It was just a typical Sunday. The kind where you are off to meet your mother-in-law for lunch near the sea and the last thing you expect is to fall in love.

We were a little early, so we went for a walk to visit the library. He had never visited before, and it had been some time since my last procession, so, in we went, curious. Designed by architects Carr Cotter Naessens and completed in 2015, the dlr LexIcon is a kind of wedge of stone that slopes up to the sky and sea, and an anchor of brick that seems to lock the building back into the coast and into the town of Dún Laoghaire. As well as books and spaces to read, this library has community rooms, spaces for art and artists, and a gem of a small theatre.

Honestly, I was not sure the building would even be open, it being Sunday. Inside, the entrance hall is tall, with long, long stairs, the kind on which people make dramatic entrances in movies. The building is busy – there are more people inside here than outside there. There are no barriers to our progress – our movement up and through the concrete and timber rooms is free, easy. No control gates, no guards, no one asking what we are doing going for a wander inside in a building like this. It is so public, he remarks and I think about this all the way up the building, noticing how rare this is, this freedom to be inside a building.

On the top floor, there is a ceiling of deep, deep concrete baffles, as if the waves of the sea itself had been poured into moulds to make a room for this sea-town. A child is climbing into a box of books, with such agility I am sure it is not their first time to do so. Another child is horizontal, face down, singing into a shelf, as if they have indexed and checked themselves in. No one is bothered by this. I wonder if I should hang up my coat and join what appears to be a very public party.

We keep moving. All around us people are reading, books, newspapers, an iPad. Some, very many, students, sit in rows looking out to town and sea, experiencing that thing the best libraries offer, focus and distraction. Daylight is drawn across the pages of books, paying attention to every word, and with just a lift of the head, readers are generously offered a prospect out beyond themselves, releasing imagination toward new horizons.

Later, I post some photos of the rooms to Instagram stories and people send messages in reply to say how much they use this building, and how often. One person says that the building is a support to them, they would be lost without it, and that it cares for them. This is such an astute review, I think, of what is really a very, very good building indeed.

It matters not if you like it, love it or loathe it, the brilliance of the building is that it cares for the people who use it. In Imperfect Solidarities, Aruna D’Souza has elegantly argued that in our current, divisive, and often hateful world, it is more care, and not more love, that is needed. It is care that requires us to place the cause of justice above our own feelings. The solidarity that flows from care will encourage us to act collectively, for the common, public good. And, as we care, if love emerges, this is, as D’Souza admits, a welcome bonus.

As we walked into this building I had told him that the building was not loved when it arrived in Dún Laoghaire. As we left, he told me he did not know why I said that, that it was daft. On our twenty-minute tour, it became so clear that the care shown to those people gathered in there on a Sunday – by the architects, commissioners, builders, engineers, in the first instance, and the benevolent building itself in the next – had fostered a deep, deep love and a kind of solidarity. Yes, you might go there to study or let the kids play, but you surely leave learning and feeling what it means to be public, to be together and to be social on a sunny, seaside Sunday. Every person in there, clearly cared for, was in love or falling so, even if some of them were initially not attracted to the building at all.

We do not have enough buildings that do this, not enough rooms that have been cared for so much in their making and by their owners that they take care of us in return. But in Dún Laoghaire, we have a precedent, and I can think of no real reason we cannot do this over and over again. This is the kind of building, the kind of ambition for architecture, the kind of publicness, that we here in Ireland should be falling for, every single time.

Photo: dlr LexIcon by Carr, Cotter and Naessens, 2015. Photo by Emmett Scanlon, 2025.