AAI Awards 2008

Nothing much to see there, the panel was disappointed with what passes for Architecture in Ireland and had t0 give their main award to some shed in the wastelands of Tallaght. Interesting that with what is coming down the tracks in terms of recession, energy/food shocks and carbon tax, architects can’t take the time to look over their 21″ flat screens and see the freight train heading our way. Do Architects know how to calculate the 0.60 Energy performance coefficient ,for dwellings submitted for planning after July? Do they know how to model the feasibility of alternative energy systems for commercial buildings, will they just farm this out these integral design tools to mechanical consultants? Are the committee’s set up in the RIAI actually doing anything to educate us, all new houses will be passive by 2011.
Awards? Look at the state of the built environment we have created in the last 15 years then tell me that the half a percentile of buildings which could be called Architecture represent a job well done. Why do all our wealthy peers build neoclassical macmansions, the backslapping that goes on at these love-in awards ceremonies, is like the band playing on on-board the titanic as she sank, its time to rearrange some deckchairs. The Institute president and past-president O’Laoire and Pike are doing a great job but we need to rfundamentally reappraise what we want architecture to be in the next couple of decades, Must we have the owners of the large commercial ‘architecture factories’ representing the ideals that sustained us through 5 tiring years of college and years of hard slog late night and weekends.
Have your say at the Irish Architecture Foundation’s tpublic consultation exercise, called Conversations about Architecture and the Built Environment. Public meetings are scheduled for Galway (May 29th), Waterford (June 3rd), Cork (June 4th), Limerick (June 5th), Carrick-on-Shannon (June 9th), Athlone (June 10th), Swords (June 11th) and Dublin (June 12th).

I saw the awards myself and think Paul’s comment-
“many of the projects are the usual cubic extension to victorian / edwardian houses – so many in fact that they could hold their own exhibition “houseworx”” is inaccurate.
All together there were 13 awards & special mentions and only 4 were domestic in scale. Amoung the rest of the projects were a school, civic offices, a community centre, a business park, a public paving scheme, an environment centre, a juice-bar, and a research centre. I think there was a good range of sizes, locations & programs, overall it seemed like an eclectic mix.

Pure freedom? I can’t agree. Parameters and constraints should be the very foundations of the creative process.

I’m pretty keen on this principle; so keen, in fact, that I keep a notebook for quotes on the subject. The title of the notebook? Liberty has meaning only in a context of restraint. It’s the last line of the Palladio chapter in James S Ackerman’s book on the villa.

I do agree, though, that simply ticking boxes for ‘compliance with the regs’ is a pretty bunk position.

Whether or not the exhibition is any good, this thread has reminded me to stick my head in for a look.

Constraints are there to be interrogated, encompassed or discarded.

I agree that working within a strict set of rules often leads to architecture of great integrity but you must question the rules in the first place.

On gunters question I can only note O Donnell + Tuomey’s house in Killiney as a beautiful and confident piece of architecture with sophistication far beyond anything else in the country. I couldn’t understand that it didn’t get a sniff when a bog standard industrial estate building with dangly bits on or a parody Zaha Hadid got awards.

The myopic idea that the evolution of architecture as an artistic development should be completely abandoned in order to comply with some Part L rating or BREAM check would be laughable were it not for the fact that so many people out there believe it.

I once worked as a chef, I produced art but it that art had to be edible, is it too much too ask that the art should be comfortable. If i’m to live in a piece of art, should I pay a huge price for energy for that privilege. Ivory towers may be zero energy Mr What but some of us must live in the real world. You’re laughable Mr What.

Social housing in an edge of rural development condition in Limerick, A new national school for one of the most deprived communities in Dublin and an inner-city Social housing scheme of over one hundred units under construction.

Name one other critically-minded architectural practice in Ireland who are tackling these types of schemes?

And don’t make me laugh with Murray O Laoire.

Keating it is a pleasure to be considered laughable by you.

How long is that exhibition running?

I am contradicting myself a bit here but I do find Sheila O’Donnell’s concepts in water colour a bit over indulgent and removed from the real world but I am always blown away by the finished article.

Keating, comfortable and cutting edge are very much attainable with products on the market now

@what? wrote:

Name one other critically-minded architectural practice in Ireland who are tackling these types of schemes?

