RIAI Gold Medal 2001-2003

Why is this award chosen so long after the buildings have been completed? I’m not saying theres anything wrong with it but it is intriuging. Something to do with the building being experienced over time perhaps?

Ussher library IMO

No Letterfrack Furniture College? http://www.odonnell-tuomey.ie/webpage/lfc/lfc.htm. Not entered? Or withdrawn because John Tuomey was nominated to the jury? It’s 40 years since anybody (Ronnie Tallon of STW) achieved back-to-back Gold Medals, with RTE Studios (1959-61) http://riai.ie/gallery.html?type=gold&item=12 and the GEC Factory (1962-64) http://riai.ie/gallery.html?type=gold&item=11.

Croke Park, no question and yes, Ussher second: I am mystified by the Clontarf Pump House, to my mind it didn’t really work at all, it seemed cool when it was described to me, but unremarkable when built.

Croke Park is great as a stadium, but the ancillary accommodation feels like a very average conference centre.

I picked the Ussher, but the Urban Institute is a fine building too, especially as, I believe, it was built on a tight budget.

The Usher is a poor echo of the virility of the Berkeley.
Urban institute is mediocre and that baldoyle library is terrible.
for me its between Croke Park and the pump house for architectural quality, david versus goliath.

croke park i think. a brilliant expression for irish sport and an enduring icon.

dunshauglin offices are a horror these days. FKL in baldoyle was never well finished and the tullamore offices were nicely but tamely done. of the rest, the pumping station is a cutesy sign of the times and the ussher library is too self-consciously trying to be a classic.

I never understood how anyone could ever have described the lumpen concrete ‘canopy’ at the entrance to the Dunshaughlin civic offices as anything other than crude.

@what? wrote:

The Usher is a poor echo of the virility of the Berkeley.

I think the massing to Nassau Street is quite successful, but I would certainly agree that the office park elevation to the cricket pitch does suffer badly in a comparrison with the Berkley.

@trace wrote:

No Letterfrack Furniture College?

Personally, I always thought Letterfrack was over-praised, so it’s absence from the short-list doesn’t bother me.
(A cynic might say that Letterfrack’s absence might have something to do with not wanting to come second to Croker!)

There are, however, other absences which are unforgivable imo!

The RIAI has gone on the record to complain that residential projects didn’t make the grade this time, but that’s because they’ve excluded projects from the short-list that should have been included.

To me, the stand-out urban residential project of 2003 was ‘Coppinger Court’ at Popes Quay in Cork, by Magee Creedon Architects. I haven’t seen it in the flesh, but from the accounts, photographs and google it certainly looks like a fine piece of urbanism with buckets of density, sensitivity to context, interweaving of historical fabric with contemporary intervention, tight urban grain, inventive residential layouts, and apparently even some ‘sustainability’ thrown into the mix.

Why is it that projects that tackle really difficult challenges never seem to get the recognition that is readily afforded lesser projects that tackle simpler challenges with great difficulty?

*last two images originally posted by bunch on one of the Cork threads in Jan. ’05*

This project seems to have been passed over by the AAI as well, so maybe it wasn’t even nominated, I don’t know.

To me, Coppinger Court looks like one of the few serious exercises in careful in-fill urbanism since the early days of Temple Bar and the RIAI should be recognising this and not handing out more awards to quirky one-offs in suburban locations (the ‘Urban Institute’ is leafy Clonskeagh for god sake!) that contribute little or nothing to the main challenge facing Irish architecture :- finding the means to lead Irish society towards a sustainable urban future!

Maybe this isn’t more evidence that the RIAI are detached and aloof and run by a clique, but I’m still not happy about this 😡

@gunter wrote:

the RIAI should be recognising this and not handing out more awards to quirky one-offs in suburban locations (the ‘Urban Institute’ is leafy Clonskeagh for god sake!) that contribute little or nothing to the main challenge facing Irish architecture :- finding the means to lead Irish society towards a sustainable urban future!

