City landscape scale projects `entirely missing' from annual awards winners

Beatriz Colomina, associate professor of architecture at Princeton University, thought Dublin would be "a sleepy city of grey skies and stone buildings, a melancholic city" before she came here for the first time to participate on the jury for this year's Architectural Association of Ireland awards.

In fact, as she was astonished to discover, "it was aggressively sunny every day I was there, the traffic was horrendous and there was a frantic sense of urgency in the air". Even the flight to Dublin was crowded with "wired-to-the-teeth commuters, armed with laptops, palm pilots, cellphones and MP3 players". Ms Colomina, a Spanish-born architecture critic, had come face to face with the Celtic Tiger. "Places we used to think of as charming, but not central, are becoming the new nervous nodes of the planetary network, while long-established centres, such as London and Paris, are turning into `city museums'."

What is remarkable about the AAI 2000 Awards exhibition is how little it reflects what is really going on in Dublin, or in the rest of Ireland, in this phosphorescent period. Hardly a single project associated with the new dot.com economy made it on to the short list of 18 projects chosen by the jury for an award or special mention.

Tarla MacGabhann, one of the Irish assessors, described most of the 68 entries as "private projects with minimal urban relevance, located within intact parts of Dublin". They were also "boutiquey in image, style and content" involving small additions to existing buildings and, in one case, a stage-set room done for TV.

James Pike, the other Irish architect on the jury, concurred that this year's exhibition is "dominated by small projects". Of the six selected for awards, he said all were "fine examples of the types entered". The jury obviously felt that none was so outstanding as to warrant the coveted Downes Medal.

Florian Beigel, the second foreign assessor, who is professor of architecture at the University of North London, complained that projects on a city landscape scale were "entirely missing" and he queried whether anyone was addressing endless suburban sprawl and the indeterminate, transitional nature of it all.

This theme was taken up by theatre director Garry Hynes, the jury's distinguished non-architect, who said she was "often bewildered . . . by the speed at which the urban landscape is being transformed, apparently driven by money and without any governing principles, ideas or real connection to the community".

As the only lay person on the panel, Ms Hynes said she was exercised by the level of ideas in the various entries and the discussion with her fellow-jurors because it reinforced her view that "we do have a choice in how our environment looks, and the greater the debate about it, the better those environments will be".

The AAI Awards exhibition does not add much to this debate. There are good models of the six winning entries, including a particularly fascinating box showing the interior of Hassett and Ducatez's Coill Dubh Credit Union building in the Bord na Mona village of Timahoe, Co Laois. But overall, it is quite weak.

This year, for the first time, there was a private viewing for entrants after the jury had completed its deliberations - es, as the French would call it - so everybody got a chance to see all 50 of the projects that didn't make it. And they included some which might easily have succeeded in other years.

Among these were two fine modernist houses in Bessborough Parade, Rathmines, one by Grafton Architects and the other by deBlacam and Meagher, and Dundalk's new bus station, by Iarnrod Eireann Architects. Only two office buildings made it on to the final list, both of them conversions - the Kodak building in Rathmines by Paul Keogh Architects and Henry J Lyons and Partners' new offices in a former tobacco warehouse on Pearse Street. Iarnrod Eireann Architects also feature for Dun Laoghaire's new-look DART station.

A number of school projects were submitted, though only one, Our Lady's Secondary School in Castleblayney, by Grafton Architects, received an award. But all of the jurors endorsed Mr Pike's cri de coeur about the "ridiculously low budgets" for school projects because they make good architecture difficult to achieve.

Grafton's three-storey extension to the Castleblayney school should help to lift spirits. Cranked to follow the contours of a hillside on the edge of the town, its bright and airy classrooms are laid out in parallel bands on either side of a wide corridor with "light scoops" bringing daylight into the ground-floor "nave".

Florian Beigel described it as "quite a free, spatially inventive project" while James Pike thought it was "quite subtle" and made very good use of meagre resources. It was the "kink" in the school's facade that appealed to Tarla MacGabhann. "It's a very simple geometry, but I think it does soften the building a lot."

The Coill Dubh Credit Union, by Hassett Ducatez Architects, was admired for its "big agricultural shed" looks. As Beatriz Colomina said, "it seems to fit into the landscape both in its setting and in the way the architects have so carefully chosen to frame the landscape from the inside".

But Tarla MacGabhann was not so sure that the building related to the Bord na Mona housing around it, while Florian Beigel complained about the use of recessed dark skirtings internally to "lift" the white walls. "On the outside, the building sits quite well on the ground, but the walls inside don't sit on the floor".

One of the special awards went to Boyd Kelly Whelan Architects for three boldly minimalist mews houses in Rathmines. Whatever the local residents may think, two of the jurors - Beatriz Colomina and Garry Hynes - were so impressed that they said they would each like to live in one.

Florian Beigel saw references in the mews to the plan of a Georgian house, with its piano nobile on the first floor. What he particularly admired was the sliding glass doors, minus balconies or rails. So on a good summer's day, "you just open the sliding door . . . and then your whole livingroom becomes . . . a loggia".

Grafton Architects won a special award for an entry entitled "Two Timber Boxes" - one to screen a workstation within an existing room and the other an extension to an artist's studio for storing paintings. "It's a very nice project overall - simple boxes becoming architecture," commented Beatriz Colomina.

Whether Camille O'Sullivan's Adaptable Room was architecture or not was something that exercised the assessors. A room designed as a child's bedroom which could be changed instantly or over time, it was after all designed as a set for Beyond the Hall Door on RTE television and, no doubt, has long since been dismantled.

But the ideas were intriguing, with sliding timber or canvas walls creating changes of mood. "Thinking back about how we all wanted to change our rooms every month when we were younger, I think the project offers great opportunities for a child's fantastical imagination," according to Tarla MacGabhann.

The remaining award-winner, Urban Prototype by Roland Bosbach/BSBL, features a multi-media presentation of how one of those terraced cottage-style houses off Synge Street could be transformed into a combined living and working space.

"The client required a safe space for his car, a garden for parties, a master bedroom and a kitchen that could also be used as a livingroom and used for business." In fact, since he works from home, he wanted all of the rooms to be potential spaces to work from, with telephone connections and Internet access.

Though James Pike thought the project was "just ideas about things" it might encourage people to think about the "great possibilities" in the use of houses. "If we are going to be spending more time in the house, domestic space becomes a more complex thing than it has been in the 20th century," Beatriz Colomia said.

Housing is what many of the exhibited projects are about - from Duffy Mitchell's superb extension to an ordinary semi-detached house in Stillorgan and Box Architecture's minimalist garage conversion in Dun Laoghaire to Kelly and Cogan's fine social housing scheme in Naas, laid out around a landscaped courtyard.

Surprisingly, an award was denied to deBlacam and Meagher's mixed-use building at Castle Street and Werburgh Street in Dublin, with its marvellous stepped-out corner tower; the fact that it so spectacularly repaired a road-widening gash wasn't even considered.