garethace

I think the idea of using a kiosk and renting that space is a wonderful idea in principle, on paper,.. as a concept,… but to turn any concept into a reality, you need a visionary designer,.. the idea and figures on paper aren’t good enough on their own. Great idea yes,.. because the city already does own this land, which isn’t doing that much,… and it can be used to provide retail space, in a different way to the normal plots of Georgian row houses etc, etc. But, my problem isn’t with this idea of retail space in principle if executed well,… but if you cannot do that, execute the idea well, then forget it. Half-baked is not the best way to go about this kind of retail space design,… you can get away with ‘half-baked’ usually when providing retail space on a normal urban infill site, but not in this situation, not on this site,… it is a way more complex than that, and deserves, even cries out for the hand of an expert.

Those kiosks are an abominable disaster, in how they were treated…. either they were done by some state paid architect who couldn’t give a shit, or someone who clearly didn’t know what they were doing. I hate the way, it effectively just ‘splits’ the pedestrian traffic now, between a slow wide lane on the inside for ‘loiterers’,… with a zippier thin line of shopping bag carriers trying to make progress faster on the outside, while trying not to jump out onto the road and get hit from behind by a motorcycle or bus. The whole attempt just reeks of some kind of ‘cosy, bureaucratic’ time-sheet filling. I just hate to see public resources flushed down the toilet in that way, especially as our public bodies are full of talented man and woman-power, well capable of doing much better than this. Sometimes you end up in situations, where too many designers fight over ‘what it should be’,… Architects are notoriously bad at fighting over, who is going to be head Pancho, when they are asked to ‘work in groups’. Given the extremely sensitive nature of this ‘site’ and the kind of opportunity it provided to do something very nice,… you could easily end up with a failure of the ‘design team’ to pull together. In ten years time, another generation of talented young designers will be ‘removing’ the kiosks, so for the moment, it is just a damb pity and another wasted opportunity…. and yeah, a masssive understatement of the talent and professionalism contained now in DCC.

This city just has to wise up a little about how pedestrians behave and get around, in relation to heavy traffic, in relation to other pedestrians, street sellers and everything else,… and stop putting amateurs doing a job, of designing in situations, that demand a properly experienced veteran, rather than a chancer climbing up a ladder,… who will not care a hoot in a few years time, what sort of trail of disasters they left after them. On a positive note though, if you come from the Westmoreland Street direction these days and gaze over at Bachelors walk, and down to your right towards Liberty hall, there is a steady and perceptible ‘cross-current’ of pedestrian traffic using an ‘East-West’ axis route now, at the bottom of O’ Connell Street,… it isn’t all just the North-South stuff, that was so familiar for years, and the nearby Quays axis hardly even existed. The traffic planners and Architects in Dublin have effectively managed to ‘re-interpret’ the whole problem, and come up with a much saner solution I think. But the kiosk treatment on Capel Street bridge now is just another sympthom, of how architectural schools in Ireland emphasise ‘objects’ in their training of their young design students, to the exclusion of any discussion about how people need to move around, to actually navigate their way through an urban landscape in 2005.

I guess it is just strange to have space ‘provided’ on the Quays by the boardwalk and widening of pavements on O’Connell Street, whilst on Capel Street bridge, we have ended up somehow ‘losing’ space, and displacing the pedestrian. You are suddenly seeing more movement of pedestrians made possible in many situations, so it is just strange to see pedestrian bottleneck created on a bridge directly in view from DCC headquarters! Do I even want to go there? ? ? ? Lets just recall,… how DCC, tried this idea of putting large objects in the middle of pedestrian thoroughfares many times before, when they decided to build the Fountain in the middle of O’Connell Street, which became a bottleneck too… forcing pedestrians either side of the fountain, into this tiny miserable ‘tight squeeze’ where you had to fit in between heavy traffic and guys eating burgers. DCC seem ‘prone’ to having one major ‘cock-up’ every ten years,… which points the finger straight at Architects in the council who are working up a ladder, and don’t give due regard to ‘small projects’ they have to do along the way, as a duty and a formality,…. rather than an opportunity and a challenge. But if you never learn to see things like these as opportunities, in design schools, then chances are, you will not in the real world either. The challenge was to do something, which didn’t interupt the flow of pedestrian movement,… and in that task it has failed woefully.

