The Irish Children’s Museum in Dublin, the identifying icon for a new neighborhood development, serves as the termination of the mews connecting with the Ireland Museum of Art. The design is based upon the tradition of storytelling, from historic Celtic to Wilde, and the role it plays in engaging and educating children. This approach, plus the setting and Museum’s program, led to Cambridge Seven’s design of a building façade consisting of a woven metal mesh, serving as a series of unfolding, drawn curtains, dramatically revealing the children’s programs within and extending the Museum into the surrounding community.

Science is central to the Museum, with music and the human body serving to present key relationships between the three topics. Using the helix as the armature for the visitor’s tour, each theme has its own path of discovery. As the paths wind upward, exhibits at strategic intersections present important interrelationships.

Incorporating sustainable design into the concept, the layered exterior envelope of mesh curtains provides sun control plus a rain screen wall system and a green roof, which also serves as an exterior program space with tubes that transmit natural light to the interior. At night, the light tubes' function become inverted, resulting in a projection of northern hemisphere constellations that are visible from Dublin.