Brightening the capital
QUESTION What is the story of the strange friezes on the Sunlight Chambers building at the corner of Parliament Street and Essex Quay in Dublin? SUNLIGHT Chambers were built for Lever Bros, the soap manufacturers, now part of Unilever, and completed in 1901.
The building was designed by Frederick Ould, of the Liverpool architectural practice of Grayson & Ould. Frederick Ould also did much work for Lever Bros at its Port Sunlight headquarters on the Wirral peninsula, almost opposite Liverpool.
The name came from the company’s most popular brand of soap. Port Sunlight not only had a new factory for Lever Bros, but a model village for its workers, and even an art gallery and a theatre, making it a complete miniature new city in its own right.
It was often stated, erroneously, that the Dublin building had been designed by the father of Samuel Beckett, the author, but this story was completely untrue.
When Ould was designing the building in Dublin, he was very influenced by the medieval Florentine palaces in Italy. Not only was the building a stand-out design, but at the insistence of Lever Bros, it also had two friezes on the three faces of the building.
These friezes, one between ground-floor and first-floor level, the other between the first and second floors, were designed to tell the story of soap, its manufacture and the way in which it was used for washing. The friezes were entitled ‘The Toils of Mankind’.
In creating the designs for the two-dimensional images of people and animals in the friezes, Ould used the colours and the styles of the Italian Renaissance.
The friezes depict people ploughing, gathering olives, launching a boat and collecting water from a well. Some people are shown working in a medieval-type outdoor wash house.
Apart from the friezes, Ould also designed several roundels at ground-floor level, depicting female figures in languid poses. On the Essex Quay side, there’s a Hiberno-Romanesque detail totally at odds with the rest of the building’s design. The friezes and roundels were designed and manufactured by Conrad Dressler, a sculptor and potter, and he made and fired them at his pottery in Buckinghamshire.
When the building was completed in 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, it was greeted with widespread public derision. Its exuberant use of colour and ornamentation was much mocked. There was also criticism that the building had been designed by a non-Irish architect.
The Irish Builder, on February 27, 1901, carried a letter that read: ‘The ugliest building in Dublin is not a hundred miles from Grattan Bridge.’ In the same publication, on April 24, 1901, someone in the building trade wrote in: ‘The earlier letter presumably refers to Sunlight Chambers. I admire the good work in the building and think that the figures are well modelled. The stonework at the doorway is very artistic.’
In contrast, the interior of the building was very dull and plain.
Parliament Street had previously been known as Essex Gate. Mason & Son, a firm of opticians and scientific instrument makers, was founded almost 250 years ago and is now known as Mason Technology. It moved into this site at the corner of Parliament Street and Essex Street in 1813 and stayed there until 1894. The building was later demolished.
Lever Bros acquired the site in 1899 on a 150-year lease for a rent of £43 a year and had Sunlight Chambers constructed.
In 1990, Tony Hanahoe, a former GAA football star, was behind a IR£5million plan to develop a new complex beside Sunlight Chambers. For much of the 20th century, the friezes and roundels were covered in grime, but subsequently, the building was returned to its original brilliance.
Today, Sunlight Chambers retains its extraordinary façade, with its two friezes. It remains one of the most exotically designed buildings in Dublin.
Christopher Walsh, Dublin 8. QUESTION How did the suits in a deck of cards get their names, ie. spades, diamonds, etc? PLAYING cards have a long history that has been traced back to China in the 9th century. These were known as money cards and had suits that were divided into coins, strings of coins, myriads of strings and tens of myriads.
This was later adapted in the Middle East, where strings of coins became clubs (perhaps due to a misinterpretation of what the illustration of a string of coins was – it could be seen as a stick or club); myriads became cups (due to a similar misinterpretation); and tens of myriads became swords, due to the Chinese character for ‘ten’ looking like a sword. Coins stayed the same.
There was then a Latin version, and subsequently a German version, of this, which included a fifth suit called shields or leaves, to add to coins, clubs, cups and swords .
The French adaptation of this German version, from around 1480, is the origin of the card suits we use today. At that point, coins became diamonds; cups (which represented love) became hearts; and clubs retained the same name but took on the clover symbol. The name spade appears to have been carried over from its Latin title, spade being Latin for sword. On the other hand, the spade symbol appears to be derived from the German-style leaves. Ger Kinsella, Ballybrack, Dublin. IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, Embassy House, Herbert Park Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles.legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.