Think outside box on empty spaces

JUST as nature abhors a vacuum, society abhors empty spaces: we humans are a colonising species.

For a small island we’ve got a lot of empty, open, covered and semi-covered space right now — but let’s not panic about those millions of unused and built square feet, let’s be smart, creative, inch by inch.

The move to find new uses for part-baked buildings and environs is already on, led by our artists, and by our largely idle architects who’ve now got the luxury of time to reflect on what we’ve (half)built.

In some respects, we’ve been here before, at least in terms of mining and tapping into energy from inertia. Remember Dublin’s Temple Bar of old?

Back in the depressed 1970s and early 1980s, as a dilapidated quarter off the quays and overshadowed by the Central Bank building, this unloved area was going to be ripped apart, to be replaced by a big bus terminus, diesel fumes and oil-spills.

While waiting on funds, CIE leased out its empty buildings at low rents to artists, community groups, and assorted (generally bohemian) alternative users. Unwittingly, the seeds of a cultural quarter were sown, and the bus idea got parked. Temple Bar’s renewal slunk into reality by 1991 having gained traction over a decade, and the rest is recent history: some cool architecture, a green building or two, some intensely used, 24/7 public spaces, and rather a lot of stag and hen parties, giving us, eh, wildlife reservations.

Now, we’re off again, only instead of a bit of derelict Dublin to fret over, the whole county’s awash in empty buildings (say, about 13 million square feet of industrial/warehouse area alone), many of them brand new: let’s find uses for some of the spaces.

Ireland’s bigger commercial buildings, its idle industrial stock, the empty shops, the unfinished offices blocks (Anglo Irish Bank’s skeleton looms large, see below) and more, all hold promise, and prospects.

Most will come right, in the end, as the cycle turns: others will get radical, left-of-centre, ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ uses. Bring ‘em on.

We’ve seen the phenomenon of pop-up shops and restaurants in unlikely places, feeding creativity and the belly at once. All over the country, artists are begging, borrowing and appropriating empty spaces for gallery-type uses: last year, students from Crawford Art College moved into the empty eyesore Government Buildings in Cork, and haven’t left yet. Last week third year art students got the Elysian tower’s empty ground floor space for an exhibition: the space nearly stole the show.

Triskel Arts Centre, while temporarily displaced, took over the old ESB station on Caroline Street, in a lucky strike, and then ‘traded up’ to colonise the cool, and ancient, Christchurch building on South Main Street to even better effect and gain. Theatre group Corcadorca has put on plays in utterly varied places, from Patrick’s Hill to parks and empty factories on the Marina, pushing boundaries along the way.

Next Thursday Dublin celebrates Bloomsday with a set of critical, alternative city walks aiming for a new urbanism and more holistic use of space, prompted by the seminal 2010 Gandon Editions book ReDrawing Dublin by planner/architect duo Paul Kearns and Motti Ruimy see www.redrawing-dublin.blogspot.co

In Cork, CIT architecture students have sized-up some well-known, but dilapidated buildings (many had been due for demolition) and offer innovative new uses for them. Extreme sports and bungee jumping from the docklands R&H Hall grain silos, anyone? Lecturer Marc Ó Riain notes that design profession, and projects in hand, have been “decimated by cut and closure, surfeit and exodus” but offers hope for renewal: the students’ ideas are on display at CIT’s Nexus Student Centre for the next fortnight.

Not everything abandoned stays that way, while demolition carries an environmental and energy burden. Fortunately, we’ve a long and familiar history of adapting/re-adapting or upscaling old buildings to brand new uses: liabilities can turn to assets.

The challenge is to find a new use for something that is useless, or as yet unused. Contrast the outpouring of suggestions for a new use for the 1793 Bank of Ireland building (itself a former Parliament house) on Dublin’s College Green, with the blinkered focus still (another bank? The Central Bank? Finished speculative offices?) on the talisman-like 250,000 sq ft Dublin docklands skeleton earmarked for Anglo and abandoned in 2009.

Are we not creative? Time to think outside the boxes.

* Donal Hickey is away