Haste: The Forgotten Virtue

There are cities, which despite a multiplicity of intervention, have very precise and definitive readings as urban forms, achieving a level of harmony. Sometimes because of the preponderance of period architecture or definitive sense of scale such as in the case of Paris, or the resonance of the topographic in the city's structure as in Edinburgh, or even something as simple as organizational layout manifested in Chicago. In contrast much of the urban fabric of Dublin, until very recent years, stands in defiance of any strategy that is decisively intellectual, continuous or legible. Despite attempts at authoritative planning in its history, the fabric, even along the historic Georgian corridors, is incomplete and contingent on local circumstance. This uneven fragmentation exists to such a degree that the image of the city is at best ambiguous, dense with unequal layers of alterations. Legibility finds no foothold here, but transience and unpredictability have particular relevance and establish a peculiar and unexpected alliance with a harmony of a different kind, one which implicates memory. For within this unequal and ambiguous terrain there lie a profusion of moments where fractions of historic fabric are appropriated into later work, or left abandoned, which are evocative rather than didactic of the historic life of the city. These intersections of past and present, which coincide in fleeting and inexplicable ways, induce a form of imaginative engagement that keeps the city past, present and future fluidly entwined.