Is it just me or as the fug of the Celtic-Tiger hangover clears, is it becoming strikingly apparent that the overall architectural legacy has been pretty poor? Many easy targets spring to mind, including but certainly not limited to: the miles upon miles of Dublin which splurges on unendingly towards Naas and Louth; the invented archetypal nowhere of City West business park and many others like it which appear to provide an anodyne substitute for urban forms and commercial centres these days; the monstrosity that is the hotelscape of Ballsbridge (even in this context, the Four Seasons Hotel, a neo-Georgian skyscraper must get a special mention for being exceptionally crap); and who could forget the horrendous housing estates (somehow simultaneously cheap and ostentatious) which got us into this darn fine mess.
Smithfield still looks pretty nice.
Its not all bad though, right? Many of the buildings on the south side of the Liffey from the centre to Ringsend are pretty good looking and consist of some really great detailing and inventive use of materials. Trinity College’s new library, with its sheet wall of glass over the cricket pitch is not only beautiful but also incredibly functional. The extension to the National Gallery is wonderful: cool, airy, restrained and constantly surprising. The LUAS is great, both aesthetically and for what it does to the city. It’s not often architectural criticism goes where I’m about to, but it actually looks like fantastic a shiny slug, and it does a wonderful job in linking up bits of Dublin (although it could have done much, much more). Much of Temple Bar (although pre-dating the Celtic Tigers height) is pretty good too: intimate courtyards, sensitive and imaginative reconstructions and restorations and some nice uses of urban space (when these urban spaces aren’t being over taken by British booze cruises, that is).
Broadstone Station looking a bit shabby.
But what becomes apparent as I try to take in the changes is just how much has stayed the same. Some of this stasis must be recognised as a good thing. While the property boom of the 1960s tore the heart out of much of the eighteenth-century core of the city, these areas were not targeted in the same way in the nineties and noughties, and indeed, there was enough money sloshing around that some even found its way into preservation. North Great Georges Street is pretty snazzy these days, Castletown has been completely restored, as have many government departments (best of all, the Department of the Taoiseach on Merrion Street). Some masterpieces still stand derelict: Aldborough House boarded up and quietly rotting, Broadstone Station stands among a herd of Dublin Buses, and Henrietta Street still slowly and quietly decays . I suppose the most important thing is that they are still standing at all. However, much has remained the same which really should have changed during the good times. Unbelievably after nearly twenty years of prosperity built on the construction industry, the best buildings in the city still date from mid-century: Michael Scott’s Busaras and Paul Korelek’s Berkley Library stand out as far superior to anything that has come since. Ballsbridge and Celbridge have been transformed, but walk around the Coombe or Church Street and there still are many cleared sites and closed buildings. Sameness also describes architectural styles. Once upon a time architects so despised the legacy of British building they went out of their way to build in contrast to their former rulers—with some pretty shocking results. In this context the acres of recent Georgian pastiche is pretty surprising as well as incomprehensible; the jarring between scale and style—as well as host of other objections—can only make one long for the brutal but imaginative solutions of their forebearers.
Henrietta Street surviving.
But then again you get what you pay for when urban development is utterly funded by private finance: little ambition in terms of design and even less desire to build in areas where the returns aren’t certain to be good. It is not only Ireland’s balance sheet which has suffered because of the developers, Dublin’s skyline hasn’t faired much better. It was a boom which lacked vision or ideology or any sort of ambition beyond making money for the rich, and this vacuum of intelligence and thought is all too apparent in the architecture and town planning which it produced. After nearly twenty years of continuous growth we are left with the shocking realisation that in the inner city very little has changed.
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