Dublin City Hall

Dublin City Hall on Dame Street began life as the Royal Exchange and today serves as the formal seat of Dublin City Council. Architect Thomas Cooley won a design competition held in 1768 and 1769 for the building, which was completed in 1779 in a Neoclassical style faced in white Portland stone from Dorset, with carved capitals by Simon Vierpyl. Its centerpiece is a rotunda beneath a dome roughly 32 feet high supported on twelve columns, with a further 10 feet of dome above. Dublin Corporation purchased the building in the 1850s and renamed it City Hall in 1852; during the 1916 Easter Rising the Irish Citizen Army garrisoned the building, and a guard there became one of the rising's first casualties when he was shot by Sean Connolly. Today the building hosts council meetings alongside a permanent exhibition on the history of Dublin.