Two teenage lads get on the Dart at Blackrock station, the talk Leinster schools rugby from there to Grand Canal Dock whereon one remarks “What is that cool building over there anyway?” and “Dunno, but it’s cool though!” the response; the building not immediately visible from the Dart station, but they clearly referring to Liebskind’s under construction Grand Canal Theatre. The Liebskind aesthetic perhaps debateable in architecture circles, but if debate (or indeed concurrence here) is sparked by two otherwise-indifferent-to-architecture schoolboys, does it not thus serve a worthy purpose. Lads of this age and aspiration will be inclined to the skin-deep beauty of Miss Ireland auditionees and will inevitably be seduced by Liebskinds, Gehrys and Hadids; their aesthetic ascribes to populace attention and maintains a needed interest in architecture, but what of those involved in the field, he sitting opposite the two lads for instance; our aesthetic fancies, be they architectural or otherwise, are inclined in specific directions and carefully crafted in the school in which we are taught. Our educated concern will be function and form, our assumed taste will consider the aesthetic with the verdict in this instance perhaps ‘acceptable’ because it is relatively hidden and doesn’t overbear as the Conference Centre does.
Who among us didn’t design a daft building in first year? First years, don’t worry if you’ve been asked to design some rowing club pavilion and you just do an upside-down boat, this eegit did a circus tent for a yoga room! But such is first year, preconceptions will be misconceptions and concepts inevitably too literal, and what would Gehry have done in first year other than crunch up some butter paper and arrive at his one-trick-pony epiphany. Aesthetic, of course, is subjectively considered in the eye of the beholder, in architectural cliché it ought to follow function but will there be sufficient concern over aesthetic if functionality is sound? And what of the reverse? Don’t we need ugly things so as to appreciate beautiful ones? Check www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com for further information. Do we need starchitect spaceship buildings to maintain a populace interest in architecture? Or will really bad ones like the National Conference Centre realise the same end? Will someone ever gracefully demolish Hawkins House? Will mock-Georgian windows continue to be employed in picked-from-a-book one-off houses on the ever spoiling landscape of west Mayo where Georgian gentries would have only gone to if they took a wrong turn on the way to hell? Can populace inclinations be leant to our learned tendencies? Hardly likely. We can but persist with their education.
