Re: Re: DDDA / Docklands Miscellany

This discussion is at the point where it needs notjim!

Anyway, I thought the whole thing with economics was that no one knows how it works.

To do architecture, you have to blank out all of that stuff, you have to suspend normal judgements on the cost of things and try and squeeze every drop of design potential out of the given site, all the time hoping to Christ that the ‘added value’ will match the ‘additional costs’, so that some bastard with a calculator doesn’t shoot it down before it gets off the ground.

On Brian’s point that Liam Carroll ‘imported’ the concept of private apartment dwelling into Ireland, in the face of the professional opinion of the estate agency community that it wouldn’t work, for the record, I don’t think that’s actually the way it happened.

The way I remember it, all the early Zoe schemes were actually terraces of tiny multi-level houses, even Fisherman’s Wharf (phase 1) and Grove Road were essentially terraced houses, it was only after these schemes sold out like hot cakes, despite the fact that they looked like apartments, that the penny dropped and all subsequent Zoe schemes simply morphed into apartment blocks and, before you could say ‘shoebox’, the profits went through the roof. I could be wrong about the sequence of events, but think it was at this point, after Zoe had proved that it could be done, that the first tax incentive kicked in, and the rest, as they say, is history.

If I have remembered these events correctly, it may suggest that studying the complexities of development economics is no substitute for old fashioned Trial and Error!