In 1951 Michael Scott travelled to Italy where he saw mosaics by SARIM at the Central Railway Station in Rome. Very impressed with these, he travelled to Venice to visit Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir, who were filming Othello with Orson Welles. While he was there, he visited SARIM's factory. On his return to Dublin, Scott became determined to use their mosaic tiles on the new Bus Station building. Mosaic panels had been present on drawings dating from 1947 and 1948 but because of the halt in construction from 1948 to 1950, they were only being sourced at this time.
Patrick Scott was responsible for these designs and the choice of colours used. Mosaic tiles were to be used anywhere that was awkward to paint or maintain. Mosaic tiles were used on the exterior - on the undersides of the canopies on the restaurant pavilion, on the front of the control tower, on the underside of the 'wing' over the entrance to the offices and on the columns surfaces on the Ministerial suite.
The exterior of the control tower continues the decorative theme of diagonals that runs through the building. A pattern of alternating bold stripes and triangulated parallelograms in tones of blue and grey-blue, it runs from left to right around the tower, perhaps suggesting the flow of bus traffic and direction of street traffic around the station. This theme of diagonals manifests itself both inside and outside the building. It appears in the brick bond used on the ground floor, in the floor tiles, in the mosaics on the columns, in the patterns of the window blinds, and the cast concrete panels under the bus portals.
At a cursory glance the office building seems to be plain and unadorned. It is the restaurant storey that receives most of the applied decoration. Viewed from street level, the canopies are an unexpected feature with their use of bold colour. A contemporary of Busáras is Le Corbusier's Unité d' Habitation in Marseilles, and this also has striking use of colour with its balcony reveals painted in bold colours. On the canopies on the restaurant floor, the patterns have a leaf motif and are alternatively red and white, blue and white, and yellow and white. These patterns radiate from the centre of the panel with the white leaves set against the colour. According to Patrick Scott, "They have no symbolism, they have just a white leaf set against the pure colour" (Interview with Patrick Scott, 1995). Scott's paintings from the 1940s show a similar attitude to form. "I am interested chiefly in simple forms such as fish or birds, rather than the complex forms of human beings or flowers" (Kennedy, 1991, p. 102).
These colours, however, are in tune with the theories of De Stijl and Neo-Plasticism. This term was coined by M.H. Schoenmaekers, a mathematician who restricted the colour palette in his work Het nieuwe Wereldbeeld (The New Image of the World published in 1915).
The three principal colours are essentially yellow, blue and red. They are the only colours existing...yellow is the movement of the ray (vertical).....blue is the contrasting colour to yellow (horizontal firmament)...red is the mating of yellow and blue.(Frampton, 1992, p. 143)
Schoenmaekers attitude to the world was complemented by attitudes and ideas brought from Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) and Hendrik Berlage (1856-1934) whom Scott met in the early 1930s. The mosaic tiles on the underside of the 'wing' use all of these colours in an abstract diamond pattern which reflects the diamond pattern of the floor of the office reception. In this way the diagonals which surround the building through bonding patterns and mosaic panels also enclose the building top and bottom.
The decorative columns on the front of the Ministerial suite are a device to accentuate and emphasise the different function of this floor. They are simply stripped in red and white which from a distance gives them a pink appearance. Between some of the pairs are two concave blue walls finished in Faience. These walls were designed to hide doorways that were to open out into the loggia. The loggia was not designed to be in steady use, being intended as a flower balcony.