Re: Re: Docklands/IFSC, the DDDA

@shanekeane wrote:

Let me get this straight. This idiot insulted the guy who curated the Venice Biennale in order to get him back because he told the truth about the general shittiness of Irish architecture, and you think it was a good article?

So Frank McDonald is an idiot! that’s insightful.

This is the man who stood up and exposed to view (with very few others, notably Uinseann McEoin) the bastards who were busily destroying this city.

Not just that, more than anyone else, Frank McDonald is the man who introduced the subject of architecture into the daily debate through the medium of a daily newspaper, when all others treated architecture as a no-go zone, or just reprinted the developers press releases and promo pictures.

IMO, if it hadn’t been for Frank McDonald, public consciousness of architecture and planning in this country would still mentally be in the 1980s.

From what I know of Betsky, he is also a shrewd critic of architecture, but, by many accounts (not just Frank’s), he is a lousy curator of an architectural exhibition. To me, what made McDonald’s article interesting was his willingness to criticize the whole show, rather than just laud the various Irish exhibits, which is what the majority of his audience would have been expecting of him.

Every time the state of dress of an international architectural emperor is questioned by our own tiny architectural community, I see a glimmer of hope that soon we will have the confidence to shape our own architecture and stop being in awe of these people and the stuff they strut.

The less than effusive reaction to Foster’s offering at the Clarence and O’Laoire’s blunt rebuke to Liebeskind are other recent glimmers of hope.

Where I would suggest that Frank may have gone off the boil in recent times was on matters such as the current revised draft DDDA development plan, the whole ‘Liffey Island’ pprposal, the ‘high rise’ debate and several significant development proposals for sensitive city centre sites which have legitimate conservation issues in the process of being trampled into the ground.