garethace
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Interestingly about the kiosks I would LOVE to see the deigner return to the scene of his crime in light of how awful these are beginning to look.
I think the achievement of good architecture, is very much up to the client,… if the client is not firm and business-like enough,… in what he/she/it is willing to pay up money for,.. then the designer will just trump up with, whatever suits them. If the client makes it too easy for the spatial designer,… and gives them a heap of cash all in one lump,.. what do you expect will happen? Yeah, you’ve already guessed it,… a quite monopolistic dynasty of spatial designers,… who regularly import an army of foreign designers, on demand, as the boom times demand they should. If you think about it,… having completed a design and build of any urban project,… the only connection, thereafter between designer and the project, is a negative one – that of liability. This is written into the code, in the form of ‘The Building Regulations’. I mean, why can’t you turn that around – and try to make what was previously seen as a negative ‘aspect’ of a spatial designer’s responsibility – into a much more positive one instead? If you think about it, it is this consciousness of this ‘negative aftermath’ to designing and building an urban project – that could be responsible for a serious amount of poor urban design. On a related note, about Complexity and Contradition in Architecture,… isn’t the car – person, person – car, inhabited street, yet another example made in Robert Venturi’s book? An example of the ‘Both-And’ inclusive strategy towards spatial design, as opposed to an exclusive ‘Either-Or’ one? I mean, if you want to a very accurate picture of what Westmoreland Street with ‘all pedestrians’ would really feel like,… then about all one has to do, is show up on the said street on any St. Patrick’s day, and you will know how uncomfortable it does feel, to have loads of boozy, daft people wandering around, ready to do something at any moment – how do you even attempt to police that situation?
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Well, I think the powers that be, do need to be stricter in the way they ‘dish out’ cash to the spatial designers,… at the moment, the spatial designers, getting into this brand new field – urban design – seem to ‘know’ the customer is under developed in recognition of quality and value for their investment. Remember only a couple of years ago, urban design was unheard of in Ireland, even amongst the spatial designers themselves. At the moment, professionals doing urban design, would have you believe that all the cost involved is in the building and realisation of the project. I believe this is a false representation of things. But this mis-representation has allowed a spatial designer to take their whole commission for doing the project in one big chunk and run away afterwards as fast as they are physically able. Everything to do with the project afterwards is somebody else’s baby – normally that ‘baby’ being passed onto some abyssmal public institution such as the local authority – some of whom, don’t even realise they have been given a ‘baby’ at all! All the so-called ‘Planning Process’ amounts to often, is a very formal and unfriendly exchange of ‘pleasantries’ or ‘hand-shakes’, between the designer and local authority. Just before the said authority is ‘lumped’ with another new problem to deal with – a shere ‘bundle of joy’. Given all the ‘money’ to be made from spatial design, is out of this quick dart of investment for the design and construction phase of the project, designers are forced to ‘live or die’ on this concentrated amount of ‘easy-cash’ available, for only a limited time and a limited space. That is, the design is only considered within the red-line of the site boundary, despite the fact, the design problem often crosses that boundary. In is important to note, you have so few native Irish spatial designers, making all of the money, as opposed to the wealth being evenly distributed. The professions have ended up very fragmented, and as a result, much less effective and able to cope with large complex urban design issues. Quite literally, a ‘raft’ of ‘short-term’ imported labour, is brought in to do the donkey-work associated with the competitions and a few working details to build the ‘blasted’ thing,… but nothing more permanent or sustainable ‘is being built’ to my eyes. I mean the educational process for spatial thinkers and designers in this country – is something of a standing joke for quite a while – mostly amongst the ‘offspring’ of a very few, well-do-do spatial designers.
I know that Temple Bar or Grafton Street retailers, are not like the citizens of a public housing project such as Ballymun, and many would say, why work with city centre retailers at all – haven’t they already got enough riches from the public. But, if you think about it carefully, successful business people are something like the citizens of a public housing project,… many great business people, had two choices with their lifes to begin with: continue to be poor, or make a conscious decision to go out and earn success. That doesn’t sound a million miles away from the inhabitants of a public housing scheme to me. Many of the biggest success stories in the history of business, were not from well-to-do backgrounds,… this is why I try to emphasise business people needing to be helped after the construction of new urban areas and streets,… just like the public housing projects,… a good spatial designer’s work, shouldn’t necessarily ‘stop’ when the last brick is laid, or begin, when someone has a bright idea, to lay down another new brick. I know it sounds a bit funny to be ‘sticking up’ for a section of the community, the business retailers, who are generally perceived as ‘doing well’ for themselves,… but I reckon they do need better standards coming from the design community,… and furthermore, a synergy of the parties working together,… combining, rather than separating their respective intelligence,… and their ‘sense of it all’. At the moment, because of a miserable ‘attempt’ at doing urban design in Ireland, our business communities are being forced to look primitive or sometimes plain foolish (Retail Boxes on Chapel Street Bridge, being a perfect case of my point). I don’t think it’s fair on a segment of society,… to be made to look ‘foolish’,… no more than, it is, on the residents of some poor housing project. If the business community of Dublin city were helped to realise better than ‘trailer-loads’ of wine pawned down in Temple Bar every night,… then it might in turn, manage to raise everyones’ standards. You would start to see ‘an inclusive’ approach towards ‘Urban Design’,… rather than an ‘exclusive one’. Like ‘All Car’ or ‘All Pedestrian’,… why can’t we have both? Is that too much to hope for?
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Shane, I am going to be really rude and obnoxious here, now, but please take it as me, just poking some fun at you,…
…unfortunately, I think you may be a little too familar with a concept like ‘Success Oriented Management’. That is not surprising, as I believe, a lot of the large institutions, involved in spatial design in Ireland these days, have succummed to a similar faith. I tried to argue in this thread here:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4206
…that perhaps, our urban projects, are being built on a model, whereby the designer spends all of the money at once, and the only way people have of looking ‘at the costs’ of a project,… are just by looking at the construction costs. Often in spanking new urban developments, it is the investment of time, expertise and energy that is spent after the construction phase has been completed, is much more important. Many Architects have known for years about the problems in social housing schemes both here and abroad, has been the lack of attention of those ‘projects’ after their final completion, as opposed to their initial design and construction. As Architects, focussed too much on merely the project nowadays, and it’s successful completion, with so many awards and recognition lavished upon designers, at that stage of the project’s lifecycle, I just wonder,… rather, no, I am positively sure,… there is a much larger and more useful role that spatial designers can play in the working of our environment,… that the current role they seem restricted to.
The problem was accurately described recently in Science. NASA ‘invented’ a technique called Success Oriented Management (SOM) to control space shuttle development. It assumes that everything will go right. As one official put it, ‘It means you design everything to cost and then pray.’ The intention was to eliminate parallel and possibly redundant development in test hardware, in response to the current cost pressures facing the agency. But as Science – and others – have noted, the program has led to wholesale deferrals of difficult work, embarassing accidents, expensive redesigns, erratic staffing, and the illusion that everything is running well. ‘The net effect of this management approach,’ says Science, ‘has been an absense of realistic plans, inadequate understanding of the status of the program, and the accumulation of schedule and cost deficits without visibility.’
I spoke a little about ‘Complexity’, in this thread here:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3076&page=3
I recognise how the ‘Cow’s Lane’ comments of mine were inconsistent, and even contradictory,… You know what, that is something I left in the writing, after having read it a couple of times,… just to see if anyone would notice the contradiction. The idea of ‘Both-And’, as opposed to ‘Either-Or’, is something everyone should try to grasp in relation to viewing urban design problems I think. It is really ‘cool’ and worth while, to see complexity and contradiction in the environment, all around you, and Robert Venturi’s book on the subject is worth looking into, if this idea intrigues you, as it does myself. Another apparent contradiction in the study of Social Science, that I am quite fond of, and applies very well to the experience of Grafton Street these days is:
Nobody goes there anymore, because it has become too crowded.
