Marian Dinneen

Thank you Public Plaza

Courtesy of ‘Coffee with an architect’, this rant outlines all that is bad with the modernist public plaza (particularly popular in the US).

My favourite has to be

Thank you public plaza for being horizontal, aggressively.

‘a reveloution that does not produce a new space has not realised its full potential.’ (Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space54)

The images of the torn up streets with cobbles stacked and transformed into baracades embody this notion for me, here were new spatial paradigms immerging out of the necessity of the revoluion. 

‘As both Fintan O Toole (1985) and Luke Gibbons (1996: 85-86) point out, the rural self image was a metropolitan myth constructed by urban-based politicians, intellectuals and nostlgic emigrants at the turn of the century, a myth which would feed into the emergent culture of Irish nationalism and eventually into the post 1921 Free State. Yet this pastoral myth of the land had proved to have a very powerful grip not only on the Irish national self image, but also on what may be termed a global discursive construction of Ireland as a pastoral site of origin.’

—

Ireland, Nostalgia and Globalisation: Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa on Stage and Screen. Miereia Aragay University of Barceloa

Paul Henry

Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy.

Edgelands: Between the urban and the rural from The Guardian 22.3.11

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts have written a book - Edgelands - in praise of England’s marginal places: the miles of parking lots, industrial estates, scrubby fields and derelict yards that exist on the edges of our cities. They take us on a tour of Birmingham’s nameless spaces

Ghosts of urban decline fade to panoramas in the West taken from Irish Times 2.9.11

Donald Teskey’s drawings, in pencil and ink, and his watercolour and acrylic paintings, respond to the restless, shifting light and character of Connemara, writes AIDAN DUNNE 

THE BIENNIAL Ballynahinch Castle/Occasional Press Project represents an inviting prospect for an artist with a particular interest in landscape.

Using the Castle “as a base from which to visually explore” the exceptional surroundings, the artist produces a body of work amenable to publication in a limited edition artist’s book. Donald Teskey is the second artist to be invited to take part in the project and the book that has emerged, titled A Connemara Folio, is a really beautiful piece of work. There are 500 in paperback and just 150 in a limited hardback edition, each with a signed and numbered hand-tinted intaglio print.

Teskey, who over the years has gradually moved out into the natural landscape after becoming established as an urban painter and, prior to that, as a quintessentially urban draughtsman, was an interesting choice. His track record suggests that he can rise to a challenge, and that proves to be the case. Connemara is an inviting but frustrating subject for a landscape painter. It is spectacular, but the light is notoriously fickle and transitory, as a mobile patchwork of weather moves constantly over land, sea and lake, alternately revealing and obscuring tracts of bog and mountain moment by moment.

By seeking a way towards a different space of different mode of (social) life and of a new mode of production. This stradles the breach beween science and utopia, reality and identity, conceived and lived. It aspires to surmount theseoppositions by exploring the dialectc relationship between ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ and this both objectivity and subjectivity.

—Henri Lefebvre

Retrofitting suburbia; bringing the urb back! Maximising under-performing asphalt, reimagining big box stores, retrofitting streets.

Infinite possibilities