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Sat 09 Sep 2006Building sightFifteen years ago, a collection of young architects won the competition to rebuild Temple Bar. Since then, Group 91's practices have gone on to design everything from libraries to skyscrapers. An exhibition in Belfast revisits their work as the North begins a new phase of development. Frank McDonald assesses their legacyBack in the bleak, hopeless days of the late 1980s, 13 relatively young architects came together to form Group 91. They had lots of ideas but very little work. Famously, one of them, Paul Keogh, had got a special mention in the 1988 Architectural Association of Ireland awards for a postmodern Jersey-cow milking parlour at Dublin Zoo. Now his firm, Paul Keogh Architects, is much better known as the designer of an elegant 32-storey residential tower planned for a site sandwiched between Heuston Station and Royal Hospital Kilmainham, in Dublin. Times have changed indeed, and the surviving architectural practices of Group 91 are swamped with work.