I think ‘Wisdom of Crowds’, has a nice chapter talking around that idea,… two hard copy editions cropped up cheap this week, in Hoggis Figgis basement, if you are interested in that book btw. Finally, I think the piece above;
‘It means you design everything to cost and then pray.’
Is basically what is wrong with urban design projects in Ireland presently, not the design, or the architecture per se. We must lack the right synergy between commercial minds and design minds, to pull off our projects convincingly,… this goes for the pheripheral centres I think, just as much as it goes for the central shopping districts. The only difference being, that Dundrum, Blanchardstown, Liffey Valley etc, seem to excercise more of a control over people within their space. Which has the flower sellers, and sidewalk coffee/wine drinking explosion in Dublin city centre, points out,… Dublin City Corporation do not have control of the situation at all. The whole issue has been like a political football lately, with everyone blasting the ball off each other’s shins. In this situation it is impossible to figure out at all, where the ball has been, where it is now, and where it will be in the future.
This point is especially important, as design of urban space, should be approached in a four dimensional sense, as opposed to a three dimensional – design and construct – way. We cannot go on building new streets adn new spaces, unless we fully understand what has already gone on, what is happening now, and have some clue, about what we hope to achieve in our next attempt. That is why I call for designer’s to be employed to re-visit their urban designs, even after they have been completed,… to learn from the real thing,… and to foster the kind of ‘Test it out’ mentality,… so badly needed. For instance, the retail boxes on Chapel Street bridge, being a classic example of a three dimensional conception of the project – design, detail and build – as opposed to a four-dimensional conception – as in Project Lifecycle Management – where the designer is invited back afterwards.
This notion of ‘building in learning’ to the project endeavour is not a new one btw, you only have to look at the automobile industry today, where the service garage plugs the car into a computer, when you have it serviced,… or the design of most any kind of machinery, photocopiers even – everything nowadays – has a digital heartbeat – something that connects in back to home base, to report flaws in the design, and crucial information for the designer trying to understand how to approach the next new design. Why can urban design, not have this dimension too? And from what I have seen in terms of the pitiful attempt to combine business creativity with design creativity – in Dublin’s city centre – this kind of approach, is sorely needed.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Interesting extract from a very good read ‘In Search of Excellence’, from the chapter named ‘Bias for Action’.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I decided to post up, this separate thread here to examine the issue I am talking about specifically.
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?p=37948#post37948
That in reality, we cannot even manage to look after the existing public pedestrian spaces, that we already have, not to mind creating more, which will just suffer from the same old problems, and total lack of perception that the older ones have. I am referring to things here, like my highlighting of the ‘flower seller’ phenomenon on Grafton Street, which Dubin City seems to believe is a creative way to use public open space. I would argue that it exemplifies our lack of creativity in dealing with the challenge that is the design of public urban space. While the announcement of a proposal to pedestrianise Westmoreland Street is calculated to create the ‘shock effect’, and probably has done so,… I think it ignores a great percentage of the design problem,… namely Dublin city’s lack of a spatial imagination and capability to deal with the spaces we already have.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
“A key goal of the growth of the city in the longer term must be to reinforce the linkage across the city. Re-invigorated shopping zones north and south of the city, if combined to a single shopping trip, will prove very difficult for any other shopping proposal to match.” Bannon said the council should remove retail services from the list of normally permitted uses on the two main shopping streets.
Okay, well then, let’s just take this much on board,… It is a pity really to be talking about ‘linkage’ of anything in relation to the city centre of Dublin City. When everything almost, that has been done in the city, state intervention or no state intervention,… has taken the whole concept of linkage and just abandoned it. You have two kinds of development happening in Dublin city centre at the moment: Firstly, you have sites which have no linkage or strategic importance whatsoever, and they have all kinds of attention and effort lavished upon them. Secondly, you have some sites in Dublin, which just stare you in the face, and say ‘I Have Linkage’ in capital letters, but normally those sites are just lying there waiting to be discovered. Cows Lane in the Temple Bar Area, is a good example of the first case – a space which has practically no linkage to anything – if you even attempt to have a coffee there while sitting outside – you get asked by passers-by for biros, money,… and maybe the shirt off your back, if you waited around long enough. As a consequence, people avoid the place whenever possible – Cow’s Lane represents an area of Temple Bar, which is appealing for the very reason, it is quiet and subdued,… yet none of the ‘uses’ of the retail units there, play on this idea,… of going to an area of Temple Bar, which isn’t quite as manic,… Cow’s Lane is a good example of a beautiful pedestrian space, within walking distance of the Ha’Penny bridge,… but it is just interesting to watch, what happens, having created this fabulous space,… the limited capability of the Irish scene, to come up with anything creative at all, to do with a new space, they have been provided. It is not the best incentive in the world, to run with ‘good design’,… when you see how good design is abused really, once it has been made. Curved Street is yet another example of inappropriate use, of what should be a very good space – a new kind of space – but it is just sad, once we ever create these new, really snappy, contemporary urban spaces – what we do with those spaces, when they have been created, and how we manage those spaces. I mean, it is unavoidable, to notice how the curved street area, has become a prime location for knacker drinking. While the Meeting House Square has terribly uses around it too, like a really cheap Chinesse restaurant, a photo-gallery or two, with no nightime presence, and big huge gates at nightime. The only possible use people could think for New Square, Temple Bar, has been to commercialise the thing completely by filling it all with de-markated areas full of tables and chairs, full of people willing to pay for over-priced, city centre cappuchinos and such. It is almost comical these times, to see the few ‘Triers’ doing second hand books, almost pushed out of the scene altogether on New Square, by the explosion of people ‘slobbering’ down wine. One of the few other uses in New Square, other than its ‘mis-use’ as a wine drinking room,… is an AIB cash machine, hole-in-the-wall,… now isn’t that original.
I actually believe the government and planners are right in this case to show restraint, and not ‘jump-in’ and create these nice new contemporary, ‘pedestrian’ spaces,… because you only have to look at the track-record,… a trail of various casulties of urban design,… in doing open public space in this city of Dublin, to know that we cannot be entrusted with this responsiblity as of yet. In a word, we simply don’t have the creativity necessary in business or in design, to pull off these complex challenges effectively. I think we need to re-think, and start from basic principles – of how we train young professionals – the kinds of designers we are producing. At the moment, we have ones who run after design awards – as in the case of the Temple Bar situation – but afterwards, the urban space isn’t used to a fraction of it’s original potential. We should encourage spatial designers to think of these projects in a life-cylce kind of fashion – about the maintenance and operation of the spaces, as well as just their execution in bricks and mortar, or fancy ‘spatially-evocative’,… award-winning, design descriptive vocabulary,… as in the AAI Awards brochure notion of things. A young designer growing up in Ireland now, should not be encouraged to think, that their responsibility ends when they have built something and gotten recognition through the AAI awards system, for doing that,… but that is the way, young designers have been indoctrinated sadly. For this, the finger of blame must point directly at the design schools. Another public space, that comes especially to mind here, was the new creation of an ‘all-pedestrian space down near Grand Canal Docks,… I think the decision to eliminate the car completely in that instance was a demonstrable mistake. While on the other hand, a three-lane curving speed-way, through college green, merging into a 6-7 lanes mess on West Moreland Street,… well, you don’t need to do any ‘surveys’ to understand, how antagonistic to urban life, that could be. The main trouble still on Westmoreland Street is the use of it, as a bus park depot. Because anyone walking on the west side of the street has absolutely no view-lines, and therefore, that makes it even more dangerous to cross. The speed of the traffic on Westmoreland Street is much too fast,… mainly because of this ‘wall’ of buses parked down one side of it,… the cars tend to ignore the presence of a pedestrian element altogether and just put the foot down. Motorists will always instinctively ‘put the foot down’ were ever, pedestrians have been elminated altogether from the equation. The augmented presence ‘People’ in the equation, on Westmoreland Streeet, using the road to cross or whatever, would have a calming influence on this car speeding behaviour,… the city planners by designing Westmoreland as a movement system, as it is,… have in effect themselves created a situation, which is much more dangerous than it needs to be. This just boils down to poor design and lack of spatial awareness more than anything. But I don’t think that ‘flipping-the-bit’ and turning what was ‘All-Car’ suddenly to ‘All-People’, is going to furnish us with a sustainable, long-term solution. To design good urban space, our ability as managers of projects in four as well as three dimensions – is going to be put to the test. It is not just good enough, to import an army of ‘slick’ well-trained foreign design professionals into the country to ‘win’ the competition to complete the new urban space,… we should be training our young talent right here in this country to maintain streets for use by car, pedestrian and bus alike, well into the next fifty years.
