After a century of exporting its young professionals, the country is enticing them back in droves as well as attracting emigrants. Still, the Irish, known for their fierce, sentimental love of tradition and for their stubborn independence, view the Europeanization of Dublin with a mixture of pride and alarm. Planners were determined not to turn the neighborhood into a EuroDisney of faux-Georgian architecture, but to encourage innovative design. Of the units, about half were developed privately and the others were commissioned from a variety of architectural firms. Part of the building is fully wrapped in untreated iroko wood, part in stucco accented by large iroko-framed windows, and part in thick mortared brickwork.
References abound to medieval and contemporary Northern European design.
A lot of the buildings there had been pretty boring. Mr. de Blacam, who worked with Louis I. Kahn in Philadelphia in the early 1970's, is known for his innovative use of timber in such buildings as the Beckett Theater at nearby Trinity College, and in another multistory Temple Bar building that received an award last year from the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland. There were 150 acres of derelict land. Now, there's hardly any. Today, down the street from the Wooden Building, jazz musicians give free concerts in Meeting House Square under an aluminum awning by Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect and engineer.