unamcgrath

re. minimalist designer bars vs fake-old paddywhackery oirish pubs as solutions for new bars

I believe neither is a solution though they may appeal to certain niches like the stylists or the tourist respectively.

Obviously paddywhackery is kitsch.
While I like many things about minimalism, I think it does not match the Irish spirit, which tends to be exuberant and earthy and prefers to exaggerate rather than subtract(remember Toraiocht Diarmuid agus Grainne)

Is the problem not a lack of an Irish design language and identity? Every country that produces good design has an evolved design language or identity – the Italians, Swedes etc. They have not ignored their traditions but built on them.

What happens when you dont have an identity – you borrow someone elses to keep you going. I think we borrow international style into Ireland. We put in what have become known as designer-bars that have nothing to do with Irish culture, who we are or what we like to do. These designer-cool bars are put in by the Irish style police and have more to do with being ‘cool’ than with design in many cases.
This jump-starting of the design process is a sort of cheat and gives Ireland a veneer look of design without allowing its complex cultural design identity to develop and evolve. Its all in an effort to ‘compete on the European stage, to be a modern nation’ but it is just copyism. It probably comes from a history of being the under-dog and the under-dog often tries to be ‘as good as’ instead of being better than , tries to follow rather than trying to lead.

Now we are nouveau-riche but money does not buy a culture, does not buy innovation so easily. This needs time and support to develop.

Design should not look like it came from a European style magazine but be its own, a good solution in its own context. It takes research and time. Part of this research involves taking stock of our traditions, not erasing them. While things must always move on, we must preserve certain physical markers of history as symbols of how we evolved into what we are.

The state of our drinking/social establishments is in a mess because we dont know what we want to communicate about ourselves through design, we dont have a design language. Since we Irish have become noveau-riche, it seems mnny of us have forgotten who we are, what we are.