The types of individuals associated with queues at bus stops isn’t always desireable either – especially not in the concentration of them, that happens on Westmoreleand Street. You have the same kind of situation on Nassau Street, or along the Quays, where the crowds of people standing waiting for a bus, tend to attract attention from un-desireable elements, just looking for a bit of entertainment,… where the city planners have provided a ready-made captive audience for their antics. There is a much better way to combine traffic and people on the same street I am sure, but certainly ‘banning’ the car isn’t going to make a street anymore friendly for a pedestrian, than a street full of cars is – I am certain of that. But finally, I must mention, on the theme of ‘linkage’ the Dublin City Council’s attempt at linking north and south, via the new Millenium bridge. I really do hate to say this, but it highlights yet another circumstance, where Dublin lacks any design and business creativity to pull off this kind of challenge effectively. You get to the north bank of the Liffey, you wait for this stupid ‘count-down’ clock to tick all the ways down to zero, and then having scurried across the Quay’s ‘motorway’,… you hit the ‘pedestrianised’ zone, and guess what? Yeah, more Dubin city centre wine boozers, at mid-day on a Saturday, having tables and chairs thrown all over the tiny miserable piece of ground, which ‘North-South’ pedestrians were promised to walk in,… But now that overflow from the Millenium bridge is funnelled through a space, about the width of one person, at times, because these so called ‘Cafes’ in this new tunnel-street,… want to capitalise, on the ‘footfall’ of a ‘thight-squeeze’ of people, to pawn expensive ‘cheese and wine’. As long as we continue to do urban design in this fashion, where it is all about extracting money from people walking in confined spaces,… then as a nation, we still cannot be trusted to deal with this responsiblity,… and I as one individual, would certainly be happier to see the traffic planners, take this responsibility away from us altogether. As I have often said, an awful amount of this lack of perception, can be traced right back as far as our design professionals and the schools they run for training young designing talents – the lack of acceptance, that space is a four-dimension movement of people through time and space,… rather than a nice 3-D graphic, which gets you an A in your examinations,… is what has cost, this country and it’s attempts to conceptualise and design urban space, very dearly now.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Okay, I think I need to finish off this current rant, with a good example of getting stuff to market and getting it on time – or not. Well worth spending the time to read through I think.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
If any of you wish to view some real mansions, check out this for ‘size’. I wonder what the price tag is like?
http://www.johnmorrisarchitects.com/longview.html#
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Well now, having dealt somewhat with the people and the organisations charged with the responsibility of designing things such as high-density residential buildings, I am going to look back again, at the people ‘who buy things’ designed, built or otherwise provided on the market, in terms of accomodation. This piece was written by Paul Ormerod, in ‘Butterfly Economics’, influenced by complexity theory in the field of AI, ant behaviour and computational modelling of wicked, seemingly contradictory problems. I cannot help but keep in mind the Irish Housing market, for 2-story semi-detached houses, with front and back gardens, when reading the piece quoted below.
In many ways, complex systems analysis formalises what sucessful business people know instinctively. But there are several implications which are worth mentioning. Once we admit the possibility that individual tastes and behaviour can be influenced directly by those of others, gaining a lead on rivals can create a virtuous circle in which the market position of a company or brand becomes stronger simply because it is already seen to be popular. So it is impoprtant not just to innovate but to test such developments in the markplaces as early as possible. A new product may seize the imagination and rapidly build up a powerful position, while if it is endlessly tested and refinded within the confines of the firm, rival companies may themselves introduce concepts which pre-empt its potential success.
The self-reinforcing nature of success rarely means that a company thereby gains complete dominace over its competitors. The simple reason for this is that it is usually quite easy for customers to change their minds – indeed, switching opinions or behaviours is the whole essence of the basic ants model. In the case, say, of the appropriate choice of techniques to be used in nuclear power plants, the successful technology can certainly gain 100 per cent market share. The investment is extremely expensive and very long-lived. Once the plant has been built, it is not really feasible to pull it down and construct one of a different kind. With a bar of chocolate, in contrast, consumers can experiment with rival brands at minimal expense. Buying a particular brand today does not preclude the purchase of a competing one tomorrow. The principles of positive feedback, of the reinforcement of the position of dominant brands, still apply. Popular products sustain their popularaity in part simply because they are popular. But, except in the case of extremely expensive purchase, this mechanism does not lead to the elimination of rivals and permanent market control.
Orthodox economics is not a completly empty box, and my arguments do not involve its complete rejection but rather an extension, a generalisation which takes into account, unlike conventional theory, the fundamental fact, that people are influenced directly by the behaviours fo others. The challenge of provideing a tolerable description of a complex world with interacting agents is certainly hard. This may have tbeen the basis behind the great physicist Max Planck’s alleged remark in the 1930s to the leading economist John Maynard Keynes. The mathematics which is actually used in most of economics, not just then but even now, was perfectly straightforwared and even trivial to a man with Planck’s background. But when Keynes asked whether he had ever thought of taking up economics, Planck thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘the maths is too hard.’ Yet the gains from a better understanding of how the economy and society operate are potentially enomous.
One of the things I like about Paul Ormerod’s book, is how he attempts to find ways in which to explain seemingly contradictory phenomena – for instance, how an inferior product, can often shove a much more superior one out of the market. The important line in the above I would like to highlight is:
while if it is endlessly tested and refinded within the confines of the firm, rival companies may themselves introduce concepts which pre-empt its potential success.
While listening to the contributions of various ‘Architect’ speakers to the planning radio programme yesterday evening, I was again reminded of how much these ‘design professionals’ love to test and refine stuff within the confines of the company. We need to grow a much stronger, more resilient architectural profession here in Ireland, that is able to get the range of products needed, out to the market on time, in order to provide the consumers with some alternatives. In short, Architects really need to start to understand the fundamentals of business, just like other people in society:
In many ways, complex systems analysis formalises what successful business people know instinctively.
I don’t know if I am the only one who thinks this – but certainly the lack of ability of the architectural profession ‘to gel’ together and cooperate on these ventures – must take a lot of the blame. It is like listening to a bankrupt company crying because its product launch went all pair-shaped on them. Boo-Hoo, get over yourselves guys. This process needs to begin I think in the design schools, at the most basic of levels,… and how those same schools are being funded and managed,… basically, you reap exactly what you sow. It is exactly the same in architecture as in any other business, and no amount of debate will change that.
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3594&page=5
Anyone else care to comment?
Brian O’ Hanlon.
@Thomond Park wrote:
Back to Ormerod, I find his type of economist impatient and generally flawed, the World economic system is constantly changing at an ever increasing pace but it is doing this in a way that involves changes in very accepted components. With the odd revolution aside which generally tend to occur in places that impact little on the greater global economy most changes both at National and corporate level occur over time and can be adequately assessed by making observation of the principal economic components.
