TALES FROM TWO CITIES — Emerging Architects in Dublin and Edinburgh

ed. Shane O’Toole

ISBN 978 0946641 383      36pp (pb)     21 x 21 cm illus

This book accompanied an exhibition at the Architecture Centre, Edinburgh, in 1994, the aim of which was ‘to explore the courses being pursued by an emerging generation of architects living and working at the edge of Europe’. It contains projects, built and unbuilt, by young architects from Dublin and Edinburgh.

EXTRACTS

"During the past decade, the work of younger architects in Dublin has been marked by sustained group activity relating to long-overdue urban repair and the redefinition of Dublin in the tradition of European cities ... Edinburgh’s needs, however, are quite different. What that prosperous and cautious, beautiful but controlled city requires is a few good strong whiffs of the future. There is too little confidence in the contemporary. It is instructive briefly to compare abstractions by which each city has come to be represented. The great working tool of urban design is the figure-ground drawing. As the 1980s proposals for Dublin were being carefully formulated, tiny new ribbons of black were unrolling at speed across the surrounding countryside, uncontrollable inkblots seeping out to the west and north; and all the while, whole blocks close in to the centre were being erased, great white voids eating away at the heart, the very structure of the organism. A postcard of Edinburgh, on the other hand, shows a relief map cast in bronze, implacable and immutable, its topography and plan coldly resistant to all change for over a century and a half. One city blind to its past; the other, perhaps, frozen in it."

— from the introduction by Shane O’Toole

"The enlightened in Edinburgh consider architecture to be Scotland’s ‘art’, while in Dublin the literary tradition is the one which has thrived. Victor Hugo once proclaimed that ‘the printed word will kill architecture’: nor is the spoken word accompanied by inaction, its friend. Ireland celebrates its artists and rewards them with tax exemption, but its architects have no such incentives, nor governmental support with which go fight their cause. Of the architecture students who graduate from Dublin’s universities each year, only a handful will find the employment in Ireland they deserve, and the majority move to mainland Europe. Those who remain fight hard to bring a renewed vitality to the city centre: the work of Group 91 in Temple Bar is a fine example of what could be achieved more widely in Dublin if the will can be found. 
          Nor should Edinburgh risk complacency. Many of Scotland’s best architecture graduates are based in London, and, while they may make brief returns to build here, the architectural scene in Edinburgh is conservative and stifled by established practices; young local practices are given little encouragement. This exhibition [and book] is timely, therefore. It gives expression to the aspirations of a group of younger architects from both cities who have been largely starved of opportunity locally. The initiative which brought it about is a testament to the dedication of the few, who have invested time and energy to ensure that the talent of these two cities have more than a glorious history to reflect on, but some hope of a future too.

— from the essay by Robert Tavernor 

We are left in no doubt as to the strength and sustainability of a newly rooted confidence in architecture, particularly among the Irish.  — Irish Architect