It began as one thing, became another, reverted, and was eventually demolished, leaving almost no trace on the streetscape. That cycle of institutional transformation is itself a kind of compressed history of how Dublin treated its most vulnerable inhabitants.

The building was established in 1703 by the Duke of Ormonde, initially functioning as a workhouse. In 1730 it was converted into a Foundling Hospital, an institution designed to receive abandoned or orphaned infants and young children, a category of person for whom Georgian Dublin had few other formal provisions. The architectural centrepiece was a central dining hall with notably tall windows and a vaulted plaster ceiling, which gave the interior a degree of civic grandeur unusual for a charitable institution of this kind. In 1798, the architect Francis Johnston carried out significant modifications, adding wings to the main block, a crenellated parapet along the roofline, and a cupola. The crenellations, the decorative battlements more commonly associated with castle architecture, gave the building a somewhat incongruous Gothic appearance. By 1839 the foundling function had been wound down and the building reverted to workhouse use, eventually becoming incorporated into the South Dublin Union Workhouse complex, as recorded on the Ordnance Survey's detailed 1867 edition map. The building was finally demolished in 1957.

There is nothing of the original structure left to see at the James Street site today. What remains is documentary, the Ordnance Survey mapping, the architectural descriptions preserved in scholarship by Maurice Craig and Frederick O'Dwyer, and the outline of a footprint absorbed into successive institutional uses. For anyone interested in Dublin's social history, the site is worth knowing about precisely because it looks so unremarkable now. The layers underneath, workhouse, foundling hospital, workhouse again, then demolition, are legible only through archival research rather than through anything visible at street level.