It more than likely is flawed, because a lot of what he wrote was about the 1990s, at the height of enthausiasm post-Berlin-wall-collapse, that America would never again see a recession etc, etc. A lot of grand ideas were found to be deeply flawed by the time the 1990s had wound up. But, I think Ormerod does offer us an alternative way of looking at our world. Especially nowadays, as we are trying to establish here in Ireland, why a certain unique kind of housing solution has won over total domination in the marketplace. These aren’t issue to do with architecture, but with economics, and most importantly, about the way we approach economics. Here I think Ormerod still has very useful guides for us here in this country. For instance, from the use of very basic simulations, you can predict how the simple rules used to adjust how an individual ant behaves, has effects on the the behaviour of the system at a much, much larger level. I think this is a useful way to look at the Irish environment, and the way housing happens. Rolling on the ‘holy trinity’, the Frank’s, Sean’s and Tony’s to explain the built environment to us, is all greatly amusing, but honestly, the reality out there is more complex than these guys ever get to describe in the short space of a radio or TV slot. This point about TV and radio interviews, about the idea of ‘propaganda’ is a really interesting one, and one I will examine a little more closely below.
But the issue that I am looking at now is that the cost of the architect will come to over €48k!! In comparison a engineer / draughtsman will cost only 3k. That is a massive saving for my budget. WHY?
Honestly – what is the difference??? I presume that you are going to say it is the same as Monet v a 3 yr old kid – but try and tell me the real difference.
As to the Architectural profession itself, as to the ‘over-pricing’ of the architectural profession,.. the answer here is very simple. It is no wonder the design professions in Ireland are in-efficient, because they were never allowed to be anything else other than in-efficient. In times of recession, the government does need to step into the breach, and provide some level of subsidy to these struggling professions, to ensure that unemployment doesn’t rise to staggering heights for architects during harder times. I know several relatively young architects nowadays, who spent the 1980s here in Dublin doing basically the same work, we take for granted that Chinesse people do in the service industry nowadays. That is absolutely no exaggeration – I mean, how many people are going to struggle to qualify, in times of recession, simply to bus tables in some crappy restaurant someplace? But that is what some were forced to do for a living. The salary situation for those working back in those days was ridiculously small, so that it made busing tables look quite attractive. The government might have done a lot more to help regulate that. Indeed the RIAI and many more should have blown more whistles at the time, but simply chose not to. We now might have a cost-efficient spatial design resource to fall back on – but the simple truth is, we do not. Architects mainly quote exorbitant fees for doing projects, because they know they cannot simply cope with it all – they need to drive away the smaller players – it is not that architects want to earn 48K per job exactly, but lack of resources forces them to do so.
Quote from Ormerod:
But these are arguments about what to do once an unusually high level of unemployment has been created, once unemployment has been placed onto a higher pather. Governments can never know in advance either the scale of a recession or whether it will lead to an unexpectedly high increase in unemployment. But when the economy has actually begun to slow down sharply – when a deep recession is beginning to be a matter of fact rather than one of prediction – measures should be brought in very quickly which reduce the possibility of a particularly massive loss of jobs taking place. Such policies could only be temporary. Further, there will inevitably be a degree of waste involved in widespread job subsidies. But once jobs have been destroyed on a large scale, it seems very difficult to generate the environment in which they can be created again. Unemmployment can be placed on a high path which may persist for decades. It is more effective to try to head off the possibility of massive and rapid job loss, and then to wait for the natural upturn in the economy to reduce unemmployment once again.
When I spent some time working in Malta, a small country with a very prestigious history in ship building on the Mediterranean, the debate was whether the government in Malta should or shouldn’t pay skilled ship yard workers to come into work every day, to sit on their fists. One side of the argument said, well, this is waste. While another side, a more far-sighted type of people argued that it was important that a small nation like Malta should have some industry of it’s own. As soon as apprenticeships in the ship yard ceased, then that whole industry that went with those apprenticeships, would cease to be also. The idea then of re-invigorating an industry like that later, would be impossible. I think that the design and spatial professions in Ireland were allowed to slide down much too far by the 1980s, and now you are just seeing the results of that. Sure you had managed to keep isolated ‘outposts’ in disiplines like Architecture, Engineering, Surveying, Planning and what not. But mostly, it all served to keep a few miserable jobs for the offspring and ‘extended family’ of those working in the professions. There wasn’t any way in which a person from the outside could try to ‘break in’. I spent most of the 1990s searching for the ‘apprenticeship’, similar to that described in the Maltesse ship yard workers situation – but it simply wasn’t there – and a lot of my friends exited the design workforce sometime around then. I mean, as a country we are able to subsidise farmers to grow ‘over-priced’ cattle in fields – but when it comes to spatial design – there isn’t a buck in sight anywhere! And apart from anything else, it makes it far too easy for the ‘insiders’ in the architectural profession to create a monopolistic haven for themselves and their ‘friends’. I am not saying that subsizing small farmers is the only answer, but certainly, when you just have a handfull of massive players controlling the whole situation – then that is unbalanced. Of course, Architects greed has gotten the best of them nowadays – but they can do precisely what they like – the government’s lack of subsidy for struggling young professionals down through the years – has created the perfect environment for architectural design monopolies and dynasties to thrive – it almost brings to mind a medieval monarchial system at times.
There has always been a very few famous architects who are mostly middle aged at this point. But all those old guys can manage to do today, is to simulate ‘youthfulness’ by taking on serious amounts of non-native and often non-English speaking labour from all around the world. That suits them perfectly, because non-natives have to leave as soon as the visa runs out, or whatever. Which leaves you right back with the same monopoly and dynasties you started out with. When Hitler invaded other countries, often the locals would receive uniforms and be forced to fight for the fatherland. Things weren’t grown when they should have been grown, and now it is just a scramble to ‘simulate’ a design tradition all of a sudden – is basically a theatre performance – something like the Nazis did in WWII, when they made show reels to try and convince the world they had a lot more military power, than was actually the case in reality. But heh, Gobbels and these guys were brilliant PR specialists, with the ability to manipulate a mass audience. The main trouble with the architects, is that some of them do also sport a talent for showmanship. I wouldn’t mind seeing what hardware they have though, put to the real test on some serious design problems. I am pretty sure the whole ‘design’ war machine would collapse around peoples’ ears. Just too much of it, is showreels, smoke and mirror kind of stuff. Indeed I often feel like the education centres for design in Ireland, are like the central bureaus of the ‘propaganda’ machine, of the Irish architectural effort – and the poor students as elements in the ‘showreel’ asked to run past the camera hundreds of times, to simulate a young, healthy, vibrant army of pro’s. 🙂 The Hitler youth, of the spatial design tradition here in this country,…
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Or dare I say, a bit like that poor clown the Iraq army put on TV, to talk to the west. Yeah, you cannot discount the contribution of ‘propaganda’ in something like this. This is really why I do question the validity of what the AAI puts out each and every year, in more and more glossy publications, for their so-called ‘Awards’. All they are attempting to do, is to sell a nice ‘smiley, happy’ image, which doesn’t match up to what is there in reality. And in doing so, allowing themselves to be ‘used’ as a further extension of the design tradition’s whole nasty propaganda machine. Sure there is tonnes of money now pouring into the design professions, but it certainly isn’t finding it’s way back to those foot-soldiers fighting on the front lines – I have no idea where it is going – It might be smuggled in suit cases to Argentina for all I know. A lot of the points I collected on this thread:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3594&page=5
manage to reinforce most of what I have said just above. But it is just crucial to appreciate, the impact of a serious recession on a profession such as Architecture. It can easily create the ideal environment in which monopolies can grow to a quite staggering scale – and thereby, in turn create the exact environment, in which a smaller player just hasn’t got a hope. I often believe myself, that Ireland is so attractive for foreign architects to come and work here – not because of the usual reasons – we do so much ‘exciting’ design – but mainly because Ireland is such a monopolistic environment for architecture – one in which it is too easy to make easy money and just ‘f*** off’ again. In other words, what is left behind isn’t the healthiest architectural design tradition in the world – but a very small few practioners can make a ‘f***’in packet’.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Unfortunately you don’t have to travel to any rural villages to see exactly the same kind of mishaps. You only have to look at the current state of things around the Stillorgan shopping centre – I don’t know the exact sequence of development, that Stillorgan village took down over the years, but from my understanding of it – the village of Stillorgan did experience several sequential road building and road alteration projects. As time went on, problems that should have been addressed from the beginning, just kept going ‘un-resolved’, leading to the current state of confusion. What you have left now is a pure obstacle course of different plans, different ideas and nothing really gels. Stillorgan is actually a crazy kind of environment, because you have a tiny village scale in parts, the first Shopping Centre in Ireland, a GAA field and associated properties, a few major car and bus routes, speculative development and residential all knitted together in some kind of weird fashion. You have a lot of open space out there and a lot of opportunities exist to solve the problem well. But I fear, the way that people are going to use these opportunities, is in the typical short-sighted, and ‘my-little-site-on-it’s-own’-kind-of-way. Herman Hertzberger is one of the very few Architects I know, you has seriously faced up to the problem of designing ‘the in-between’ space, as opposed to just designing ‘the object’.
