Bus shelter provokes new possibilities
More often than not, such questions are the reserve of academic and professional institutions. However, what is intriguing and original about the Arts Council’s ‘Engaging with Architecture Scheme’ (which is represented in 2014 by an entirely Cork-based project ‘Sharing Architecture’) is that similar questions are being asked by entirely new constituencies of people — namely, the public. What is so positive about this as a prospect is that the discipline of architecture begins to re-situate itself in to the public realm and be clearly understood as an agent for debate and change.
It also promises that a reappraisal occurs of those forgotten or overlooked urban landscapes. In the case of the current project, this involves Cork’s bus shelters.
It seems appropriate to think that architecture as conceptualised in this way might be thought of as some type of ‘urban-provocateur’; capable of tethering many disparate conditions of the contemporary city and its fluxing habits of inhabitants. Perhaps it is the case that a desire to facilitate such emergent transactions underpin ‘Sharing Architecture’, and this would certainly be one way of reading the initial choice to select the 208 bus route (Mayfield-CIT) in Cork — which made up part of the initial proposal to the Arts Council of Ireland. The approval came with the explicit demand that it would “develop more effective and specific methods of bringing architecture to an audience”.
Such aspirations can often become undone for all sorts of reasons — unforeseen procurement conditions, changes in leading personnel, lack of community and public interest, etc. In this instance the project has been directed by four architecture practices: Kate Dowling/Ruth Fortune, of Paula Kelleher; Martin McCarthy and Seoidín O’Sullivan, of City Architects Projects Office; and in the case of Mary Aird and Maeve Mansfield of MAKE(shift) Architecture is completed by graduates from CCAE Cork School of Architecture.
In each instance there occurred a pairing process with public groups who represent differing types of constituencies along the 208 bus route — imagine library users in Mayfield and hospital patients on College Road and at least one aspect of what defines this project begins to become more clearly understood.
There is perhaps a more critical aspect of the project that needs dilating — the actual process of the engagement between these practices and the public, which one might term as being ‘dialogic’. This notion brings us back to the earlier assertion that starts to develop thinking around the idea of architecture as ‘urban-provocateur’, and also toward re-understanding agencies within architecture.
These assert that architecture is fundamentally a sociological act, and that it is mediatory in nature or operates in the middle of ‘things’, rather than necessarily being simply seen as that same thing itself.
A new lamination to the rich historic and contemporary architectural environment is about to occur in Cork. It is one that will have emerged from a distinctively dialogic process and required a vision that may well have seemed impossible even a relatively short time ago.
But given the way in which a diverse set of intelligences and constituencies have come together on this project — it now seems entirely reasonable to aspire to high expectations in the future. This project might heighten the debate on the place of architecture in our cities nationally, whilst simultaneously acting as a harbinger of new beginnings in that begin to provoke critical new ideas, projects, and test-sites in Cork city and county. Given the ambition and capacity in imagining and delivering this project, it now seems reasonable to ask — what next?
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