I’ve lived in Galway for a lot of my life now, and I know the lie of the land pretty well. I could close my eyes and take a fairly detailed imaginary stroll through town.
Just like someone you see every day getting taller or fatter or older, I sometimes don’t notice the landscape shedding it’s skin and gradually evolving into a new place over time; change comes dropping slow. Still, I can also go for a real-life walk and, if I’m in the mood to pay attention to the familiar surroundings, notice the most tiny detail — a new piece of graffiti here or a replaced road sign there. There’s comfort in it.
Alongside this organic type of development, there are the obvious and sudden changes brought about by Development-with-a capital-D. New buildings (like the hideous new city museum dropped from space next to centuries-old stonework) arrive from nowhere, catching me off guard and forcing me to annotate the map in my head.
RTÉ’s radio documentary series on architecture The State We’re In: Revealing Irish Cities features an episode on Galway. An architect takes the presenter for a ramble around the city, chatting about the design and history of the streetscape as they go. Even though they don’t explicitly name the buildings they are talking about, if you know the area, it’s easy to follow along.
It’s like being taken on a reverse psychogeographical journey, where your emotional connection with a geographical environment has already been defined, and by replaying the space in your head through someone else’s experience it becomes new. It’s cool.
Being a cut-and-paste job from a rambling email exchange, this may be a bit haphazard; you get what you pay for.
There’s a site, foundmagazine.com, that has loads of photos, shopping lists, tickets, etc. that people picked up and sent in. I tried doing the same here for a while, but there’s not much interesting about soggy Bus Eireann tickets and dirty Major stubs.
Being in London a good few times in the last couple of years, I kind of got to thinking that Ireland is ‘under-designed’. There’s not a huge amount of visual stimulation to be had, natural features excepted of course. In London, design is everywhere: buildings, bridges, posters, advertisments, exhibitions, graffiti, etc. I even noticed that the content of ads and billboards are much more sophisticated over there (although this could be a demographic thing).
I wouldn’t like things around here to become any more hyper-commercialied, but it would be nice if there was more of an aesthetic (good or bad) to what is around - like your ticket has.
And snips from the reply:
I think Ireland is in a period of transition. Chaos rules the roost right now, but look back in time, mid 20th century. Shop fronts, pubs, post offices, news papers, cartons of milk, bills from the ESB, Telecom Eireann phone boxes, clothes, attitudes, religious beliefs, thinking, attitudes, nationality of inhabitants, all recognizable as being Irish, very homogenous no doubt about it.
I am excited by what is happening in Ireland right now, but also very afraid that it could all go wrong. Look at all the American mall type crap jumping up outside every town. That roundabout outside Athlone is a joke. There was nothing there four years ago, now McDonalds, Woodies DIY… have all arrived. Sure, jobs are being created but there’s nothing worse than a huge eyesore built for the sole purpose of allowing people to blow their money on shite.
You are right though, an aesthetic quality to the simplest of things, the crap we find on the street, is important, because if what we nonchalantly discard is aesthetically pleasing well designed items then I think we are doing well. It’s like having the confidence to throw money away as if to say, plenty more where that came from. Maybe not?
Design in Ireland is in an interesting place at the moment. I would just as soon (or sooner) like to see a hand-scrawled, misspelled sign as a well-designed advertisment. I just hope we don’t get stuck somewhere in between, where character, stimulation and individuality are lost completely, and where you wouldn’t pick up a piece of rubbish out of lack of interest.
Consider my day made. The wonderful Four Tet is taking in Galway on his upcoming UK/Irish tour:
Saturday 12th - Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin, Ireland - with Kid Koala
Sunday 13th - Spring and Airbrake, Beflast, UK - with Kid Koala
Monday 14th - Roisin Dubh, Galway, Ireland - with Kid Koala
Tuesday 15th - Club One, Cork, Ireland - with Kid Koala
If you haven’t heard his stuff before, it comes highly recommended.
The Economist on the London bombings:
No city… can stop terrorists altogether. What can be said, though, is that terrorists are unable to stop cities, either. Perhaps an army, launching wave after wave of attacks, might succeed in doing so, especially if it were to deploy biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Short of that, cities will always bounce back quickly, after the initial shock. They are resilient organisms, with powerful social and economic reasons to shrug off terrorism.
But of course, cities themselves don’t bounce back or change at all. The adaptability of a city lies in the fact that physically, it’s no more than a structure. The composition of the city, the orgamism of the quote above, is the made up of the people, social networks, experiences, and organisation that hang on the physical framework of a densely populated space.
In How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand notes that family homes can easily adapt to the needs of those living in them - rooms can be swapped, renovated, and re-used. Institutional buildings, on the other hand, have great difficulty in changing their function after they have been designed. They can’t adapt easily because their function is too rigidly written into their structure. Form follows function, but it should also be ready to keep up with function. Brian Eno on the appeal of adaptability:
An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me.
This is also Jeff Tweedy’s approach to art:
I believe 50 percent of art is the perception of the listener… as an artist all you’re really doing is hopefully giving people the raw material to think here something and make something out of it. I always think about how the world made something just incredibly beautiful out of Elvis Presley that he could have never in a million years intended. The intent of the author, the artist, the writer is really once it’s done your involvement is finished.
It’s also there in Jane Jacobs’ community-led, bottom-up approach to city planning, and Steven Johnson’s swarmlike collaberative filtering to achieve the emergence of optimium performance.
This way of thinking about design applies to lots of other stuff too - programmers who write reusable, modular code; copyright, and the freedom to remix content; open source and the ability to branch developments; open-ended, free-roaming video games; templates, themes and plugins for blogs; digital rights management and proprietary formats; mobile phone covers and ringtones; evolution.
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