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3933
But getting back to your point on the pavements – Stillorgan – coming from its ancient history as a country village – still manages to sport this very large kind of ‘hump in the road’,… it is a kind of topological feature that really dominates and defines the experience of walking or driving through Stillorgan. And just like the photograph you have shown, most of the architecture flanking this ‘hump in the road’ has adapted to this hump in the road. For the life of me, I just cannot understand, with all of the major road building projects going on all over the country – how that ‘hump in the road’ right in the middle of Stillorgan has managed to go un-noticed for all of these years. The road is far too wide there anyhow, and the parking on either side of the road is a pure mess. It is one of the few places in Dublin, where a pedestrian is not ‘safe’ to cross when a green man lights up. But as I have said, for every nice ‘all-pedestrian’ environment one creates, at the other end of the scale, Dublin City manages to get away with an environment which is exclusively car oriented. The siting of the Ormonde Cinema in Stillorgan is very funny too, as most mothers will park their car in the summertime in the Shopping Centre park, and then the half-dozen or so kids have to ‘run’ across about 5 lanes of car traffic going in two directions, with the added difficulty of this ‘hump in the road’ topography, which makes visibility of oncoming vehicles especially hard to judge. It is so funny, right at this point you have a veritable ‘intersection’ of mums with kiddies running across a road (sweets and fizzy drinks in hand) with practically an ‘Auto-bahn’ running right by. You see, unless, you can manage to view spatial design problems in four dimensions, you just don’t notice things like that. My fear, is that most spatial design students, looking at their projects manage to see their solutions in three dimensions, and that is as far as they get to take it.
The real trouble with everything that has happened to Stillorgan, including the most recent scheme to extend the old 1960s Shopping Centre. Every presentation, perspective view, plan, elevation and representation of the new scheme was very carefully doctored to draw your attention away from this current nasty traffic/pedestrian mess, that exists right along side the proposed new development. No one has ever been commissioned to just model the entire base – the reality of what is actually there – irrespective of property lines, of point of view or special interest. This I feel, is where you do need a government to step in and take the initiative. But as I have already said here, the government aren’t in the business of spatial planning and design – just a few individuals in a very little known profession called architecture, are actually able to wrap their heads around such complex design tasks – and I don’t know to what extent they seem to be able to get into anything at all. I as a kind of person, who knows his way around a spatial design problem or two, I do know perfectly well, that to trully represent many designs, it is not enough just to model and present the proposed ‘Object’ you have to build,… because in fairness, you have to represent the entire picture – the context, into which this development is going to land. The trouble, is that your developer consortium doesn’t want you looking beyong the immediate boundaries. And with the advent of computer graphics visualisation nowadays, which ‘appear’ to present the reality of what will get built – alas – that elusive ‘Fourth’ dimension doesn’t translate through these CG renderings at all. Which is all the more reason CG renders are so popular amongst the developers I fear. I think, the Stillorgan centre renders presented only, what the developers want you to see – when it is plain as a pike-staff out there on the ground, what the real problems are. The same faith fell to Moore Street, which lost it’s chance to gain a suitable entrance space, at the corner with Parnell Street. If you really look at it, you see a pattern emerging all over the city. The planners obviously aren’t able to grasp the spatial subtleties of the various sites either – and something tells me, that developer consortiums have twigged onto this, and have exploited that.
The extent of the definition of spatial design problems, in planning applications is seldom large enough – especially for crucial sites, where doing the right thing has impact on the whole surrounding area. The problem with villages like Stillorgan is repeated all over Dublin City as far as I can see. The only problem is that our spatial planning and design tradition in this country has just been too weak over the years to contribute anything to the debate now. The profession seemingly run by too many old folks, who would rather a quiet evening in their back garden talking to their plants, rather than exert themselves to deal with the actual issues. In relation to Grafton Street, which excludes the automobile altogether, this idea of having armies of pedestrians marching up and down to their own drum beat, supposedly in the name of high street commerce. Dublin City Council seem to be unable any longer, to put that idea back into it’s box – it has escaped – and is totally out of control. It has just gathered it’s own momentum down through the years, as if some ‘bottom-up’ intelligence, in the form of pedestrians were somehow getting back at the automobile for all of the years of suppression. I really think DCC needs to put the lid back on this box, and put a pile of bricks firmly on the lid. The pedestrianisation of Grafton St., was a pretty mess they created, except they are unable to admit that now. I challenge anyone to fairly say, they can ‘walk’ up through Grafton Street on any busy shopping day – and enjoy that experience – I challenge anyone. Total separation of car and pedestrian just tries to solve the issue, by separating the two things altogether – in other words, you avoid dealing with it. In terms of a ‘solution’, total separation is just the lowest common denominator, the lowest rung on the ladder. But heh, we have a long history in the spatial design tradition here of doing just precisely that. As warped and chaotic as they may seem, I actually ‘like’ places like Stillorgan village and even streets like Dame Street here in Dublin. They still represent to me, a problem waiting to be tackled properly and given the attention and care it really does deserve.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Yeah, I see now where you are coming from. One of the ways that Ormerod looks at the same problem,… but instead of using mathematical models, has used the idea of ‘agents’,… based on observations, of how ant colonies behave,… with kinds of bottom-up intelligence,… so that Ormerod thinks that all capitalist societies follow a very similar pattern. You can build a simulation of this, with average industrial output increasing by 1.5%-2.5% per annum, over a period of say 100 years, and what happens is a very similar pattern always emerges,… the few companies get to huge heights in terms of output, dwarfing those beneath, who actually ‘lose’ productivity enormously in relation to these ‘giants’. In the third world countries, starting from a non-capitalist base, which starts the initial high rates of productivity,… in the third world countries, the gap between large and small companies isn’t very wide at all. In the Western economies, it widened to factors of 800,… between large and small. While in the third world, the productivity gap widens about 1:3 or so, over the same period. Apparently, according to Ormerod, the current Economic models, just don’t predict this kind of behaviour which you can observe, if you look at the reality. While the Ormerod models aren’t pinpoint accurate or anything,… they give a very useful idea of what happens in reality, compared to the mathematical approximations.
