Dublin: Building For The Future

SOMETIMES you have to get a bit of distance to see things more clearly. I was in Barcelona for the first time recently, and it was a revelation. I couldn't claim to know the city or to understand fully its strengths and weaknesses but my immediate gut reaction is that it's a hugely impressive place that buzzes with enormous energy and excitement.

There are similarities to Dublin. You get the feeling that Barcelona is a party town; there's a sense of abandon about the way people enjoy themselves. The Catalonians seem to know how to let the good times roll and visitors to the city quickly get into the spirit of things. It's as if decades of repression under the combined weight of Franco's rule and the influence of the Catholic church have been cast off with utter relish. We've engaged in a similar kind of process here: they had us in balls and chains for so long that the experience of freedom is all the more intense. Irish people know how to party with the best.

But there are other ways in which an encounter with Barcelona shows how locked into a conservative mould we still are. Dublin is going through a remarkable phase of urban renewal. Cranes dot the skyline in a way that would have seemed inconceivable 20 years ago. There is building going on everywhere. Whole areas that had been derelict are being redeveloped and renewed. People have begun to live in the city again and apartment blocks and houses are springing up all over the centre. This process has been in full swing for over five years now. And yet in all that time, and amid all that development, is there one building in the city which we can point to and say: 'Now, that is a beautiful thing'? Is there any building that suggests an architectural leap of the imagination? Is there any building that represents a real challenge to people on an aesthetic level?

The Central Bank and the civic offices occupied by Dublin Corporation, both designed by Sam Stephenson, still stand out as Dublin's most interesting developments of the past 30 years. The Financial Services Centre, like it or lump it, makes a statement of sorts and works in the context. Temple Bar has a few impressive elements. And without a doubt there are great interiors hidden behind the walls of unremarkable buildings. But there is little or no evidence that there is any sense, among the Irish, of architecture as a form of public art.

The difference in Barcelona is best symbolised by the work of the great Catalonian eccentric, Gaudi. It doesn't have to be an article of faith that his work is brilliant - though there is undoubtedly something wonderfully playful and imaginative at its heart. But it is this that matters most: to encounter these buildings is to be confronted with the realisation that architecture can be original and inventive. I know that the man himself was hardly a barrel of laughs but Gaudi's work has about it a sense of fun that's almost childlike in its inspiration.

But Gaudi is not an isolated genius. Barcelona is a beautiful city not just because it is obvious that its architects have, at least some of the time, been given the freedom to dream but also because the authorities there have been sufficiently bold and ambitious in their vision of what the city might become. You get the impression that rather than stifling creativity they have cultivated it and the result is a place that's full of visual surprises and delights.

Here, a kind of paranoia still seems to dominate official thinking. There is an endemic fear among the city's planners of allowing anything new, different or modern to happen. We are locked into the notion that Dublin is a Georgian city and that nothing should be done that might put those roots at risk or cast them in a new light. The result is apparent in the stale and clumsy pastiches all over Dublin, and the essentially lego-like approach to building apartments. The financial investment in building stock over the past number of years provided a wonderful opportunity to genuinely redevelop the city centre and make it come alive. So far that opportunity has been spurned.

One of the key issues here relates to height. An obsession has developed in the official mind about keeping Dublin flat. Looking at the great buildings of New York, you realise that this doesn't really make any sense. Tall buildings can be magnificent and spectacular and - well-designed - can give a tenfold return against any potential downside. Of course context is important. Of course we don't want a rash of ill-conceived skyscrapers being thrown up, driven by a demand from developers for a higher return on their investment. But wandering through the streets of Barcelona it becomes quite clear that a city benefits greatly from diversity and freedom of expression. It becomes obvious that it is possible to marry a respect for a city's roots, with a willingness to embrace the future. And it becomes obvious that buildings don't have to be small, or low, to be beautiful.

It is never too late to start. Dublin is being further constructed and reconstructed even as you read this. It can be done in a way that gives rein to the joyous and creative instincts of great architects and great architecture. Or it can be done in the fussy and meanspirited manner favoured by those of a fundamentally bureaucratic disposition. In the end it comes down to the city managers and the planners that work for them.

Now is a time for opening up and embracing the future rather than clinging blandly, and blindly, to the past.