BEYOND PEBBLEDASH ... and the Puzzle of Dublin

by Paul Kearns and Motti Ruimy

ISBN 978 1910140 031     224pp (paperback)   17x11cm    b/w illus (wire-frame drgs and photos)

Beyond Pebbledash is both a book and a wider design initiative whose creative aim is to promote a critical conversation on the future of Dublin urbanism. It provokes questions in the mind of the reader: What have we built? And, critically, why have we built it here? It encourages us to look beyond the surface meaning of any built landscape, to peel back the façade, to enter a different, engaging and challenging realm of questioning. How do we read the built environment? What can we see beyond the literal structure or structures standing before us?

With a series of exquisitely produced drawings, and the quick and thought-provoking nature of the writing, Beyond Pebbledash continues to develop the ideas and arguments put forward by the same authors in their previous book, Redrawing Dublin (also Gandon).

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EXTRACT

"Attracting middle-income earners to live in the heart of the city should be a policy priority for Dublin. We would further argue that Dublin City Council needs to set out a strategic vision for the long-term sustainable future of the south Georgian core, and that this vision should be to repopulate the area as a desirable place to live. The merits of that vision are many, overlapping and powerful. Despite a doubling of its population in the last 15 years, the inner city continues to remain the home of extensive pockets of dereliction and underperforming urbanism. Attracting higher-income families back into the heart of the city would assist in consolidating, often fragile, residential living elsewhere in the city centre and inner city. Dublin’s Georgian red-bricks along Upper Mount Street and other streets may, in time, become the fashionable equivalent of the New York brownstones. A residential vision would give significant practical support in advancing the UNESCO application for World Heritage status.
          An interesting comparison is the city of Tel Aviv. The city was designated a World Heritage City in 2003 on account of its unique Bauhaus and International Style architectural legacy. A significant proportion of the city’s population resides in purpose-built Bauhaus apartments, a fact that gives real meaning and credibility to the city’s urban identity, and, critically, this was an important factor in the decision to grant the city its UNESCO status. UNESCO status underpinned by a residential vision provides a significant opportunity of ‘branding’ the city.
          Residential consolidation has the potential to unify wider Dublin civic society around a shared vision for a collective Dublin regeneration project, to ignite Dubliners’ ‘ownership’ of the city’s Georgian heritage. A residential vision should not favour or preclude specific models of residential ownership, but instead be driven by the primary desire to provide demonstration models for quality urban-living. Perhaps for too long the city has not fully acknowledged or successfully challenged a lingering, widespread perception that inner-urban Georgian living is either the preserve of the eccentric or the fate of the destitute and impoverished (student bed-sits). The residential revitalisation of the south Georgian core may, over time, permeate to more challenging areas of the inner city, providing an economic rationale for investment to consolidate and reuse vulnerable historic fabric in places like Thomas Street and the north inner city."

— from Chapter 4, Where we live ... and Why?, “The Dead City?”