The only trouble with the few companies getting to peaks of 800 times larger than the smaller rivals, is that the large companies then become very hard to manage effectively. Although size matters in westernised industrial economies, your complexity also gets un-manageable. I am trying to compare this ‘scale’ of things like the American car industry, or the Japanese electronic industry, with the ‘Emergent’ behaviours of the property building industry here in Ireland. Obviously, the property thing here in this country is just simply too large, for anyone to get a good ‘overview’ of things, just using the existing mathematical approximation. Obviously a much larger brush stroke needs to be used, maybe not as accurate, but something more generic, something to lend some clearer picture of what is going on in the reality we see around us everyday now in Ireland. That is why I think, that professions like Architecture are being really under-valued in Ireland at the moment, because they contain the only people we now have capable of working in this space, where an overview or concept of the larger spatial problem, is necessary. Unfortunately, the architectural profession’s lack of success, relative to it’s engineering and ‘numbers’ professions, means that architecture isn’t really able to contribute to the debate effectively at all. Well, apart from the usual radio show appearances made by Sean, Frank and Tony. Like the father, son and holy spirit of Irish architecture. 🙂
Brian O’ Hanlon.
St Stephens Green West will be open to vehicular traffic from the junction of Cuffe St./Harcourt St./St. Stephen’s Green South as far as York Street and from the top of Grafton Street as far a Glover’s Alley. The stretch of St. Stephen’s Green West from York Street to Glover’s Alley (i.e. in front of the Royal College of Surgeons) will be closed to traffic. A new plaza will be constructed here.
That’s great news.
Actually, it isn’t good news at all, because once you begin, to see cars ‘excluded’ totally from the equation in some areas, you automatically see environments created on the other end of the spectrum, which exclude the pedestrian and even cyclist altogether,… that is not progress,… but going backways in terms of urban design.
Interestingly the new ‘pedestrian plaza’ on Green West consists of an extended pavement in from of the Royal College of Surgeons.
Well if you look at my observations in relation to Dundrum Shopping Centre,
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3703&page=3
you will notice how in Dundrum, the approach of ‘separation’ of cars from pedestrians is taken to an extreme, whereby cars are totally ignored on one aspect of the site, and it is all chinese rock garden kind of aesthetic,… whereas on the other end of the site,… it is all ‘car city’,… and pedestrians and even cyclists have been just shoved out of the whole equation period. This is the polarity that often happens in today’s road engineering I find,… whereas to do design well, I think you have to accept a bit of both worlds,… to accept that these worlds are going to intersect much more than we are currently willing to accept. It is so funny to see the few cars that do venture down towards the college of surgeon’s, getting really ‘aggressive’ with walkers at the moment,… I see cars beeping an awful lot at the walkers, and it is currently unclear as to who ‘owns’ the territory. As if that was the proper way to go about things,… that you have to either ‘own’ the territory as a car driver, or as a pedestrian, but no in between. The drivers around College of Surgeon’s and the LUAS stop now feel as if they need to hoot and honker, huff and puff a whole lot, to re-establish some of their personal space. The article on Hans Monderman linked over here, is about the best article I have read in a long while, on traffic mixed with people,…
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3896&page=2&pp=25&highlight=monderman
As I said, all over the city, the separation between car and pedestrian, is just so exaggerated as to be ridiculous. I tend to subscribe to the notion, that when you speed up the flow of cars, then the whole traffic system in the city as a whole tends to collapse, and everyone is left waiting in jambs. But if you actually slow down the traffic in general and mix up pedestrians and cars more, the system will manage much, much better as a whole. This seems like a paradox, but recent studies are showing it to be the case. In Ireland, in recent years we have been so busy arguing for faster and faster lanes, speed limits and allowance for car speed all over,… and the system as a whole has just buckled completely. Of course, as soon as you create a car speeding friendly zone, you have to take measures to exclude people from the design altogether, and the car just takes over completely,… that is where your drab, and lifeless environments come from. The trouble I see happening in Dublin, is the hell that is Grafton Street ‘pedestrianisation’ is being allowed to spread out too far altogether,… you already have the pedestrianisation down to the Gaeity, and now all over the Green. All that is happenings is the hell that was Grafton Street pedestrianisation,.. and the extreme separation of cars from pedestrians,… is starting to grow, and it is not an improvement but a dis-improvement in my opinion. I think it is patently wrong that pedestrians are seen to need a totally separate environment of their own – it is something driven mainly by big commerce and a culture of litigation in Ireland. The kind of environment produced when you just have all pedestrians on their own, isn’t really a nice environment at all, or a successful urban experience. Even in the planning of new areas of cities, you see the influence of the car, down through the years,…
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The ‘Radburn’ example in the linked images, is the one that Hans Monderman thinks was ‘written into’ most traffic guidelines and codes, and re-produced all over the world,… the extreme separation of car and pedestrian. The ‘Radburn’ philosophy comes about, because cars are treated the same way as water flows in a pipe, and that kind of engineering of car traffic, like how large the pipe diameter needs to be etc. As I have mentioned here on the board previously, for every nice spanking new ‘Henry Street’ that Dublin City Council manages to make,… it also has to create a ‘Parnell Street’ rear service entrance to accomodate all of the ‘shit’ that has to happen to service the said high street. So that, one space becomes ‘car hell’ like Parnell Street, while another street, just becomes pedestrian hell, like Grafton Street or Henry Street,… any day I have experienced those places anyhow.
My major concern would be that this turning circle would end up being a buspark, where the drivers had their ten-minute break before heading out of town again.
It would be entirely inappropriate for double-deckers to be parking around here and it would be probably worse than the old arrangement where at least the traffic was moving (albeit slowly).The big question that is raised here, is why do all of the bus routes in Dublin city appear to need to ‘stop’ in the City Centre? Why can you not have a terminus stop, someplace removed far away from the city centre,… and also reduce the amount of space needed in general for buses stopping in the city centre? It seems to me as if most of the great spaces in Dublin city centre are entirely ruled by rows of double deckers,… and yeah, the drivers eating kit-kats. The strongly hierarchial nature of urban city council’s just doesn’t seem to be capable of maximising on what our cities have to offer,…
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4159
An often quoted architectural text from the seventies, Complexity and Contradiction, by Robert Venturi, expresses the point about hierarchies, and such in the following way.
Cleanth Brooks refers to Donne’s art as ‘having it both ways’ but, he says, ‘most of us in this latter day, cannot. We are disciplined in the tradition either-or, and lack the mental agility – to say nothing of the maturity of attitude – which would allow us to indulge in the finer distinctions and the more subtle reservations permitted by the tradition of both-and.’
The tradition ‘either-or’ has characterised orthodox modern architecture: a sun screen is probably nothing else; a support is seldom an enclosure; a wall is not violated by window penetrations but is totally interrupted by glass; program functions are exaggeratedly articulated into wings or segregated separate pavilions. Even ‘flowing space’ has implied being outside when inside, and inside when outside, rather than both at the same time. Such manifestations of articulation and clarity are foreign to an architecture of complexity and contradiction, which tends to include ‘both-and’ rather than exclude ‘either-or.’
Complexity and Contradiction, is actually a nice book to study in the context of urban design in Dublin nowadays. I had almost forgotten totally about that text, but I must say, I have ‘re-visited’ it recently and find it useful, in constructing my ‘thinking’ about urban design.
The real question is what is of higher value another civic space entirely free of traffic or the efficient operation of the 14/14A 15/ 15A 15B 44 48A and only public transport disturbing pedestrians.
‘Either-or’ philosophy? Hmmm,… We need to stop thinking in terms of ‘either-or’ and start learning to think in terms of a ‘both-and’ mind-set. Just my humble opinion. 🙂
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Economic models can look very complicated in mathematic form but they tend to simply take account of one or two new factors on existing principles which is a little like good strategic planning which thankfully now has most of the equations stored in existing models where only the new factors need to be considered in mathematical form.
