Take 5 °2 – PAUSE: 5 Perspectives on Unbuilt Ireland

ed. John O’Regan

essays by Gerry Cahill, Eddie Conroy, Niall McCullough, Conor Skehan 

ISBN 978 0948037 795      60pp (hb)     22.5x24.5cm    col illus

 
This book features a number of innovative architectural projects that have been delayed, postponed or abandoned in recent times. The aim of documenting a wide variety of currently unbuilt Irish architecture (presented here within a framework of five distinct categories) is to ensure that a record of ideas is enshrined for the future. The projects are evidence of the general architectural energy at work in Ireland, and demonstrate that innovative work is being designed and made right across the country.

EXTRACTS

"Pause is intended to be a series of publications and public exhibitions showing innovative architectural projects of some significance that have been delayed, postponed or abandoned in recent times. The idea of the series is to document and exhibit the best and wide variety of current unbuilt Irish architecture to provide a record of ideas for the future. The first Pause features the work of fourteen architectural practices. The work, submitted in response to an open call for entries, demonstrates a wide variety of activity. Spanning towns and cities, public and private spheres, the pragmatic and the visionary, the gloriously delirious and the eminently sober, it provides a snapshot of good projects that suffered suspension amidst the much more widespread bad and downright ugly."

— from the foreword by Denis Byrne

"You could look at the last decade in lots of ways. We all have stories of excess and excitement; we are all coming to terms with change in architectural circumstances, but maybe also gaining some (post-rationalised) insight into the strategic inevitability of events. Clearly, too much was built. Most of it was second-rate... Worse, it was cowardly, without ambition or ideas. It is also destructive, costly to repair, difficult to alter or remove. The baroque exuberance of construction brought forth a behemoth of over-regulation; the first is gone, the other remains, curiously suspended, a floating, fully manned world of unrequired stricture.
          The projects in this book can be seen as a first cut – a selection of projects caught in mid-air between inception and construction; the unlucky ones to be left standing when the music stopped. The grouping or collection is consciously random, a response to an open call for entries, not sieved by taste or personality. If anything, the projects represent themes and an ambition for architecture miles beyond the inadequate official culture of safety and sustainability. The projects are good evidence of a general architectural energy at work, an intensity of small ideas and constructions, and an efficiency of purpose typically found in times of plenty. People know how to do things; they focus and do them with skill and move on. They have the advantage – and disadvantage – of fluency. There is a lack of slow-time architecture.
          What does the work show? It shows that the boom was by no means exclusively Dublin-based. The projects demonstrate that innovative work was being designed and made across the country by brave and engaged architects working in cities, small towns and in the countryside. It marks the sheer range of work carried out through those years in private and public commissions, and the extent of public work available with the opportunities offered – and sometimes grasped – to define a new approach to making internal and external public space. It hints at the huge opportunities for linking architecture and infrastructure in Ireland in the knowledge of what an abject failure that engagement has been to date. Who has ordained that architects should not get involved in the design of water and sewage schemes?"

— from the introduction by Niall McCullough