We have a similar problem in the middle of College Green, where all sorts of artistic sculpture and rubbish in general has simply ‘accumulated’ in the middle of the street, over the years,,… so now instead of that being pedestrian territory, it is basically owned by sculptures that no one ever looks/enjoys, angry Taxi rank parkers, who protest if you even ‘brush’ against their cars, and chaotic traffic rushing past in both directions,… and a pathetically unsucessful attempt to provide a pedestrian ‘cross-over’ opposite the Central Bank fore court. That reeks just as much, of generations of nice young men and women Architects at DCC, who ‘spent time’ on projects, on their way up through the ladder of DCC. Sad really, the present condition of the city is just a lot poorer for that. I always recall in my time at Architecture School, how one of the star students won the Xmas, student design project, by placing a massive ‘cool-looking object’ in the middle of College Green,.. now it was a COOL looking object, Spielberg or Lucas couldn’t have done it much better, but what College Green needs now is another object in the middle, like it needs a hole in the head. The sponsors of these student design competitions are often large building contractors, or building product manufacturers,… so often the incentive, is to make something that it an expensive looking object, something that would be difficult to build, but look really cool. It takes some real balls sometimes, to just see a site or location, for how it should be,… left as it is,… with perhaps careful management of services and ‘stuff’ under the ground, or ‘out-of-the-way’,… just to retain that sense, of what the space should be.

That stuff, should include stuff, like Taxi ranks and Bus stopping,.. Westmoreland Street and upper O’ Connell Street, is a poster child for inefficient tidying ‘away’ of nasty stuff, and not allowing the space to be what it wants to be. For some reason, DCC took exactly the right approach with O’ Connell Street, a large profile project, and yet on a smaller job, the Capel Street bridge, it was allowed to pass through the pipeline, and noone seemed to pick up, how ill-informed the strategy was. Some state pensioned designer has now left that mess behind them, and moved onto much higher, greener pastures I would imagine. But that is the trouble with doing one very good large scale project such as O’ Connell Street – the smaller stuff, which is also important, around the town, can get neglected and left to young hopefuls, whose ‘heart’ really must not be with their appointed design tasks.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

When I was a kid in the 1970’s and 80’s I can recall loads of overseas media portraits of Ireland as a backward, church-run, myopic land where modern civil liberties taken for granted in other Western democracies such as divorce, contraception, etc were banned, while women’s equality was archaic and gay’s right were unthinkable. At the time, Ireland was divided between one section of the society who were embarrassed to be living in this country and agreed with this negative portrayal of us, and the other half who claimed there was nothing wrong with Ireland and this was just anti-Irish bigotry and nothing else.

This is a thread I am going to spend some time reading in the following weeks, but just to put down a specific marker, of what I wish to highlight, I will say the following. I was around enjoying the fine weather today and couldn’t help but notice, the amount of washed-up natives we seem to have around our city. I mean, people who obviously have seen some very hard times, and basically submitted themselves to much, much abuse down through the years… some of them barely able not to conduct themselves in a normal way, kind of wandering around, scared of the ghosts around the place, that nobody can see but themselves. It is sometimes like a time warp, where you are back in 1840s Ireland at the height of the Famine, where people were just simply desperate. I would just like to talk about the way people do get this way, and what we can do to prevent it. I mean, starting with a decent roof over one’s head must be the first thing, and then connecting that place of dwelling up with some suitable sense of community and well-being. I mean, the investment the city of Dublin does in preventing these problems is good I have no doubt,… but it struck me, how important it is to deal with the problem, before it goes too far. Once you find masses of urban inhabitants wandering around the place, with only a fragments of basic consciousness to navigate through their lives with, the problem has already gotten far too expensive to sustain. Take even recent projects such as ‘The Temple Bar’ area, how does any city ever allow that kind of an abomination to happen? Or worse, hope that anything useful can come from making such a place? I mean, it begins to weigh heavily upon all sorts of other things like our health services. We do love spending a lot of time in Ireland discussing our health service, when I just wonder, is more and more spending on the health service, just drawing the attention away from the other problems, at the opposite end – the ground level – the awful lack of afforadable and social housing and therefore, healthy and sustainable communities,… is just all the spending at one end of the social equation aggravating a problem at the other end? I am sure there are very good formulae and mathematics to calculate this – and furthermore, to calculate how much more you could save, by spending the money you do have appropriately, before the problem becomes far too expensive to even look at – and you have what we currently have now – a whole lot of buerocrats squabbling over ‘who started it’. None of them do seem to remark the obvious, of where I really think the problem is stemming from.

