DUBLIN'S DILEMMA:
The Fruits of the Boom
(copyright Hugh Pearman and the Sunday Times. This is the full-length version of the Irish edition article published 11th October 1998 as It's not hip to be square
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Hit 'em hard
DUBLIN'S DILEMMA:The Fruits of the Boom(copyright Hugh Pearman and the Sunday Times. This is the full-length version of the Irish edition article published 11th October 1998 as It's not hip to be square
I first came to Dublin in 1988, wished I had come much sooner, and have returned at intervals ever since. So I have a stop-motion picture of the changes wrought in the city during the recent boom years. On the surface, what happens today bears little relation to the sweeping plans for "comprehensive redevelopment" made for the city in the 1950s and 1960s. All, it seems, is not necessarily now based on the assumption that everything old is to be cleared away, that International Style buildings must be thrown up to make Dublin look like every other city in the world, and that new roads must slice up the city so that motor vehicles can reign supreme. Not outside the docks area, anyway. No: the changes are subtler, more insidious, than that. The character of whole districts have changed through piecemeal redevelopment. The culture of the pub has given way to the culture of the mega-bar. Individual shops and stores have yielded to the international chains. Bland new hotels, some staggeringly expensive, have mushroomed. Property prices are now on a par with London. Car ownership has rocketed: it was a busy city in 1988, but I do not remember the daily near-gridlock on the streets that you encounter today, which is at last - far too late - forcing the city corporation to plan upgrades to its public transport network. And back then, of course, the docks were still docks - run-down, semi-abandoned, but yet to become the development free-for-all I had witnessed, with at best mixed results, in London, Liverpool and Cardiff. There have been other changes. I saw a glorious, rollicking Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre on that first visit: a hoary theatrical standby, of course, but excellent nonetheless. On my latest foray, a week or so ago, friends advised me to look elsewhere. The Abbey has had its troubles, though it may be coming through them now. Come to that, the austere, Miesian brick box of Michael Scott's 1966 theatre sprouted a portico in 1990 and now has plans for a radical Millennial revamp, inside and out. Central to the success of this enterprise will be the reconfiguration of the auditorium. At present, actors and audience just have too much space between them - it is difficult to get emotionally involved, which is the essence of all theatre but particularly, surely, of this one. The key change in the city, obviously enough, is the Temple Bar area, and here the comparison is with London's Covent Garden. Dare I say that I preferred Temple Bar in those ramshackle days, when it had an edgy, slightly dangerous quality? But then, I preferred Covent Garden before it became a tourist honeypot, for exactly the same reason. There is no escaping the fact that in any city, a characterful area close to the centre, colonised by artists and musicians and cheap eating places, is sooner or later going to get overrun. At least in Temple Bar some real attempts have been made to keep a strong element of the community that gave the place its Bohemian feel. And if only Covent Garden had had the equivalent of Group 91, the young architectural confederation that won the competition to replan Temple Bar that year and which has now largely finished its task. There are new buildings of real quality there, stitched into the grain of the area. Among the best are the film buildings by O'Donnell and Tuomey - the Irish Film Centre, the National Photography Centre, the Gallery of Photography. This is world-class architecture, as is the "Ark" children's cultural centre by Shane O'Toole and Michael Kelly, with its virtuoso Santiago Calatrava opening wall to the outside world. These buildings contrive to be both small-scale and monumental. But the new urban space where they come together - Meeting House Square, planned by Paul Keogh - somehow does not work. I have not seen it with that Calatrava door open and a live performance going on, but when it is shut, the place is dead. It is not where people choose to go, even when images are being projected from the one photography building to the other. On an evening when the rest of the area is heaving with people having a good time, Meeting House Square is all but deserted.
In contrast Temple Bar Square, the other key new urban space backed with buildings by Grafton Architects, is bustling - despite facing a building site. It may take only a few urbanistic tweaks to put this imbalance right - perhaps the planned new pedestrian bridge over the Liffey by competition-winning architects Howley Harrington will help - but for now, Meeting House Square is Temple Bar's black hole.
As for future developments - somehow, after all the respectful height-conscious interventions of recent years, it comes as a relief to find architects de Blacam and Meagher building a tall, timber-clad apartment building near here. In Temple Bar, the relatively new architects on the block are doing pretty well. But how about this: there is one Dublin building, a modern bastion, which acts as a gateway to Temple Bar and which looks better and better with every visit. This is the inverted ziggurat of the Central Bank of 1978 on Dame Street by Sam Stephenson, then of Stephenson Gibney. Deeply unfashionable during the 1980s and 1990s, its merits are gradually becoming better appreciated, and not before time. After all, in London, buildings of this quality are also listed and statutorily protected: think of London's National Theatre, or even the once-despised, now listed Centre Point tower - and the Central Bank is considerably better than that. It is harder to love Stephenson's squat towers of the civic offices on Wood Quay, but nonetheless the hybrid building that has resulted from the project being completed by other architects in a totally different style has led to an unsatisfactory conclusion. There is not so much a join as a rift valley between the two parts. The river frontage of the new bit by Scott Tallon Walker, admired by many, has too much of a whiff of the American business-park about it for me. The world over, high-profile civic projects like this that drag on for years and years invariably end up half-baked, half-hearted, or both.
