Tennis courts

THank you for all the replies guys. I just mentioned Mount Pleasant Square and all of those other spaces. Because if you care to spend €10.00 there is a very nice UCD publication available at RIAI bookstore, which has a scheme for Charlemount St. out between Rathmines and Ranelagh. I wonder how the LUAS is going to change these areas. I think of the Government spending 5 million on a spike, and I would advice any of you to walk along Mespil Road by the canal at nightime. I think Wilton Terrace is on the other side. But it really is a disaster, since absolutely no public lighting is provided at all, and the space seems to be ultimately lost to the public.

I think that Wilton Terrace triangular space, if it had restaurants and cafes, or some other couple of public buildings could be a rather nice place at the heart of Dublin city and accessible from many different directions. I wonder if LUAS is ultimately going to change these currently untapped resources of space in Dublin city. ANy opinions or observations? Thanks for all the replies people.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Have a look at http://www.McCulloughMulvin.com web site, where they have an idea for ‘Nine Squares’ on Dublins North inner city.

I haven’t looked too much into that side of the city as yet. Your observations are welcome though. That is one massive hole they built in Smithfielf though I think.

Ewan

Thankyou for those observations. I am slowly becoming aware as I grow more observant/older of peoples’ general behaviours, needs and patterns – that so much about the built environment can be influenced by the most banal reasoning, and simplistic cause and effect relationships. It is not always as complex as one would like to imagine.

BTW, I noticed a very old photo of an old JV Downes building on Mespil Road, … are you familiar at all with that one?

StephenC,

I had a wander up towards the North Side recently and I can only say one thing. Parts of it are really beginning to buzz, particularly down towards the Quays areas. There is loads of room up there for it to get so much better in time. I think a few thesis students should really study that part of Dublin, since the vacant sites on the south side nowadays are harder to find. It is really weird though to see the state of some of the brick Georgian stuff up there still. Since anything that looks remotely Georgian on the South side could command considerable rents.

Which brings me back to my most firmly held belief now, that pedestrian irrigation and traffic – foot fall – is the term used when advertising shop leases in the papers, is what can really make or break an urban environment. The North inner city is a complex problem. Which deserves a suitably sophisticated response. I haven’t seen very many plans or visions for it actually. It still hasn’t had its Temple Bar. If one discounts Smithfield that is.

One is as well to study the South side initially to grasp what the North side could be, with decent volumes of pedestrians and activity. There are some magnificent Streets and spaces on the North side. It is just a shame they are ‘off the beaten track’.

I know all this drifts off the point about Tennis courts. But I don’t want to paint a completely rose-tinted view of what pedestrian streets are like either. A struggle to walk up Grafton Street, or O’ Connell Street puts all notion that ‘FULL-ON’ pedestrian-isation is the way to go, to rest.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Somehow, the nuts and bolts of the architectural and spatial training – were contained within this very tight, exclusive and high-end profession or institute. What has happened really, is that engineers and planners, people with a very ‘text-based’ kind of instinct have graduated into all of the important public service positions. The process been accelerated by the rise of information technology – the capability of local authorities now to churn out high quality text-based publications and reports. Which provide the platform and ‘illustration’ in words normally, of their ideas about the environment. A lot of these very half baked ideas, then become written into the legislation and the environment you witness every day of the week.

This is contrasted with architecture, with its tiny band of dwarfs, pretending to mount some opposition, which was never really there, except in myth. So the debate on all environmental matters nowadays, doesn’t even enjoy the input from individuals, who retain some sense of spatial awareness. There is a Charles Darwin, kind of evolutionary, survival of the fittest logic that should be applied to the construction related professions. Call it a ‘free market’ approach, or something similar – rather than pretend each profession is ‘protected’ by its own institution. They are actually in competition. Then you can begin making useful observations, and come up with useful suggestions.

Things like spatial awareness were never fully incubated and developed into sucessful business models, by our architectural profession, which for a long day, stayed just too miserable and small. You have people nowadays making the decisions who understand ‘hard’ things, but not the softer things that knit it all together – the muscle and tissue so to speak. The walk through those public spaces I refer to was a lesson in soft-ness, that manages to knit an urban environment together. The trouble is though, the people who are concerned about money rather than ‘value’ have graduated into all of the key positions – and what you are seeing, is some very intelligent people like such, seeing the world as all hard, un-budging elements, like budgets, regulations, standards, legislation, guidelines, rules, timelines and deadlines.

The side of the brain, which is needed to understand the softer elements, is ‘catered for’, in some small print, or additional image/documentation, that goes with the 100 page report, and relegates the soft issues to a background rather than a middleground or foreground role. By the way, I have studied in some detail myself, the occurance of similar ‘splits’ of opinion between hard and soft-types of personnel working in large technology companies or projects down through the years. It is just an interesting comparison, to that same split now occuring in the built environmental professions. As Thom Mayne iterated at last nights talk at the National Concert Hall, ‘Architecture in the public realm, is negotiation’.