None of our politians seem to be capable of looking at the whole wider debate in its entirity – of realising that all things – the health service included – is linked up with everything else. Of looking at the problems as a system or issues rather than just isolated situations where some ‘fire-fighting’ is required. I hope that one thing that we can all learn from architecture and urban design – is that everything, education, employment, transport, health care, housing, energy, communications, industry, the whole lot…. are all part of something by itself – some huge social network of interacting relationships. It is like the politians are sometimes, like blind men with a huge elephant, every individual politian having a handle on his/her own part of the bigger picture. I mean, why do we pay the salaries of our public servants, just to be myopic? It is no longer a matter of how will we do social housing for Dublin, but how much is it costing us all, every moment that passes and we do not take the initiative. What costs are our grandchildren going to pay later, for our lack of ability to see something and do something now? When you have a large proportion of the urban population in Dublin, in as much trouble and difficulty, as I seem to see, a lot these days, I wonder what it is currently costing, and moreso, what it will cost as time goes on, to leave this situation, without doing that much about it. I am talking about a strong positive approach towards social housing and dealing with problems before they sprial out of control altogether. I would think, that with this kind of problem, your money is worth an awful lot more now, than it will be worth in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years time. Because when you get into second and third or more generations of problematic urban inhabitants, the cost seriously mounts up I would think. Not alone, is this problem costing the state, it is also affecting large areas of the city, which could work much better,… and furthermore, as generations continue to multiply, the problem obviously begins to engulf an entire urban area. The money spent on trying to solve problems, which we create in the first place,… is taken away from doing projects that really should help this city and country for generations to come. Then you have a bald attempt such as LUAS, which does very, very little in my humble opinion to get to the heart of the matter – yet it amounts to a gigantic expenditure for a small nation. I would wish that future projects are considered in a much more broad context, as I have described above – it is certainly not good enough, just to leave expenditure of that scale, only to the transport department. That is just too much like something Ireland would do. It is noticeable these days, during the nice weather, as the more respectable affluent members of the community, take it upon themselves to enjoy the fine weather, and suddenly come straight into contact, with problems on the street, which normally just go unnoticed. I think, it is one of those problems, where a little money invested at the right time, in the right way, in the right place, could save millions and even billions later. I do not have the expertise, analysis or experience to fully understand this phenomena, but would be greatful for any feed-back this board here has to offer. In short, I am just wondering how good, bad or indifferent has this cities track record been, with regard to the social housing design problem? What do we need to do to improve the cities performance in regards to this and many other matters? Thanks.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Or if you listened to Des MacMahon speak a year or so ago, in Bolton Street, he compared how his early background in pottery, later was of help to him, when trying to conceptualise the design of his Croke Park Stadium in section. I mean, things on a totally different scale, surely, but still Des was quite sure of his design for Croke Park, because it reminded him so much of the pot slowly rising from the wheel as it spun around. If you really think about the form of Croke Park, it has got something like a potter’s form to it, in that it repeats a perfect repetition of a complex section shape, all the ways around. I know it is a ‘rough’ architecture, and has its detractors, but it was just the way that Des spoke about his building in his talk. I mean, how fanciful does one need to make a structure, which only gets used at weekends anyhow? Of that scale, and for a ‘voluntary’ organisation like the GA?

