Reply To: 32-floor building planned for Dublin

I gets back to that project for Beirut doesn’t it? I mean, the fact that most buildings there were made of soft limestone, plastered over to stop it crumbling, but now they are expressing the limestone to make it look neat and clean looking.

Competitions are a bit like ‘Radio Friendly’ songs though – I really don’t know if they achieve very much at the end of the day. What have you thought about big competitions like Bibliotheque de Paris etc?

How French were those entries, I quite liked the one by Meier myself, and also the one by Stirling. I saw a recent monograph on Botta and he seems to have built a lot of works, that were ‘sort of designs on paper’ for a long, long, long time.

Does a Botta design on paper translate very well into reality – his buildings try to evoke a sense of place, materiality etc I think – whether you can do that in modern construction or not. . . . I guess one really has to go and look at some newly completed Botta works to find that one out.

I am going to post something about Thom Mayne aswell shortly – a nice post, with a lot of images – possibly put it at cyburbia or CG Architect or someplace and link it here. It sort of will deal with how Mayne deals with ‘place’ and the earth in areas like Los Angeles with little to go on.

Do you think his few realised works live up? Diamond Ranch high school for instance, theory, reality, experience. . . .