Re: Re: Smithfield Wasteland
@Michae1 wrote:
In immediate proximity of Smithfield is the Bolton Street area which also suffers from dereliction. The students of third year in Bolton Street spent the year addressing the problem by shifting the proposed site for DIT Grangegorman towards the city to create an urban campus serving the student population and the community.
They have a book launch and exhibition at the end of October but you can see some of the work online.
To be honest I wasn’t too enamoured with this. The forensic level of analysis is welcome but I find calling a decent, functional urban neighbourhood with organically diversifying uses a ‘wasteland’ to be irritatingly bourgeois.
On one level there is talk of Kreuzberg and its invigorating squatter counterculture then we get a fairly typical city ‘fix’ based on dated ideas of urban renewal.
Don’t mean to piss on anyone’s chips and I appreciate the huge amount of work a student has to put into such a project but it’s analysing urban renewal from a very narrow prism, yet demonstrating an overreach regarding what architecture can deliver for real communities.
