libeskind / Manuel Aires Mateus on the docks

don’t know what you mean don’t know what you mean don’t know what you mean

Shadow I agree

Consequently, for your first point, far from being competative and open to all the opposite is true? Emphasis is placed on marketability and the architect who can talk a good game.

Therefor someone like Tony Fretton who is an excellent architect but who could bore for England, in my view, will always lose out to someone who could talk the hind legs off a donkey, like yer man with the leather jacket and black rimmed specs who is trying to build the same building, horizontal and vertical all over the world and now in Dublin

Your second point …….that’s because good modern architecture should stimulate debate and be provocative.

Aland,

What if the substandard work from an international star is better than the best work from Ireland? I still smell protectionism here. The best Athlete from America, giving a sub-standard performance in the Olympics will almost certainly beat the best Irish Athlete.The pool is bigger.

If the best Irish Architect was really good, he would be an international star anyway. It’s not as if, I presume, there is an Irish school of architecture with everything deriving from a similar pardigm, or look, which in future generations will mark the era: instead all architects have their own signatures. I am not an archiect but maintain an interest in the environment around me, and the stuff chosen for the grand canal seemss way better than the IFSC – which was not doubt an Irish designed block.

Ok, I take you point if that is the case.

In fact in thinking about this between my last post , and this, it occurs to me that architecture is not really like software. It is probably better to hire an Irish architect for Ireland, if that architect is as good as a foreigner, and all else been equal – given that a country needs to define it’s identity somehow, and an indigenous building style would be a way to do that. I am always wary of free market fundamentalism, like any other fundamentalisms.

Still, on this building. I like it, in photoshop as least – even if it is a copy of a building elsewhere, and regardless of who designed it.

The building is architectural fodder.
Libeskind is laughing (at us and all the other fools) all the way to the bank.

http://www.spa.uk.net/hotmail.htm

I particularly like the lexicon, but maybe that’s got more to do with me not being an architect, just having to deal with them.
🙂

I bet they wait till U2, along with the rest of us anticipating it, are dead. 😡

The lift shafts of the Aires Mateus were being cast in situ two weeks ago.

The Libeskind was invisible, though the Schwartz plaza is nearing completion- estimated date is late March according to DDDA people.

Isn’t completing the plaza before the performing arts building a bit like hoovering the shed before commencing the woodwork?

Here’s a glance at what’s happening with the Mateus hotel. It looks as if they’ve added another lift shaft since November and there’s more activity going on at ground level I can’t make out. There are some good pictures from Devin and CM00 in the New Public Space for Docklands thread that, combined with some of these, give a good sense of how the plaza is developing.

In keeping with the cart-before-the-horse spirit, they have started to install some of the lighting that will form a pathway alongside the rumored ‘performing arts theatre.’ They seem to be a bit cheaply made and don’t look as though they’ll wear well over time.

Lots of lights. Lots and lots of lights. One can only grit one’s teeth in anticipation (fear?) of what it will look like once the Libeskind mothership lands. There are such bizarre juxtapositions going on right now, some quite wonderful:

Or this:

So far, so good. But then, gentle reader, you get this travesty:

Arrggh! The cheapy green bulbs, apart from reminding me of a marquee or some emergency exit path lighting gone all wrong, are garish and detract from the oddball, elegant simplicity of the vertical red lights.

The renderings of the plaza are flashy all right. When you look at the plans for everything all together: the red sticks, the green Disney benches, the odd triangular yokes, the performing arts theatre and its ‘meaningful’ angles, the sleek checkerboard of the Mateus, it really is sensory overload. All of them? All at once? I know I should suspend judgment until it’s all built, but I feel at the moment rather like that Grand Canal Harbour chimney… hidden away, standing in the center of a bizarre half-wasteland, half-art installation, wondering whatever was wrong with leaving a little open space.

Enjoy it while it lasts…