Whilst I agree that that should be the main purpose of architecture (and awards ceremonies), awards ceremonies (and Irish architecture) seem to prize the building as object above all other considerations. See the comments of ‘what?’ above (who, with ‘shadow’, I often – reductively, and perhaps a little unfairly – think of as representing Architecture [big A] on this board).

Also, the seductiveness of The New is hardly unique to architecture- all Government departments, for example, prioritise capital investment over maintenance. You get much better press for opening a new bypass than for maintaining/mending existing roads, etc. etc.

As for your U.I quip- you do know that the name has nothing to do with the location and everything to do with the function (which – oh the irony! – is, partly at least, ‘finding the means to lead Irish society towards a sustainable urban future’)?

(Apologies for putting the ‘names’ in inverted commas, but the sense of the sentence got buried otherwise.)

‘Architecture’ as a creative, cultural act needs representation in this place. If it was left to the majority of people on this forum architecture would be ‘reductively’ transformed into a sustainability contest, where the RIAI and AAI awards are replaced by the annual insulation awards, with the supreme medal going to the ‘most apologetic’ scheme.

@what? wrote:

‘Architecture’ as a creative, cultural act needs representation in this place.

Yes, it does, and while I don’t always agree with your posts, I do appreciate what they add to the debate.

My issue is that there’s more to the profession/discipline than that; a fact not reflected in awards ceremonies such as this.

gunter: I’m with you on this one; forget all the ‘sustainability’ hype – thid is good,dense, imaginative urban design. You can criticise some of the detail, but my main gripe against it is that I couldn’t find it on my one trip to Cork, but I suppose that’s a tribute to its integration.

@ctesiphon wrote:

As for your U.I quip- you do know that the name has nothing to do with the location and everything to do with the function . . .

ctesiphon, I think I understand that distinction, in the same way that I have long suspected that ‘Fire stations’ are the places where they keep the fire engines, not the places that go on fire.

. . . but since we’re on the subject of the ‘Urban Institute’ I would suggest that the design of the building itself confuses these issues in adopting forms and devices that would perhaps make sense in a confined urban context when in fact the building is located on the edge of a field in a suburban context (at best).

This building makes no sense to me:

With light available on all sides, what are the three rooftop ‘light boxes’ for?

Why is the facade facing the park land and the pedestrian link from the main Belfied campus so bleak?

Apart from being a curious pre-echo of Grafton’s Italian job, how did this building, which has weathered particularly badly, make it onto the gold medal shortlist?

@what? wrote:

‘Architecture’ as a creative, cultural act needs representation in this place.

I fully agree with that, but my point is that urban in-fill schemes of the quality and degree of difficulty of ‘Coppinger Court’, for example, are architecture too and arguably a much more valuable form of of architecture than the little arty numbers like ‘The Urban Institute’, for example.

Croke Park got it, the Pump House was in second place.

Well that will add to the dilemma when they want to knock it down in thirty years time!

. . . I think pump houses may enjoy a longer life expectancy.

With this, and the current AAI comments, can we finally say that architecture is suffering box fatigue?

@gunter wrote:

Well that will add to the dilemma when they want to knock it down in thirty years time!

. . . I think pump houses may enjoy a longer life expectancy.

With this, and the current AAI comments, can we finally say that architecture is suffering box fatigue?

Yeap curves and colour will be the order of the day for awards in 2018

Never mind ‘curves and colour’ (more nods to the trendy), what about ‘form and function’ – remembering that ‘form’ relates to context and location and ‘function’ goes beyond the merely functional?

@johnglas wrote:

Never mind ‘curves and colour’ (more nods to the trendy), what about ‘form and function’ – remembering that ‘form’ relates to context and location and ‘function’ goes beyond the merely functional?

natural progression …

there is no nods here just nodes and more people per annually than croker

@johnglas wrote:

. . . what about ‘form and function’ – remembering that ‘form’ relates to context and location and ‘function’ goes beyond the merely functional?

That’s very profound johnglas!

*. . . . will be robbing that *