Not a Pretty Face by Vitali Vitaliev

The old chimney, with me inside, was trembling, as if swinging ever so slightly to the accompaniment of the wind’s hooligan whistles. With some exalted American tourists, I stood on what our guide called “the best viewing platform in Dublin” – at the very top of a former Jameson Distillery’s chimney, turned into “viewing tower”. There was some sad symmetry in the fact that the unsightly Dublin cityscape, dominated by concrete boxes, smoking chimneys and occasional church spires, could be best viewed from inside yet another chimney, even if disused.

From my very first day in the Irish capital, I could clearly see that Dublin in its entirety was not a beautiful place. Even so, having looked down at the capital from the top of the chimney, I found myself thoroughly unprepared for the sight “of unparalleled charmlessness, an absence of grace so total that it was almost the thing of wonder”.

The above quote from James Cameron, incidentally, refers to Dundee – once a thriving and pretty Scottish city that had been meticulously (and successfully) destroyed and mutilated by “city fathers” and “developers” for over 130 years. I used it here because I had considered modern Dundee the most architecturally messed-up metropolis in the Western world. Until I saw Dublin.

If architecture is indeed a “frozen music” (the metaphor, attributed by different sources to Goethe, Schelling and Le Corbusier), the panoramic view from the top of the chimney could be compared to an ear-grating cacophony, played by a madman. Dublin’s chaotic cityscape was reminiscent of a huge sack of potatoes that had burst at the seams and was carelessly dropped onto the ground. Or of a pebble-strewn beach after a storm.

Like pieces of amber among pebbles, however, there were occasional gems to please the eye here and there: the graceful dome of Custom House; the brown-green smidgen of Phoenix Park, skewered by the disproportionately massive phallic Monument; the pillars of the magnificent Blue Coat School in Blackhall Place straight below me. The latter was the only surviving 18th-century structure in this formerly fine-looking area, disfigured by Corporation housing and the so-called “in-fill development” - ie cramming every vacant space with as many hideous, profit-making, concrete apartment blocks as possible. As I could see from the top of the chimney, the frantic “filling-in” construction was still going on.

“First we shape buildings, and then – buildings shape us,” Winston Churchill once famously remarked. And wasn’t it the architectural turmoil of Dublin that had eventually “shaped” it into a depressive and largely dysfunctional metropolis, with high crime rate, all-permeating corruption, unworkable transport system and one of Europe’s worst dressed street crowds - in short, into a city that is much less attractive than its painstakingly created PR image?

When did it all start and who is to blame for the ugly pockmarked face of one of Europe’s spiritual and artistic capitals? Unlike in Dundee, it is not just the money-grabbing developers of the not-so-distant past, for even as far back as in 1727 Jonathan Swift, himself a Dubliner, called the city “the most disagreeable place in Europe”. And in 1937, Oliver John Gogarthy, a Dublin writer and a model for Joyce’s Buck Milligan in Ulysses, remarked sardonically that “Dublin has one advantage: it is easy to get out of it.”

A number of Irish historians and architectural experts throughout the years referred to “the planning nightmare of Dublin” and the city’s “decayed physical fabric”. From Frank McDonald’s book “The Construction of Dublin”, I learned that Ireland was “in breach of EU law relating to protection of architectural heritage”. Yet none of the pundits provided a coherent answer to one simple question: why?

In search of an explanation, I had to descend from the chimney of speculation to meet Simon Walker - an architect, a UCD tutor and a native Dubliner – for a short and strictly down-to-earth “guided tour” of the capital.

Lunchtime Dublin traffic was so dense and slow that it gave the impression of crawling backwards. Walking to my meeting place with Simon, I had to stop (purely out of habit) at pedestrian lights, ignored by most other passers-by. And by drivers, too. A New York friend of mine once told me that freedom-loving residents of the Big Apple ignored traffic lights, because they found them “too suggestive”. “No one is telling me when to cross the road!” he snapped. In Dublin, the reason was more practical: most of the traffic lights seemed totally out of sync with traffic itself. As if they had some little independent minds of their own. I noticed that it was generally safer to cross the roads at red pedestrian lights than at green ones.

Looking up at Dublin facades and trying to describe each of them with just one epithet was like constantly checking with my brain’s in-built thesaurus for the synonyms of “ugly”. Most of the houses were indeed “plain” (in the best of scenarios), “unattractive” and “unprepossessing”. They were also “disagreeable” and “distasteful”, whereas many were truly “frightful”, “hideous”, “horrid”, “monstrous”, “repugnant”, “repulsive”, “shocking” and “vile”.

