Because Dublin doesn’t have a Metro, anyone travelling to the city from outside Ireland using public transport is going to get to know its bus station, Busáras, pretty well. It is also, as you get off your airport bus or arrive from the ferry port, your first impression of an Irish modern architecture.

Speaking for myself, I was bowled over when I first visited just over a decade ago. From a distance, it is a simple pair of Portland stone and glass boxes, but the details when you’re up close are remarkable, from the fan-roofed rotunda of the ticket hall to the use of mosaic tiles, sometimes forming artworks, and sometimes used just to clad a column. I could see how shabby it was—the grime is hard to avoid—but I was still shocked to find out how it regularly features in newspaper ‘ugliest building in Dublin’ listicles. Anywhere should be proud of a building like this, but apparently, Dublin—or at least its opinion-forming caste—were not.

This is the conundrum at the heart of Eoin Ó Broin and Mal McCann’s The Dignity of Everyday Life: Celebrating Michael Scott’s Busáras. Put together by a photographer and a Sinn Féin TD, with extensive interviews with both the building’s designer and its current users and workers, it is an open and optimistic account of how this impressive building came to be built in mid-century Ireland—not exactly known for its enthusiasm for modernism—and how compromises and changes to the design led to its current state of neglect and misunderstanding.

Everyone uses Busáras, Ó Broin points out, but it is still in a way an ‘unseen building’. The book’s introduction describes how he learned to ‘see’ it on an Architecture Foundation tour in 2019, where he was shown for the first time some of its details in mosaic, bronze, and wood, such as the glorious signage on the doorway to the office block that makes up a large part of the complex, Áras Mhic Dhiarmada, the headquarters of the Department of Social Welfare. How this department came to be there in the first place explains some of the building’s problems.

Busáras was the product of an attempt to rationalise Ireland’s various transport companies under a single public-private corporation, Córas Iompar Éireann. In 1944, CIÉ commissioned Michael Scott as the architect for a new central bus station. Scott, the foremost International Style architect in the country, was known for his own house in Sandycove and for the Irish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Expo. He entrusted the design to younger architects in his team such as Wilfred Cantwell and Kevin Roche, later to become a major designer in the USA (who unfortunately returned in late life to foist the appalling Convention Centre on his hometown).

Working with the Danish engineer Ove Arup, their building combined influences from Le Corbusier—the office block above the station is closely modelled on his Swiss Pavilion in Paris—and Scandinavia, with abundant use of humanising decorative details and expensive materials, including the same Portland stone used in the city’s Georgian public buildings. As the team conceived it, this was to be a generously public building, where ‘after buying a bus ticket, passengers were to have access to a rooftop restaurant and balcony in the city’s highest building, with spectacular panoramic views from the sea to the mountains’, with a cinema (later a theatre) in the basement, another public restaurant in the mezzanine, and the usual bus station mix of kiosks and cafes in-between. Artworks were commissioned from Ireland’s finest modern artists.

Nearly all of this was built, but in the end, much of it would not be for a bus passengers. While under construction, the building, one of the most ambitious projects in post-independence Ireland, became a political football. First commissioned by the relatively modernising Sean Lemass of Fianna Fáil—who Ó Broin calls ‘a quasi-social democrat’—it was redesigned under a coalition government between the other centre-right party, Fine Gael, and two parties of the left, Labour and Clann na Poblachta, who turned the office block intended for the transport company over to the new Department of Social Protection. The entire complex wasn’t completed and opened until Fianna Fáil returned to power in 1953, several years late.

Though a few trims were made to the design in its long gestation period, the first setback for the building’s public ambitions was in the way that the rooftop restaurant became a facility for the office workers at the Department above, and not for the public. If you look up from the bus stops, you can see the restaurant at the top of the building, defined through a series of canopies decorated with bronze columns and exquisite abstract mosaics by Patrick Scott. You can only imagine how different things would be if this remained a public rooftop pavilion, as at the Royal Festival Hall in London (a slightly later building that Busáras very closely resembles in both ethos and materials).

Similarly, a planned restaurant in the mezzanine with ornate balconies was turned into a ticket office, and then closed altogether. ‘It is not hard to understand’, Ó Broin points out, ‘why so much of the building remains unseen when the travelling public is literally not allowed to see it’.

This is particularly the case for the long-closed Eblana Theatre, which Bus Éireann plans to demolish entirely (over the objections of the Arts Council). Younger Dubliners won’t have heard of the Eblana, which was closed permanently in 1995, but it was once part of far more vibrant arts scene in the city—hosting premieres of works by John B. Keane and offering early stage opportunities to everyone from Liam Neeson to Gabriel Byrne. Before that, the theatre had been a cinema, one part of Dublin’s mid-century film boom which remains fondly remembered by those who witnessed it. If anything in Busáras symbolises Michael Scott’s original ambition to build a thriving civic hub and how decades of paper-pushers reduced the building to its leanest functionality, it is surely this space.

For the moment, you can get as much sense of this building’s ambitions from looking at McCann’s photographs of its still highly impressive interiors as you can from looking at its sooty Portland stone facade. For Ó Broin, the restoration of the building with its original public spaces intact would give Dublin something it currently lacks, politically as well as architecturally. Busáras literally stands between the Custom House, an elegant monument to British colonialism, and the International Financial Services Centre, a cheap and nasty monument to globalised capitalism. Busáras represents neither of these things, but encapsulates a road not taken, towards a modernist, truly decolonised social democracy. In Busáras you can see more than a good mid-century building in a city that lacks for them.

‘It doesn’t matter’, Ó Broin concludes, whether you like the architecture or not. ‘What matters are the ideas that drove it’. By looking at Busáras and truly seeing it, you can see ‘a glimpse of what our future could look like’.