Care to expand slightly on that one? Flesh it out maybe, if/when you get a chance?
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Well, that is an interesting point,… because Ormerod, prefaced the above quotes, in his book, by recounting, how in the field of Economics,… the ‘Business Studies’ students and graduates were ridiculed, because they didn’t have the same grounding in mathematics and theory that Economic graduates tended to have.
But Ormerod, in his book, Butterfly Economics, points out, that some of the major battles lost in the world of commerce, were due to a lack of perspective of the overall picture. That is the kind of picture apparently he says, that Business Schools try to give their young management graduates,… rather than that of Economists, who employ mathematical modelling, which is always going to be just an approximation to reality,… heavily dependent upon the way you build your equations and the factors you consider in those equations.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
This is just some random thoughts I had while visiting Dundrum Shopping Centre earlier this year,… I have bits to change, edit and add to this piece, but I might as well get something up for the moment.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Building Organisation.
Even though the building is huge, the plan organisation of the retail units on the site, is simplicity itself. It is like a huge accordion, with the major ‘mega-stores’ book-ending the small retail units in between.
Transport Interchange.
Lets look at an airport for a second. An airport in itself is really a transport hub or interchange. Because from the one point you have buses, taxis, car parking, sometimes trains (except in Ireland, where airports never have trains) and you have flights going to all different destinations around the world.
The Dundrum shopping centre interior experience, does feel a lot like an airport in terms of its scale and treatment. That would be fine if the shopping centre was located next to a couple of major transportation interchanges. If it was in close proximity to an Airport, a major docklands port and a train station or tube station. The argument that Dundrum Shopping Centre is next to a LUAS stop, is only barely plausible. Now if Dundrum Shopping Centre had been next to two different transport systems intersecting, then I would feel the ‘airport’ aesthetic inside the centre had been justified.
The rear car park is a notoriously ill-defined and ill-considered space. It shows very little imagination at all, in how people might navigate through the sea of parked cars. Even the space immediately in front of the centre at the rear has been sacrificed for more car parking spaces, when the reasonable thing to do, would be to place a couple of benchs and treat the space with the attention and details it deserves. Because lets face it, on those nice days, you really don’t want to sit inside a glasshouse and sip coffee while looking at the escalators full of families and kids going up and down.
Here I really feel the designers got things backways. By lavishing far too much attention upon the ‘rock garden’ space with fountains etc, etc,… at the front of the site, which is closest to the existing Dundrum village. And not paying enough attention to the heavily used space at the rear of the centre which is sourthern facing, and could have worked as a very pleasant space to sit down on nice days, with good views of the blue hills in the distance.
The bicycle as a means of transport, wasn’t even considered in the entire design. Despite managing to consume a million or so acres of space. Well not quite that much, but does anyone know exactly the area of the Dundrum site? By not catering for bicycles at all, it is almost as if Dundrum was trying to encourage obesity in the Irish nation. This is definitely a black mark against the whole design concept. But while the design doesn’t cater for people who want to walk or cycle from the neighbouring areas – the complex is nonetheless strategically centered from a car infrastructural point of view – and will be set to become a focus for much of the car-oriented residential development stretching out as far as the Wicklow hills.
Cafes.
This was an oversight I think, by the ‘ideas people’ in the design of Dundrum Shopping Centre. In Dundrum Shopping Centre you have quite a large Eason’s book store, and you have many, many places to drink coffee, buns and all manner of refreshments. But somehow, it never managed to put two and two together, and give the visitors to Dundrum Shopping Centre, a bookshop-cafe. I mean, most of the city centre book sellers have used this concept in different ways down through the years – why didn’t Dundrum try out some form of the bookstore-cafe? Books have always used a technique of selling, which is known as ‘sampling at the source’. Even ‘Amazon.com’, the huge American online bookstore has managed to digitally scan millions of books, and make that content ‘sample-able’ via their website, so that online customers would get a similar experience of buying books, to those in a physical bookstore.
Just while I am at it – another thing about cafes. While the rest of Dublin is trying to do ‘outdoor’ cafes on side-walks and open spaces all over the city. Outside in Dundrum, where space seems to abound, there isn’t one single outdoor cafe experience in the entire complex. There is all sorts of uses, that you can ‘combine’ a cafe with,… with furniture and household goods, you can have an Art Gallery which has a cafe,… but in Dundrum, the food outlet, is just a food outlet.
Two guys are running away from a bear, but you don’t need to run faster than the bear, you just need to run faster than the other guy.
This is basically how we run our spatial design courses here in Ireland. Look people, back in 1994, when I was a young student doing a course in architectural design in this country,… for the four months between September and Xmas, I had no guidance in my efforts to do a couple of projects,… why was this? Well basically because, one of my tutors was too busy building the competitions they had just won, and my other appointed tutor had just began a very popular TV programme on RTE about houses and architecture. When my xmas assessment came around, I presented the work I had managed to too, without any form of guidance from my course, and was bluntly accused of being lazy and not trying hard enough. In other words, it was all put on my lap – that I was in effect responsible for my own lack of guidance in a degree course. Of course, when a young man of c. 19/20 is told that by a person in authority – they tend to just take it on the chin, and think, well this person is older and wiser than I am. What you don’t see at 19 or 20 is how you are being ‘measured’ on the scale that the design course sets for itself – not on the scale that would relate to the specific individual’s progress. The amount of progress the individual has made over a set length of time – related to where they are coming from, and potentially where they could go some day. It is very possible, for two students to make exactly the same progress in a design course, to do precisely the same amount of work and effort, but because one may have started off much better than the other, the guy who started off worse, is penalised because of not meeting some bullshit standards.
It is just as important for a design course to produce students, with ‘Grade D’ as it is to produce those with grade ‘A’s. Who knows, maybe the ‘D’ guy worked twice as hard for it, and may therefore go much further than anyone ever thought. Many years down the road, I can now see how wrong my acceptance of my conditions were. After xmas, the only excuse ventured by the faculty, was that both of those tutors, had decided to take extended leave from teaching in the course, at which stage of course, my game was up for that year,… and for ever afterwards, I was branded in that institution a bit of a waster, a goofer and of no merit or ability design or spatially wise. Indeed, that is how I began to view myself – after all, the ‘experts’ had just come to that conclusion. This was really the conclusion come to by several trained professionals, not by myself – who was I to argue with them? As I said, at 19/20 you tend to take these things at face value, rather than question the authority. When I talk about a ‘lack’ of a well established and healthy spatial design tradition, this is mainly what I getting at – a lack of ability to teach aswell as to practice. A kind of ‘contempt’ for the youth and the potential contained within that youthful talent – as if it posed some sort of ‘threat’ to the establishment or something. Well, maybe it does, but that is precisely what one must do, keep re-building, re-training, changing what went before when something better comes along. Our spatial design professionals, as basic human beings, lack ability to see something that is grossly under-valued at the moment – the youth. To invest the time and effort into that project, and watch your investment grow into something over the years. Something that will persist and survive long after all of the roads are built. It seems their best solution is to import talent en masse from abroad, if and when you need it – than to grow your own naturally. It is the educational equivalent, to getting Chinesse Take-Out instead of making your own dinner.
