INNOVATION DUBLIN AT CITY ARCHITECTS
Innovation Dublin 2009 was a week-long festival promoting innovation and creativity in the city, held from October 14th - 20th. The week provided an opportunity for Dubliners - whether entrepreneurs, students, researchers, artists or large corporations - to celebrate new ideas and fresh initiatives. City Architect’s Division organised a series of events as part of the festival:
Re-imagining Public Space, Sitric Road, Stoneybatter, Sunday, 18th of October, 24 hrs
In August 2009 Culturstruction (Jo Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy), with the assistance of DCC’s Community section, facilitated a weeklong summer workshop with fifteen 6-10 year olds. The idea was to challenge the conventional relationship of who designs our city.
The group were introduced to the ideas of measurement and scale, brainstorming, democratic decision making and talked about strategies for playing in urban areas. The children were asked to describe a new public place through spoken words alone. This spoken brief was then recorded and passed to the crafts people at the Dublin City Council Joinery Workshop in Cherry Orchard. The resulting design was temporarily installed on Sitric Road, Stoneybatter and was the centre-piece of a lively street festival which was held on Sunday 18th October.
See more about the days event
The Dublin House, Smithfield, Saturday 17th October, 9.30am-5.00pm
DCC City Architects in association with the Now What? initiative at UCD School of Architecture organised a one day design competition open to architectural students, graduates, practitioners and all those interested in the design of housing in Dublin.
The competition took place in Smithfield over the course of Saturday 17th October with a brief to design ‘the Dublin house’ - a new housing typology suitable for infill sites in the historic Georgian city. The site posed is located on the west side of Lower Dominick Street, currently the site of a Dublin City Council social housing flat complex built in 1970. Dublin City Council has identified the need to develop a new typology that respects the inherited grain and pattern of the city. This is a reaction to the poor design quality of many infill schemes, resulting in the loss of appropriate scale and grain where historic plots have been accumulated for development.
The competition was judged in the afternoon by Frank McDonald, Irish Times environment correspondent, architect Denis Byrne and the City Architect Ali Grehan and was won jointly by architects Michael Pike and Grace Keeley and a team of Jamie Conway, Cormac Nolan and Elizabeth Gaynor, who are students at the School of Architecture, DIT Bolton Street.
Exhibitions: Excellence for Everyman and the Mansion House Project
The Excellence for Everyman exhibition was held at Wood Quay Venue during Innovation Week and featured the innovative design projects of the City Architects Division over 100 years. A series of historical projects running from the founding of the office up to the present day were displayed as a timeline, highlighting the work of individual City Architects.
Also exhibited at Wood Quay Venue, The Mansion House Project places the residence of the First Citizen of Dublin, the Lord Mayor, centre stage in promoting urban sustainability through environmental best practice and innovative thinking. This is a high profile cultural and creative design project that incorporates best practice for addressing energy efficiency in historic buildings. The exhibition showcased the Project, explaining the history of this important building and a series of proposals for improving its environmental sustainability.