Reply To: Cathedrals of Commerce

Hmmmm,….

all quite true,

just on my thread of thought,

If you want to work Smithfield and the Docklands at their very best, the whole notion of ‘crowds of people’ being part of the definition of the design problem must be done. How would you propose that people get to or from Smithfield or Docklands, given that Dublin is already moving like molasses, no matter what kind of transport you use. I think that cities thrive or die on the provision or lack of good open spaces connected in a fashion, which allow people to move. I mean, just look at what the north/south axis of pedestrian movement has created in Dublin city over the years. That massive scale and movement of people is part of what cities are all about. Perhaps we have to ‘buy’ a few properties here and there, just to knock them to make more connections and ways for the city to breath properly.

From this article.

Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world’s most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the ’90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change. It took Jackson and his partners a while to raise the resources, but they purchased an abandoned paint factory that, in a singular example of adaptive reuse, emerged as the studio responsible for the most breathtaking trilogy of films ever made. He realized, he told me, that with the allure of the Rings trilogy, he could attract a diversely creative array of talent from all over the world to New Zealand; the best cinematographers, costume designers, sound technicians, computer graphic artists, model builders, editors, and animators.