Another building, which reminds me a lot too of the potters idea of architecture, is another building by MacMahon – the Bolton Street DIT extension. While attending both the architectural end-of-year exhibitions at UCD and Bolton Street this year, I was aware of how in UCD, one was fully able to use the courtyard in the centre of the complex as part of the circulation between the various studios. This was very interesting, because the courtyard formed a natural meeting place, where the wine could be consumed and you could pause momentarily, as you ‘took in’ the work of the students, to chew some fat with yours buddies, on a nice summers evening. In some way too, Des MacMahon, somehow, in the context of a multistorey building on Henrietta St., managed to pull something as close to an outdoor courtyard as you could get – from the new studio areas with their nice vaulted ceiling with north lighting.

For some reason, people drinking their wine in Bolton Street congregated around that ‘semi-outdoor’ feeling space, of those new Studios, as the next best thing, to the kind of outdoor courtyard atmosphere that UCD Architecture school has got. Which just made me realise how unique a situation the top level of a multistorey building actually is – the opportunities it provides to house a kind of summertime ‘coming together’ of people,… the only pity I suppose is that Des MacMahon wasn’t allowed to go a little bit further in Bolton Street new Studios and perhaps have some bit of outdoor space at that level… so one could literally have a courtyard in the middle of the city, on top of a roof.

Dunno, how it would work. But faculties of Architecture which live on the roof of an Institution, in the middle of a city like Dublin are at a disadvantage in some ways. It is nice to study in a building like UCD Architecture school, where you know instinctively you do have the freedom to walk out a door, and you are on the ground level – as opposed to Bolton Street building, where your journey is intermediated by a long bouncing step routine, running down through a fire escape stairs. The difference is subtle I know, but I often think, the ability of UCD students to relax enough and make all of those nice models, and explore concepts of occupation and territory in depth, in their design proposals, is linked to the fact, they exist on the ground or have decent access to the ground level.

Bolton Street Architecture Faculty, I have my suspicions, might have suffered from added stresss, owing to the lack of ability to access the ground immediately outside its doors. There was a distinct lack of models thrown around the studios in Bolton Street – Bolton Street studios, I think, will never fully manage to disguise the feeling of being what they are – space, that could be used for spec office building. It is, as if, it is disallowed to make a mess, such as making a proper architectural model entails, because you feel as if you are doing something entirely inappropriate, given the ‘office environment’ feel of the whole place. It struggles valiantly to break out of that, I know, but ultimately, you expect the cleaning staff to come in some day in BS, and dump your nice model – probably doesn’t happen – but you feel that should happen – in an office building – along with all of the ‘half-eaten’ sandwiches and empty coke tins. I know this will improve when they finally get to Grange Gorman, but that is still a while down the road.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Could you explain that in plain english and what it has to do with architechture?

Well very simply, the curve with the very exaggerated peak and big long ‘fat tails’ as they are called, described events like 100 year storms, events of extremely low probability, or times like wars etc, where situations can become exceptionally volatile.

The normal distribution, in the flatter curve where the tails are much, much shorter and the peak is only moderately expressed. It describes normality basically, if there is such a thing – it is probably an ideal condition created by scientists rather than anything else. But the physical properties and experiments which scientists perform do often follow a bell shaped curve.

The intermediarary state, is the kind of liquid state – the two extremes behind the ‘solid condition’ which would employ stability and the ‘gaseous condition’ which would employ extreme volatility. The liquid state has fairly long tails and a very pronounced peak – it carries some of the movement and volatility properties from the gaseous state, but also some of the stability from the solid state.

Most of my writing above, was to do with describing the average ‘spread’ of students you are lightly to find in an architectural school in Ireland. I don’t know, but the range of results that students seem to receive as their end of year scores and marks – would indicate a very gaseous kind of distribution of results. I am just alway curious why that is – is the spread of talent and intelligence so exaggerated in the average class, or is it being exaggerated artificially through the means by which we try to educate our architects?