I can’t really think of one. That’s pretty much the point I was getting at, only I was using O’D&T as an example of this absence, in the Dublin context. The projects you mention are probably worthy and some may prove relevant, but Dublin has been redeveloped at break neck pace in the last fifteen years, and apart from one article in the paper by Paul Keogh, (posted on one of the recent threads) there hasn’t been anyone shouting ‘stop! this isn’t what we showed you’.

O’D&T (and the rest of that group) made their name with the ‘Making a Modern Street’ manifesto, followed by their win in the Temple Bar Framework Plan competition. Back then, there seemed to be a huge appetite for rediscovering the city and imagining it renewed and reinvigorated. It just seems to me that that energy isn’t there anymore. Back then, the AAI would come out every year and it would be provocative and even inspirational at times.

This isn’t a fully worked out theory, but I think that the real value of the whole post modern thing was that it provoked the more gifted architects into getting out of cruise control and actually re-examining what they believed in why they believed in it. They knew that the cardboard superficiality of Graves was an architectural cul-de-sac, but they knew also that the urban environment was being short changed by just continuing the modern movement as if nothing was wrong.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but once Group 91, and their circle, achieved that level of success, it just seemed that they left the field and HKR and the like moved in with a commercial brand of Modern Movement with stone, and that’s your lot! attitude. If you look at any high profile recent development in Dublin, you’ll find bits of abstracted Le Corbusier composition, or a bit of a Rietveld colour scheme, or a Mendelsohn curved glass corner, or whatever, added into the mix, but randomly, like pages torn from a book. We’re quarrying the modern movement for bits of imagery in the same way that, in the dark ages, they quarried Roman ruins for bits of ornament.

Contemporary Irish architecture is a ‘pick and mix’ and, in my opinion, there’s not much integrity in the mix!

This is not all O’D&Ts fault, that would be stupidly simplistic, but it’s somebody’s fault and I don’t get the feeling that the people who know better are all that bothered about it.

Yes the latter phenomenon is one in recent years that has really raised its head across the city, and indeed nationally. Whereas by the late 90s/early 2000s developers were finally being turned down on schemes they’d got their kids to draw up on the kitchen table as a Sunday afternoon fun and games project, the allure of the architect in more recent times has partially enabled schemes to get through due to their offical ‘stamp of approval’ – one particularly horrific exmaple of which is currently nearing completion in all its back-slapping, derivative, tokenistic plum-bricked glory (as recently pictured by gunter and of which more anon) on one of the most challenging and prestigious sites in the city.

I wish there was a way to automatically block the posts of certain users – I’m really quite tired of the drivel being spouted by Boston or Berlin. I know I should just ignore but I’m drawn like a moth to a flame anyway and invariably end up infuriated by the patronizing, negative and ill informed nature of his/her posts.

As for the discussion at hand, Irish practices are beginning to make headway in an international context – O’Donnell & Tuomey are building the Photographer’s gallery in London, a prestigious and significant project which will undoubtedly open doors to further commisions. Another of Irelands “artistic” practices – Grafton, are just completing a hugely impressive university building in Milan. it isn’t much but it’s a beginning.

There is enormous talent in architecture at work in Ireland at the present time, it’s unfortunate that, for example, Boyd Cody have not had the breakthrough into larger projects that they clearly deserve – their competition winning Monaghan Civic Offices scheme seeming to have been shelved indefinitely. It’s an unfortunate feature of the Irish architectural scene that we now have these behemoths of practices, obviously driven solely by profit with their offices in Bratislava and Talinn, hoovering up any significant commercial work and churning out identikit schemes with neither rigour or quality beyond being constructed as quickly and as cheaply as possible (aside from the tack on “bling” depending on how “prestigious” the end product). It’s frustrating, but I suppose it’s the way it is and always has been…

On the subject of the awards themselves – nothing much to argue with aside from the insanity of presenting the silver sheds on the outskirts of Galway with an award. The Briarhill area is a disaster zone architecturally and whilst the particular buildings in question display a little more refinement than the usual business park asthetic (oh and of course they have cantilevered bits sticking out – exciting eh?) they are still faceless boxes within a poorly planned wilderness of roads, roundabouts and acres of windswept carparking. You might say that they are better than the usual – I still don’t think that it justifies them being given a prestigious architectural award. In fact I think that their presence on the list diminishes the value of all of the awards that were given out this year.