Hugh Pearman
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The question is asked, has anyone previously rebuilt an illegally demolished listed building? I know of an example in London. The Chinese Embassy, facing the Royal Institute of British Architects in Portland Place, was being rebuilt internally behind retained Adam facades in the 1980s when – by some extraordinary accident – the facades fell down. The Chinese were obliged to rebuild it in replica. Of course they did not quite do that. The facades are a rough approximation of what was there before, but now surmounted by a huge and out-of-scale mansard roof.
Another bizarre related example concerns Grand Buildings on Trafalgar Square. There was a competition in the mid 1980s to replace this large but dilapidated Victorian corner block. Out of entries including some radical stuff by the likes of Future Systems, the chosen winner was a design that rebuilt the block in replica – but with modern office floors and an atrium inside. That’s how low confidence in new architecture was in the UK at the time. The architects were Siddel Gibson, who have since got a bit better.
I agree with those who feel Calatrava is only commissioned to build a bridge in Dublin because of international city rivalry.
Calatrava virtually reinvented bridge design a decade or more ago, but since then he has seemed unable to move his ideas forward: esentially, all Calatrava bridges are now the same.
Nor does having one guarantee a city international renown anyway. He has done one in Manchester that is comprehensively overlooked.
Now that Dublin is calling in SOM and Kevin Roche and Calatrava, it can be only a matter of time before you get Norman Foster, Richard Meier and Frank Gehry – also fixtures on the international circuit. At this rate, everywhere will end up the same as everywhere else.
Too big, too American, and in the wrong place. After all, modernism can have national distinctiveness – look at the work of Michael Scott.
Also, I’ve never seen anything wrong with leaving derelict sites derelict. Why does everyone always assume they should be built on as quickly as possible, with as much floorspace as possible? Only the developers gain from that.
True, you don’t want to turn down a good original scheme in favour of an inane planner-friendly one. My view is that the present scheme is neither good nor original.
So I’d rather the site stayed empty until Dublin got a design better suited to its new wealth and confidence than what looks to me like a slice of downtown Chicago.