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Any comments?
No prize for guessing the location.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Just as an aside about the architecture profession, I am always amazed at the fact that you almost never see an architect on Irish tv giving their opinion / analysis on any topic. There seems to be much debate within architecture circles about design, the environment, and planning, for example; but when it comes to promoting such opinions to the wider world, there is a great deficit. And their input is greatly needed. You just have to glance across the countryside to see why.

A poster above asked about perspective.

Well, you tend to receive some perspective long after you leave an architectural school I would say for sure. There is quite a sense of ‘togetherness’ for the duration of the student’s course, I would say that sadly isn’t followed through, beyond the college level.

Anyhow, just to underline a lot of what I have said above: It is true that the architectural schools in this country receive a fresh supply of young people each year – around 90 between UCD and BS. But what has always concerned me, was what the schools did to that sample of young people. Very often trying to bend that sample out of the normal shape of statistical distribution – that you would expect to find in terms of skill, perception and capability. In all fairness, once you are finished filtering the entire teenage population of Ireland, down to just a mere 90 students, it gets tough to bend the statistics out of shape I think – people are all so closely matched I think – yet, the efficency, with which the architectural schools manage to produce exaggerated bell-shaped distributions out of a class of 50 individuals, who have been filtered from the entire country’s population, is something that has always amazed me personally. I don’t think it is fair, and honestly, I don’t believe it to be really true either.

In reality, I was always very worried that architectural school tutors, couldn’t really grasp how small a sample they are in fact dealing with, and how rare it would be to find students of much higher stature in architectural ability, or much lower stature, within such a small sample – but sadly, that is how they ‘see’ every new class. In order to produce a kind of exaggeration of extremes – on the one hand, students who grow during the course, to ten feet tall in terms of their architectural stature. This of course are the stuff mounted in the display case as it were. But on the other end, you do have the people reduced to almost ‘one foot’ in architectural stature, represented way below their actual value, and these are disposed of via the rubbish shoot. Now, I do understand, it is both attractive to the college and to certain students even, to go the ‘ten-footer’ route, with their education – but I still believe, this lack of eveness has it’s price at the end of the day – for all concerned. You are just throwing half your actual ‘worth’ down the rubbish shoot too, to make the end of year exhibition a little bit more sexy.

It is a bit like going for the fast return, the quick buck, rather than holding out for the real windfall. Just think about political systems even, the best and most productive governments down through the years, are talented majority parties, kept sharp by the mere presence of a decent opposing party. That is how it should happen in the context of Irish Architecture too – you need that opposition party – but sadly, architectural schools here love that old rubbish shoot. So you run the risk of having a large, fat and lazy majority party, which never lives to see it’s real potential. I believe the work at Archiseek is even useful in trying to help sustain some form of useful ‘opposition’, in the absense of anything else. That is just simply, how I feel about these things – quite frankly, I believe in team work – a concept which architects could look a good deal more at. Your quote above, about the lack of presence in the media, by architects, speaks in volumes of their individual lack of confidence in their own voice. Remember, when an individual goes on stage, or on TV and speaks, even though you see the individual – they also represent a collective network. I don’t know really what to think, but certainly, if a company CEO was exposed of manipulating the companies statements, to paint a ‘Mona Lisa’ like picture in their earnings and profit sheets – to boost the share price – they wouldn’t be highly respected. I think the same is true of architecture – you have to find a reasonable level for the standard you set for your students – one which approximates your true value as an faculty. Rather than using display cabinets all the time.

Mind you I did enjoy the UCD exhibition this year, I thought there was an honesty about the whole event, throughout the work of all the years on exhibit, which I did appreciate. I haven’t made up my mind yet, before I visit the Bolton Street exhibition, being launched tomorrow evening, hopefully it will be good too. I have just tried to underline some of the weakest points about the architectural education system here, as I have seen it. I am sure those concerned in the Irish architectural schools are just as painfully aware of the weaknesses as I have been. But I have not spoken as much in this thread, about the many, many real strengths in Irish architectural education too. (No sniggers at the back please) But I still believe, one has to work on your weakest points most, to see the overall best improvement, that is all. I hope I have managed to get some of that across to you all, here in my posting.

