The structure was known as the Pipe Office, and its purpose was the administration of water rates, the fees charged to households and businesses for connection to the city's water supply at a time when such a connection was neither universal nor cheap. That a dedicated building existed for this function at all says something about how seriously early modern Dublin took the business of managing its infrastructure.

The Pipe Office is known today largely because of a late seventeenth-century drawing attributed to the artist Frances Place, referenced in Maher's 1932 study. Place was an English draughtsman who visited Ireland and produced a number of topographical views that have since become valuable records of how Dublin looked before later centuries of development and clearance altered it almost beyond recognition. His depiction of the Pipe Office is one of the few visual traces the building left behind. The office itself was part of the broader apparatus by which Dublin attempted to supply and regulate water across a growing city, a practical concern that generated its own bureaucracy, its own premises, and, eventually, its own absence.

The site is now vacant, which means there is no structure to visit, no door to find, no interior to read. What remains is the fact of the place, and the Frans Place drawing, which can be pursued through library and archive collections for anyone curious about what the building actually looked like. For those interested in the layers of civic Dublin that have vanished, the Pipe Office belongs to a category of sites where the research trail matters more than the ground itself. The Maher reference offers a starting point, and the drawing, wherever it is held, is the closest thing to evidence that this quiet administrative building ever occupied space in the city at all.