Business parks, it seems to me, need to be out of town - near the airport, preferably, but anyhow not in full view of the centre. A shame, then, that they built one down by Custom House and called it the International Financial Services Centre, begun in 1990. It's not that it's irredeemably awful - it's just averagely bad and all too familiar. I'll concede that this Irish-American complex has been given an urban scale, but it seems to connect with the city in no other way: it excludes you. The greatest criticism of the project is a mute one, and it is uttered by the mere presence nearby of Michael Scott's masterly Busarus building of 1947-50. The Financial Services Centre at least makes you look at Busarus with freshly appreciative eyes. The building is a national treasure.
Economic success, of course, is always what drives the development of any city. You can't wish away some of the things that have happened in the boom, The plans to civilise the magnificent but run-down thoroughfare of O'Connell Street seem both timely and thoughtful - though my gut feeling is that the ghost of the long-vanished Nelson's Pillar should remain a ghost, - pace the current competition to find a replacement. The winner of that contest had better be very good indeed - certainly better than the clumsy original, which with its massive base completely blocked the views down the street. What are the chances of that happening? Still, let's hope. The docks area is a pressure-valve for the booming city, in a way that was impossible in the 1960s. Development can go there which would otherwise wreck the centre. Fine: but remember the lesson of London, where the supposedly market-led (but in fact heavily subsidised) docklands development that kicked off in 1979 somehow managed to overlook culture in its drive for offices and apartments. The £80 million National Conference Centre planned down on the Liffey at North Wall Quay on old railway yards does not look much like culture. Nor does the controversial mega-development of very tall office and apartment buildings proposed for George's Quay opposite the increasingly beleagured Custom House, designed by the American architects SOM. True, the conference centre is designed by the celebrated and now elderly Irish emigre architect Kevin Roche, and will be something of a landmark. It may make a great venue for pop concerts, as does Norman Foster's rather cheaper "Armadillo" equivalent in Glasgow. But there's something about conference centres, whoever designs them. Something stultifying. They know they're not real cultural attractions, but business venues, and we all know it too. Admittedly is it difficult to introduce arts buildings into the docklands mix. City centres are the traditional location for palaces of culture, and in Dublin's centre the National Gallery will soon build its extension by the Anglo-Scottish architects Benson and Forsyth. Those wanting a sneak preview of what to expect should take themselves to Edinburgh, where the new Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street, from the same hand, gives you a fair idea of their monumental approach. By an eery imperial coincidence, Benson and Forsyth are extending a building originally by the same hand in both Edinburgh and Dublin, namely the Victorian architect-engineer Captain Francis Fowke - who is also responsible for a large chunk of London's South Kensington museums quarter. It's perhaps unfortunate that the original plans to break the National Gallery extension through onto Clare Street, so giving the gallery an important presence on the Trinity College side, had to be toned down in order to preserve a previously unregarded house on the site. But at least the Gallery will have an entrance there, and will be better plugged into the city than it presently is in its corner of Merrion Square. So the development of Dublin continues, ever faster. One almost forgets the fine restoration projects completed in the past few years, many for cultural purposes - Dublin Castle, the 18th century Collin's Barracks (now the National Museum of Ireland) the 17th century Royal Hospital at Kilmainham (now the Irish Museum of Modern Art), and Dr. Steevens Hospital, cleared of its years of clutter. These are amazing achievements by any standard. But now attention shifts to the opportunities offered by the North Quays, by Smithfield, by the canal basins, even and importantly by the housing estates to the north of the city. It is almost too much to take in: which means that one fears it is all being done too quickly. As I leave, the airport is in Saturday morning turmoil. It is seething. "There used to be just six flights a day here," reflects my cab driver as we sit in the customary traffic jam on the way out. The airport, which already resembles an out-of-town shopping centre, is being almost doubled in size. The original late 1930s terminal by Desmond Fitzgerald and his Office of Public Works team - one of the great airport buildings of the world - is now an unnoticed adjunct to the frenzied activity around it. All this spells out the success of the Celtic Tiger economy. But I can't help reflecting that all booms turn to bust sooner or later. And part of me can't help thinking: maybe this wonderful city could do with a breathing-space.
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