The city needs those able negotiators from both the hard and the soft sides of the debate – in order to have a debate in the first place – at the present, we don’t have both sides, largely due to the inability of the architectural profession to assert itself forcefully within the public realm. It often appears, their ‘kind of language’ only extends as far as the private end of things, where you can sit across a table from ‘a client’ and not much further. Architects particularly at the moment, with individual people in Ireland commanding large sum of cash, leveraged nine times by borrowing, seem to be smitten by the idea of knowing the individuals, and doing nice, but ‘small’ works.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Links:

Architectural and many creative professions lack a sustainable business model. Understanding that weakness is a first step towards improvement:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4479&page=3

Carlisle Pier attempt at knitting together a social fabric:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=2744&

The hardware and the software:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4308&

Nine squares was a project on their web site ages ago, must have re-organised the website again – I guess you cannot show every single project. Blackhall Place would be another open space of course.

But this is the problem as I see it, to build up an understanding of the city takes a long time and a lot of looking at the problem. There is no client sitting across a table from you, directing you what to do, nothing to react to – it is just you and an environment. Because a larger part of the architect’s earnings would derive from single clients, who give you a large enough budget to build something. That sort of wraps back I think, into the education process – with some architects giving the bias, of looking for single clients, and buildings with nice budgets, to do nice finishes and details.

It is very hard to break away from that and look at problems on the scale of cities – especially, right now, for a lot of architects – because there is so much incentive to chase the AAI award, and the client who will provide you with an opportunity to design a great once-off building. I guess, that is where Frank McDonald’s forte lies. At least, through years of investment of his time and energy, the man has managed to grasp something of the dynamics and scale of money, decision-making and politics at the level of the ‘entire’ environment. That is an achievement in itself, and something that few architects manage to do in a lifetime. It is unfortunate, that non-architects like Frank McDonald seem to reach that level of understanding and the architect trails so far behind in terms of perception. From that point of view, there is a lot of merit in somebody like Frank being part of an architectural school, in the hope that some of his focus may ‘rub off’.

Unfortunately, architecture is like a company that says, rather than diversify our product range, we are going to produce this one product in exclusion. In fact, Architects have developed one product so well, that no one can beat them. I wonder though, was this victory false, is the environment worse for it? Was the superiority achieved at too great an expense and needless waste of potential talent along the way? I have always enjoyed the urban scale view of things – but when trying to present a project in this way to a tutor in architectural school in Ireland – I felt I wasn’t getting across to them. It somehow did not fit into their mind-frame, of this neat ‘client-architect’ building relationship – with the nice details, and quirky use of steel and glass. When you get to the ‘intangibles’ of urban environments, and try to show them in diagrammatic or model format to an architect, the impact is often lost on them. It is like, because we haven’t discovered this yet, neither will you.

I always wonder about this when attending the architectural awards ceremony. The absence of awards or presentation of investigative work, to do with the broader environment. Most of it has been so ‘text-based’, as in Frank McDonald’s work, or that of Rem Koolhaas, or even our own AAI Building Material publications. The text-based urbanistic focus of the Building Material magazine, plays a second fiddle to the glossy diagrammatic pages of the AAI awards book. I am not sure really, there is anyone in the architectural community – or any rewards-based system, for that matter, to counter-balance, the colossal ‘im-balance’ the AAI awards process seems to have put on the profession here in Ireland.

I mean, you have only to look at the entries to the AAI awards – and there is really no ‘experimental or investigative’ work going on, to do with peoples’ observations about public spaces and places – it seems to have vanished from the radar, lost in a plethora of ‘cool’ looking jewel objects, that are tailor-made for awards selection. It requires a lot of disipline, on an individuals part not to be seduced by the jewels, and actually move ones’ focus towards the larger issues and the public realm. This seemed rather important to Thom Mayne in his talk the other night. I guess the urban problem requires a different kind of thinking to that in designing a good building – Mayne reckons a lot of problems architects will have to deal with in the future will be urban design problems.

The effect of the AAI awards process has been bad. Even if you just want to do some research, there is a massive stumbling block in the way – because, other people will say, ‘Look at that fellow, must be trying to pull out some new concept to win an award!’ So investigative people, people with inquiry in their soul, get a difficult time from their piers. The AAI awards process has been a rotten thing, the public look up to architects to become the leaders for the environment – when you see this mass-self-promotion through the glossy brochure, it doesn’t send out the right message. I always give the Daniel Goleman links below to people I know. I would reckon, the architect studies everything except for one important, crucial thing: leadership.

Daniel Goleman, author of emotional intelligence and Primal Leadership, where he introduces the ‘six styles of leadership’,….

http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/l2l/summer2002/goleman.html

Nice matrix arrangement of things here:

http://www.12manage.com/methods_goleman_leadership_styles.html

Another bit on Goleman:

http://www.businesslistening.com/primal-leadership.php

Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono is another book I think, helps to look at the crucial skills needed, for architecture as negotiation, when dealing with the urban design problem. What I am saying really, is the kind of thinking required for single buildings and urban design is different.

Brian O’ Hanlon.