Take care,
Brian O’ Hanlon.

It is very obvious to me at least, even if the whole world out there is reluctant to admit to the fact, that the existing two institutions of architectural schooling in the republic – UCD and Bolton Street – ‘aim’ to encourage ‘alternate’ values about design in their young graduates. This is just the reality of how it pans out. Bolton Street just sees it slightly differently from UCD, and visa versa. And I think that slight difference, often does count for quite a lot, as far as the practice of architecture is concerned.

I have only very limited exposure to the Belfast institution – having attended just one lecture a year ago, given by one of the main tutors here in Dublin. Some people have gone to the trouble to travel further afield to view ‘end of year’ exhibitions of student work in Great Britain and Scotland. Others still, have gone and attended years abroad doing architecture at the French, Spanish, German and possibly Italian architectural schools.

I have not done so myself, so I can only speculate. Indeed, some tutors in our colleges have worked and/or studied as far away as America, Asia and elsewhere. So that might indicate, just how diverse and wide the ideas or approaches to Architecture could be.

But I think, the real question is, what slightly different slant will the Limerick institution come up with, that might further enrich the total architectural debate in this country? And that is not to detract anything from the efforts made already by Bolton Street and UCD departments. Who have both worked very carefully over the years to preserve their own individuality in the great debate that will always remain ‘Architecture’.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

The strangest thing about architectural schools, is on the one hand, it is great to get the brightest, cutting edge, talent to have as your teacher(s) in your course. On the other hand, the really brilliant architects, don’t always make the best tutors either – dunno whether this had more to do with the students all clammering for the ‘guy/gal with the big name’,… and thereby, cancelling out a lot of the good that feature ‘named’ tutor could do. Or if big named people just don’t make the best architectural tutors.

I think a lot of the best creative architects out there, are still just like ‘kids’ themselves by mid-life even, because they are still so busy turning various ideas around and experimenting with things. The mix of students who experiment, and old wiser people who are still creative at an older age, isn’t always a great mix. Because there is a real clash of powers there – young people tend to get used to thinking of themselves as the most ground breaking and creative, and tend to think, they know lots more ‘cool stuff’ than the average 50-something year old. Except in architecture school, you often find that trend is reversed – the cool, hip, and controversial people are the older guys – the tutors, and the students themselves are often the stodgy, conservative and rigid-thinking individuals in the equation. I know that sounds really odd – but that often is the case, and it is a pretty crushing blow to any early 20-year-old, who thinks they might have something ground breaking to contribute, and then realise that they don’t. 🙂

I tend to find often that some of the most boring students in the class often ‘get along’ best, with some of the most creative tutors and visa versa. Anyone care to refute this? But largely I would imagine, that most peoples’ brains aren’t sufficiently growth prior to 25, to be able to make adequate use of a famous architect as their tutor. Most peoples’ personalities prior to 25 would not be developed sufficiently either to stand toe-to-toe with anyone, who holds a reputation – most people under the age of 25 deal poorly at best with any kind of piers and mentors. That is the real trouble in an architecture school situation – that mentor/student thing is strained to breaking point at times. I honestly don’t have the answer to this one, but I will listen to this thread with some interest all the same.

My overall feeling on this, is that there is finite and often very limited amounts of fresh air to go around in the architectural school situation. The trouble is that with both tutor and students’ egos alike using up huge amounts of that finite supply of air in the building, at the one time – you do tend to reach a suffication point much faster than you normally would in a third level education system. The tutors I think do use up the fresh air at a much faster rate though, on the whole. That leaves a lot of very talented young students, left fighting over the remainder and quite simply, there is never enough to go around. The ideal situation would be, if you were to reduce the intake of fresh air in the architectural school by the tutors – you would thereby, be leaving a lot more room for the young student to breath in.

Brian O’ Hanlon.