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DoChara's Ireland Blog
Random Writings about Ireland and the Irish
Wednesday
June 4 2008
The Best Building in Ireland
The annual Irish Architecture awards normally tends to be something of an insiders' event, but this year the public have a chance to pick their favourite new building from a fairly diiverse range of contenders. The idea of public voting is good - it'll give architects a feel for the sort of buildings people appreciate and give the public a chance to think about the built environment and how we would like to shape it for future generations.
But it's all a bit of a farce in reality.
Unless you are extremely dedicated and prepared to travel Ireland from Donegal to Cork and spend a few days tramping around Dublin to actually look at all the various contenders in the flesh, so to speak, you have to rely the RIAI website to make your choice. And there you have one, just one, small image of each building, and in many cases a fairly poor image at that. How anyone is expected to make a choice based on that is a mystery to me.
Why can't they put up multiple images, large and at high quality, of each building, inside as well as out? Why can't we see at least some of the plans to get an idea of how the buildings are connstructed? Why do we hear nothing about how the buildings actually work - what the people who use them every day think about them?
As an example, here's what we are told in the blurb about Russborough House:
"The past three years have seen more prominent works that have made an important contribution to the sensitive conservation and improved presentation of the house. "
What works? What important contribution have they made? How have they made inprovements? Any chance that we could have a look? Since the picture is just a pretty but fairly standard one of Russborough (not the one above, but about as infomative), it tells us exactly nothing other than that the original architect did a great job over 250 years ago, but it isn't him we are voting for.
Anyone can vote , but it's hard to see what meaning if any the result will have given the limitations on which the voting will be based.
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