johniwhite
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Bren, I’ll have a look next time I’m in Naas.
Shaun, the White Bungalows dotted all over Kildare & Wicklow wouldn’t strike me as Fascist – horrible yes. At least they’re humanisable in some fashion – with effort from the owners, though it doesn’t save the land around Valleymount and Ballymore. Corporate HQs often are not humanisable: rather they dehumanise and demoralise the people in them whilst elevating the egos of the people who built and commissioned them. Ballymore is under threat from a developer who wanted to build 500 new houses in a 60 acre field – doubling teh village population. Not to help out the locals mind, just to make more money. A local businessman also wants to put an industrial park there too. I believe it’s the same guy who has a dump accross the road from the national school. BME is lovely but it takes a lot of effort by a few locals to keep it that way.
John
BTH, I hate people who know nothing criticising art too. I’m afraid that’s the world we live in, people use their own eyes to make their own judgements, based honestly on what they feel and believe.
I think art (of which this is not a good example) should be honest – once it’s honest peole will see it. I also prefer that it be beautiful, which is subjective but most people see through or just get bored eventually with imitation.
If what the public – who haven’t necessarily gone to Architecture School – only got that which is decided by the elitists and never challenged it, we’d possibly be living in some sort of fascist architectural landscape or or one built purely from glass, steel or plastic. I imagine even the elitists would got bored and move onto the next thing eventually too.
I have to agree with Maud. I went to school in Naas, and grew up in Ballymore Eustace – 8 miles away. It’s a heap of rubbish. Many “Architects” these days have a strange idea of just what the imaginative faculty is. There seems to be no effort. The practice’s requirement for project management, technical cleverness (?) and grand-scale seem to have taken over. Do any of them actually DRAW anymore? Do they actually ever go fora walk and notice their surroundings – I’m thinking particularly of the countryside. Do they look at art? I realise that there is more to architecture than what the thing looks like from the outside (or am I being overly charitable?) but I actually wondered if it were collapsing. How will the inhabitants and locals feel when they see that great mass in mid-skew. Yes, yes, clever – like Liebeskind – computers are great aren’t they?
Look, it’s a box, a basic box, but seemingly lacking the supports to stop it falling over. I suppose the visitor expects a vertical horizontal box like any other and is delighted by it’s quirky defiant leaning. (It’s not just lens distortion that I’m seeing is it?). Unimaginative, corporate, macho and inhuman. The architects will probably like to stress the ‘human’ and ‘organic’ aspects of it’s flexible-looking fluidity or some such nonesense. They’ll probably even say its parallelogram look is inspired by local shale rock strata etc etc. Yes, you can say anything can’t you? Sometimes people believe it. “Those fellahs went to buildin’ school – dey know what dey’re talking about – we’re just country folk”. I will say that it looks better than the ugly hospital extension Naas put up in the 80s but that’s saying nothing. I could go on but this is a dial-up connection and that building isn’t worth the money I’ll have to spend going on…
We need a radical overhaul of how architectre is taught here. Even just from the point of view of the profusion of minimalist/Mondrian-esque things that the practices seem to spewing out all over our country.
