ in Cambridge for the academic Mansfield Forbes, the interior decoration of the BBC headquarters, London, and St Ann’s Hill, Surrey, he rose to become one of the leading modernist architects in 1930s England. The Second World War took him to the safety of Dublin and the Office of Public Works; he became Principal Architect in 1948.
McGrath produced these sketches to illustrate an article he published in the August 1941 edition of Sean O’Faolain’s The Bell magazine called ‘Dublin Panorama: An Architectural Review’. They show the Irish House, Winetavern Street, the interior of O’Neill’s, Aungier Street, Salthill Railway Station, Monkstown and Longford Terrace, Dun Laoghaire. In the article, McGrath tries to answer a question posed by O’Faolain: ‘What was it that you as an architect liked about Dublin city?’ McGrath’s reply shows that, for one so recently arrived, he had already developed a remarkable familiarity with Dublin’s architecture and architectural history, and a real affinity for ‘all its magnificent and shoddy details’.
