The Spire of Dublin is one of the city’s most iconic and most abstract landmarks. It stands 120 metres tall; the 3 metres across at its base taper to roughly 15 centimetres at the tip, and the piles sink 14 metres down to the bedrock beneath O’Connell Street — literally a giant metal needle.
For all its minimalist look, it’s a complex piece of engineering: it has a damper system to reduce movement in the wind.
A time capsule is buried at its base. The funniest part is that it turned out not “stately” but almost parodically mundane: cigarettes, receipts, an Argos catalogue, menus and a TV guide. What was left for the people of the future isn’t heroic Irish symbolism but a set of objects you can read consumer Dublin of the early 2000s from. It was designed to last some 200–250 years underground.
Dubliners gave it a pile of nicknames. As often happens with public art, the Spire irritated plenty of people at first and quickly picked up joke names: “Stiletto in the Ghetto,” “Stiffy by the Liffey,” “the Spike” and others.