The surreal post-crash landscape of Dublin's Docklands
From the early Celtic Tiger, when the dominance of finance capital emblazoned itself upon the city's landscape, to the cold Internationalist half-empty remains of the frantic land speculation that characterised the era and its demise, Owen Hatherley walks us through the confused but telling structures of one patch of Dublin's post-industrial regeneration.
During the boom, a new linear city took shape along the Liffey. It's a landscape punctuated with spaces which were nominally public, but are spectacularly cold and inhospitable. Nothing here seems to be occupied, and much of it appears half-way under construction, spaces somewhere between wasteland and plaza. These spaces might be a failure in any rational terms, but their quietness and eeriness becomes increasingly surreal, with empty spaces that create a richly filled time.
Principal among the inadvertently strange and thrilling spaces of the post-Tiger Economy city is the container port, which has around it something I've never seen - a whole load of new housing and offices (in a vaguely Germanic, cold mock-modern style) built adjacent, as if this mechanical spectacle might be worth seeing, rather than being hidden away and ignored. However, I suspect that the frantic land speculation that preceded the crash - rather than an unusual interest in the aesthetics of automation - were the reasons behind this. Dublin will build anywhere and everywhere - it's a city the size of Berlin, with around one-third of its population.
The port is almost always visible, due to the Liffey's eerie, Canal-like linearity, a man-made thing, thin and extremely straight, so that even in the preserved, Georgian centre you can see the power station and the container cranes in the not-too-far-distance, while in Liverpool or London the extant ports are hidden away by the curves of the Mersey and the Thames (and in the latter case by extreme distance). There was still, of course, a lot of 'Brownfield' land ripe for regeneration nearer the centre – and it's this which we will examine here.
Architecturally, it's an example of the international phenomenon of 'regeneration', which can be defined easily enough as the colonisation of former working class spaces in post-industrial cities, usually accompanied by 'world-class', 'signature', 'iconic' architecture, designed explicitly to appeal to tourists. It's positively tasteful when compared to the earlier architecture of the Tiger Economy, which is brash in the extreme, with none of the recent ethereality and fashionable fragmentation in evidence - the International Financial Services Centre is especially gobsmacking in its crassness. Finance capital here was clearly not interested in being subtle about its presence and dominance.
Across from it are two fragments of a pre-regeneration era, i.e. buildings for public functions, intelligently designed in an original manner, without retro gesture or expressionistic ego. Both replaced their transparent, ethereal glazing with hard mirror glass after bomb attacks in the 1970s. One of them, Busáras, the central bus station, is the finest 20th century building I saw in Dublin by some measure. Nominally the architect was Michael Scott, the modern movement's Irish emissary, but it's generally accepted that the main designer was one Wilfrid Cantwell, with Kevin Roche, soon to cross the Atlantic to work with Eero Saarinen, whose practice he would then inherit. What Cantwell did here is analogous to Berthold Lubetkin in London, or the Royal Festival Hall – a public modernism gone festive, full of mosaic patterns, lush materials and an interplay of the wilful and joyous with the strict and rectilinear. It's a wonderful building, an example of what modernism can be, and here, mostly isn't.
The unfinished skeleton of the Bank of Ireland building looks over the Docklands. These corporate spaces are still pockmarked by industry, which in the context resembles a series of scattered ornaments, accidental or otherwise, creating a landscape which gets ever stranger the closer you get to the centre of it, the piecemeal realisation of the erasure creating, in a tighter, urban equivalent the weirdness of the vague and dispersed expanse of the Royal Docks in London, a place where, unlike Canary Wharf, it hasn't all quite worked, it didn't all stick, and this sense of failure creates a concomitant sense of - almost - possibility. Not that schadenfreude is entirely absent from the proceedings.
The surrealism only intensifies when you reach the bit of (in the offensive planning parlance) 'public realm' where the Dublin Docklands Development Agency has decided to be a bit ambitious – an intriguing square on Cardiff Lane, where it wasn't clear how much of the place was accidental. Its boundary is a poem of some description, inscribed on a snaking, low wooden fence, with lighting that has been torn apart at various points, which means that the promised 'butterflies in your tummy' may in fact be volts in your nervous system. They enclose a sandpit, climbing frames, palm trees and a Victorian factory chimney. All the office blocks around seem to be either empty or unfinished, or both.
This eccentricity is tucked away where nobody is looking - the shiny showpiece is further on, where a regeneration trinity of Calatrava-Schwartz-Libeskind have created something much like the thing they have created everywhere else. Martha Schwartz's square, with its lights and public art is the most original, but Libeskind continues his sad decline into self-parody. Here he designed two office blocks flanking a theatre. The offices are basic curtain walls given completely arbitrary slicing and dicing for no reason other than to remind you that It's Danny, and the theatre sits at the centre, its crushed polygons only as deep as the atrium. It's probably about war, independence and stuff, especially given that De Valera once hid in the silos over the river, or something.
Then there's the Manuel Aires Mateus hotel, with lamentably poor detailing – as in the UK, contemporary Irish architecture is marked by a striking parsimony, a cheapness and carelessness in construction which is especially curious given how these tend to be 'luxury flats' or 'stunning offices'. A sign reminds us that were are, after all, round the corner from Misery Hill. In the offices of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, the models still show the U2 Tower, a shelved Norman Foster scheme where the Great Satan itself would rehearse and not pay its taxes on the top floor. In a way, the sheer internationalism of the scheme is admirable, the fact that it could be built anywhere, up the road from Temple Bar's men dressed as leprechauns – a refusal to pander to tourist kitsch. They've gone for big names, and why not? It's a capital city after all. The problem is that said big names are clearly not especially interested in or attached to Dublin, and it shows, especially in Calatrava and Libeskind's tossed-off efforts. But that would imply that (here, ex-) locals could do something better...
The other side of the river, reached by the Samuel Beckett bridge (oh yes. Perhaps if he'd known, he'd have stayed in Dublin for longer?), is dominated by Kevin Roche's homecoming building, the Convention Centre. Roche, as a partner with Michael Scott, was partly responsible for Dublin's best modernist building – the lovely, 'people's detailing' modern of Busáras. After emigration to the USA, he designed some fabulous buildings with and without Eero Saarinen – but this homecoming is sad indeed, a giant tilted barrel, the very kitsch that the rest of the place tries to avoid.
Adjacent, the Dead Mall that was recycled out of the Custom House Quay Building is one of the quietest and airiest of these failed spaces. The advertisements that mark the empty spaces where retail 'unit' could be or might once have been has a particular streak of desperation. And here, even the CCTV cameras are 'contextual', designed to be in keeping with the corporeal industry that was once here. They look out over a startling emptiness.
Owen Hatherley writes for The Guardian and is the author of Militant Modernism. His blog is nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/
Image top via infomatique on Flickr.