This is what I mean, the country is choc-full of half-baked (or even raw, un-cooked) talents in design of space – that is our failure as a country – as educators. That is the strength of the British and Anglo-Irish tradition – the ability to see a something worth investing time and effort into – and later on, seeing the rewards of your investment. We tend to give up way too easy in Ireland, throw in the towel before we have even got as far as the ring. The fact is, that in an area like spatial design – which is already weighed in favour of those of whom have access to mature people in that field,… well, I will just let you use your own imaginations in that sense,… to what it means to be hung out to dry,… without tutors, while you watch others speed past. That is why I keep on refering to the teaching of basic fundamentals to do with design and space in our courses. Because given how un-level the playing pitch already is, the young people who really could make a difference, need those fundamentals badly,… but are not provided with them,… just a system that spits you out, like a discarded bit of McDonald’s packaging or similar. In other words, the real wealth of this country, not the roads, not the helicopters, the peach jobs or the money – the young talent that has the ability to make everyones’ living conditions much better,… is now being flushed down the toilet. Money just serves to raise the conditions of a very few people,… and to provide a society which is even more out of balance, than the one we already live in. That is basically all that any politian needs to know or should ever know about spatial design, and that is the simple lesson that needs to be driven home. I don’t accept the ‘standards’ that the Irish spatial planning and design tradition sets itself – it sets the bar too low for what this country could achieve – and it just doesn’t serve the community as a whole as we progress into our future. I am referring precisely to stories like my own as represented above, and stories of many more young individuals like me. If we just can stay focussed on this issue, for the next few years, instead of being side-tracked and going down all kinds of cul-de-sacs, then the future is very bright. On the other hand, if we just do our usual half-arsed attempt, then expect the worse.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Well just take a small, poor, African nation as a good example – one that recently recovered from a Famine perhaps – what if one such small, poor African nation, suddenly had everything it needed – to just build itselves a brand new country?
Just suppose a consortium of billionaires and foreign banks, in the morning, decided to give a small, poor African nation a huge lump of investment – what do you think would happen?
I dunno, maybe, these rich Westerns thought it would be a funny experiment to try out – having gotten drunk in the bar last night.
Well, you can almost imagine it, if you try hard enough.
Some of those African leaders, or chieftains, and the usual few movers n’ shakers in the tribes, would fly around in brand new helicopters mapping out the future.
Then they would fly in loads of designers and planners from Europe or someplace civilised and well-to-do, to come and ‘draw it all up’.
I know, it sounds like a bad recall from a 1960s James Bond movie.
‘Goldfinger’, or ‘Moonraker’, or some similar abomination.
Of course, not a single cent would be spent, on the young Africans and trying to train them up as sufficiently skillful Architects and designers.
Does this sound like the Irish situation – because it really does to me.
Well, maybe not.
But I find it useful just to examine this idea – try to see things from that vantage point perhaps.
I mean, it contrasts with the sorts of viewpoints already presented here on this thread.
I do understand your argument for the ‘existing’ design tradition we have here in Ireland, and I really do respect that.
But, I also think it has strained a bit too much, for what it was, under the current pressure – I feel we could have anticipated that pressure – and acted to deal with it.
It is just too easy now to take the ‘Frank McDonald’ route out, and blame it all on politians without any spatial perception, background or even the most basic training – like these hypothetical tribal leaders riding around in new helicopters.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I know it is a very hard egg for an oppressed country to swallow, to admit that a conquering nation, built most of our infrastructure and left very little of that expertise lying around, for when we need it nowadays – but that is much closer to the truth – than trying to imagine, that we have some submerged Celtic ‘spirally’ River-Lord-of-the-Dance, kind of magic with spatial problem solving. As if, we can just conjure up this magic, or pull it out of our arse, after 700 hundred years, making potato ridges. To attempt to brush right over that historical legacy, is simply the worse form of hypocracy – and you tend to encounter it all the time – in our design professions. So to try and push the blame off on a politian, for a lack of any tradition we have in building things – is just another saddenly reflection on our whole culture today. What is more – it is going to be extremely damaging to the young Irish people growing up now – who might help us out in this situation.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Large industrial centres like Birmingham, Manchester , Liverpool, Bradford, etc, etc?
I would not live there if you paid me!No maybe, by our early 21 century aesthetic standards, and cultural biases. But any of the cities mentioned above, have played a huge part in the formation of the world we now live in. Just as Florence, Venice and Rome played in the 1500s. All of the technological gadgetry, computers, internets, practically as much as you can think of had origins in the heartland of the industrial revolution. Maybe architectural enthuasiasts aren’t so turned on by that, but many engineers and scientists, historians, thinkers and philosophers would be. If you are looking for short sighted, I think you can look at Ireland. I heard the architect responsible for O’ Connell St. re-development express his excitment in a talk a while back, that Dublin had just surpassed London city’s attempts to re-develop Tranfalgar Square. It is like, I am listened to his moment of pathetic little triumphalism, while in my mind thinking, the British built O’Connell St., and hundreds like it all over the world. All we did really, was to put down a pleasant looking patio… and after the abuse O’Connell Street received over the past few decades, the least it really deserved was a decent make over.
But in relation to blaming politians about lack of spatial planning abilities – it just isn’t good enough. I often sat in a design studio in Architectural School, wondering where I would begin to design my Olympic Swimming Pool project, or how I was going to design my Docklands master plan project, or whatever. How did I feel having spent years of all kinds of artistic and spatial/drawing training under my belt? To be honest with you – I was stone cold – I was frozen by even the contemplation of making anything of that size. So how is the average politian, who understands opinion polls, surveys and publicity campaigns suddenly expected to ‘have all the goods’ required to understand complex spatial problems like building roads? I mean, when you listen and watch politians on TV, trying to grapple with spatial tasks like the Red Cow roundabout and such,… and bearing in mind, these guys could not draw a box on paper, nevermind visualise anything more complex than that…. it really makes you wonder what they are doing involved in these projects at all – but still they are, and in much too close a way I believe.
As Architects, the ones with the real heavy duty minds and capabilities to deal with these spatial problems, are doing bar interiors, house extensions and the like – harmless stuff. It reminds me of Navy Germany, when the politians would decide how many bombers would be made, and actually approve the designs. Despite having no idea about aeronautics. Or how politians would be given the latest Panzer Tiger blueprints to look over, and design what would become the latest grade, military hardware for the front line offensives – despite never having fought in a battle some of them. I just want to highlight the shere ridiculous practice of trying to blame some guy in a pin-stripe suit, who goes to Dail Eireann each day and talks all day – for having lack of perception when it comes to problems which demand all kinds of talents – a million and one miles away from those of any polititian. We shouldn’t blame politians – what are our design professionals doing? While being very content to monopolise all of the brownie points that come from being a design professional – they still don’t want to be a part of the overall attempt to modernise and build the country.
Our design vocations have been restricted far too much, to doing polite, harmless and financially safe small stuff – while people who have no clue what they are doing whatsoever – are flying around in helicopters, and deciding the future of the country in 3 and 4 dimensions. You have to understand Britain and the cities mentioned above, in the whole context of the British Empire and it’s history. The industrial and port cities mentioned about, were converted into large scale industrial power houses, to feed the expansion of the British Empire all over the world. Nowadays the British are in the mood for re-developing those same cities as living environments anew – and they present a massive opportunity for designers in the future. As do similar urban centres throughout industrial Europe. But, we hear in Ireland have to get over our current petty triumphalism phase, and realise that we are entirely fresh and new to this whole building and urban planning racket – and just start right from the basics.
And if you really wish to get back to the very basics of the problems – just look at the kinds of people trying to build the country nowadays. Then compare this, to our design colleges and their lack of ability to even pay staff to tutor and guide the coming generations of young designers, who someday might work us out of this fiasco. Maybe if the country spared itself the odd road project here and there, and spent less money on helicopter rides for guff-faws to ride around in the sky – then there might be just a little money to throw at educating a young army of spatially minded technicians and designers. But there is just too much denial going on – in the design professions – if you aren’t an award winning young architect for doing cool house extensions – then you are nothing, period. This often happens, when you have a crisis situation – rather than facing up squarely to the task and attacking it – you often try to pretend, it isn’t even there.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
