The Modern Register

The Modern Register records Dublin's twentieth-century buildings, from 1930 to 1990: 1,912 of them, from bus stations and churches to flats, schools and one swimming pool. It was started in 1989 by an architectural historian with a typewriter and a shoebox, and until this year it lived on index cards in six oak drawers, next to a shared drive of 60,000 photographs. People wrote to ask about buildings. Úna, the registrar, was happy to answer, but there was one of her and nearly two thousand buildings.

What we did

• Strategy. Workshops with the registrar, the volunteers and the people who lead the walks, which turned a card with eleven typed lines and a pencilled back into three things: the building, the architect and the street.

• Identity. A wordmark drawn from the letters cut into a bus station's foundation stone, one colour (black), and a square monogram for the places a long name won't fit.

• Website and walks. Every building findable by any name people use for it, every page prerendered and fast on a phone, and twelve walking routes saved to the phone before they reach the one place on the quays with no signal at all.

• Plaques. Six hundred black enamel plaques with the building's name readable from across the street and a code that opens its page.

• Photography. 1,400 photographs of the buildings, taken in flat light and delivered as uncropped originals.

What changed

The volunteers now keep the Register themselves, on their phones, standing in front of the buildings. In the four weeks after launch they wrote 211 notes, added 37 nicknames and published every change without posting a card to anyone. The journal has the whole story, mistakes included.