Half built office blocks and abandoned construction sites across Dublin city stand as headstones for the once proud Celtic Tiger. Yet, as ever when something dies there is a continuation and within those headstones there is the potential to re-imagine a city as something better than it was.
With the best and brightest on a steady stream to the airports again, it falls to those we still have to explore how that might be achieved. This year, the final year architecture students in the Dublin School of Architecture at DIT were asked to choose vacant and inactive sites around Dublin, including some Nama properties, and propose what could be done with them by way of theoretical interventions that would be “socially useful”. Nama-labs is the continuation of this whereby the work will continue and an exhibition of their ideas will be on show under the Central Bank in Temple Bar until mid-July.
The back story as to why this theme was chosen has been well documented. The dramatic collapse of the property sector was spectacular with the profession of architecture suffering more than most as the recession firmly took hold. Architects suddenly found themselves with little to do while students anxiously looked out from shelter of college wondering where they were supposed to fit in.
The students’ designs are part of the Nama-labs project which fifth year head, Dermot Boyd says “are Dublin-based for now but we're not stopping there, we hope to take this to a national level and deal with the ghost estates in the midlands among others. Nama-labs is a working laboratory on how to tackle Nama and other underused properties – not as an economic model, but rather how can we use half built buildings.”
“We didn’t want another office building or more apartments, there are enough apartments. It was important that the building would be social useful,” Dermot Boyd said. “There were a lot of community buildings, as well as exchanges for labour and trade.”
Paul O’Sullivan took on what is probably the most iconic unfinished building left behind in the remnants of the financial crash, the Anglo Irish building in the Docklands. In place of the bank Paul proposed NAMArt to be installed in the leftover shell. “Basically, the building would take all the private art collections of the banks and put it all on public display in the building. Giving something back to the public from the people who have taken so much from us.”
Helen Rose Condon proposed an intervention that would act as a “parasite” to the Drury Street car park in which people weave up through the unrefined structure to a library perched on top. “I am retaining the car park as fully functioning; therefore the library will act as a parasite onto the existing structure. The library takes advantage of the unused air space above the car park, the roof top view synonymous with penthouse apartment is giving back to the public, as a sitting room in what is considered the a truly public brief, a public library.
Other popular reinvented sites around the capital included new markets at Carlton Cinema site on O’Connell Street, a state casino in Temple Bar and infamous Irish Glass Bottle site in Poolbeg on which Irene Walsh proposed a veritable, urban farm. “This thesis looks towards an architectural strategy that can anticipate unknown future needs, and asks; can we prepare the ground in a useful way.”
Opening the DIT Architecture students End of Year exhibition earlier this summer, City Architect Ali Grehan suggested their place in the broader scheme of society; “in the world of Nama, architecture must give hope.” In that regard, the sickening headstones for the Celtic Tiger ought not to be reminders of what was squandered but rather stand as monoliths waiting for reinvention.
(for the Social 1st July 2011)
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