Passing through two of the five remaining Georgian squares was like getting two sudden deep breaths of fresh air. I made sure I had a good eyeful of both before plunging back into ugliness (“unattractiveness”, “unsightliness”, “repulsiveness”, “hideousness”).

In his attitude to traffic lights, Simon was a typical Dubliner: he was resolutely pushing his bike in-between the rows of stationary traffic in total disregard of designated road crossings and angry honks. I could hardly keep up with him. “Irish people never had a sound relationship with spaces of public appearance, and the real culture was always relocated to rear parts of houses,” he was saying as we raced along Grafton Street.

With some fiendish satisfaction, I remembered that Dublin street, where I myself resided, was designated as “Rear”. The “Front” bit ran parallel to it. In no other city of the globe had I come across a similar division. “This is why,” continued Simon, “architecture was always approached very pragmatically. If the spirit was something immaterial and not ostentatious, then appearance didn’t really matter...”

He pointed at the flock of some particularly scruffy passers-by. “The best planner Dublin ever had was James Butler, the 17th-century First Duke of Ormond. As for the beautiful Georgian and Victorian buildings, they were always perceived as something belonging to the enemy power – England – and therefore not worth preserving. There was even an attempt to make Dublin into a Celtic city in 1924-25 ...”

“But as far as I know, Celtic Ireland was a hundred percent rural and had no towns at all,” interrupted I. “How could they re-create something that never existed?” “Well, they couldn’t. The Irish always enjoyed direct relationship with the land and felt alienation in towns. In any case, the people of Dublin have never been interested in preserving whatever architecture they had.”

We turned into Westmoreland Street. “Here’s a brilliant example of a typically Dublin phenomenon known as ‘facadism’,” Simon pointed at the eclectic-looking building of Westin Hotel across the road. “A row of fine houses that stood in its place were disembowelled, with only the facades kept intact, and their interior taken by just one hotel. The EBS Building Society next door underwent a similar mutilation: a Georgian mansion was destroyed, but the middle of its façade was kept and stuck to the modern building with its ridiculous mirror-like windows...”

The distorted reflections (including those of Simon and myself) in the façade of the building made the street feel even more congested and claustrophobic than it was already. I thought that “facadism” could be traced to the infamous “Potemkin Villages” – painted images of plenty, made of cardboard, and displayed by the inventive 18th-century Russian Prince Potemkin on the banks of the Dnieper to mislead Catherine the Great, when she sailed down the river to inspect her domains, and to cover up the indescribable poverty of the villages behind them.

We proceeded to the Quays of the Liffey, dominated by the new Liberty Hall that could be best described with one capacious Italian word “casuccio” – a huge and ugly house. The shabby concrete box of the Deparment of Health, looking as if it was itself in need of plastic surgery, was peeping out cheekily from behind Corn Exchange – like an untidy primary school upstart stretching both unwashed hands into the face of a myopic teacher of History.

“Cheap and nasty... Just money and no art... No architecture here at all...” such were my learned guide’s comments as we moved past various concrete blocks – all in different stages of ugliness – lining what could have otherwise been a truly beautiful embankment. Old Custom House, the exquisite late-18th-century creation of James Gandon, stood out like an alien visitor in this parade of modern architectural atrocities.

I didn’t notice how we crossed from the First World into the Third (somehow bypassing the Second) and ended up in once fashionable Gardiner Street in the North of Dublin. And it was quite a different world: rough, run-down, shabby and unclean. Badly dressed people with sullen faces stared at us with hostility. English and Russian swear words flew in the air like sparrows. A couple of burly policemen were pushing a screaming woman into a “Garda” van.

The architecture - or rather total lack of it - corresponded to the atmosphere (or was it the other way around?) Original Georgian houses in the lower part of the street were all “obliterated” and replaced with five ironically named “Custom Hall” concrete blocks of private apartments, ‘facadised’ with fake ‘Georgian’ features and imitation red bricks.

“This is what private capital would do, if allowed,” Simon said bitterly. “The apartments are all dark and tiny: not big enough to swing a cat in. There are no gardens, trees or even courtyards...” Black rubbish bags were displayed on miniature balconies: there was probably no space for them inside the flats. “No light, no space, no air,” summed up Simon. “And the reasons are obvious: greed of speculator builders and incompetence of the conniving city authorities.”

Before rushing off to teach his students, Simon took me to Summerhill, the site of the now-defunct Luke Gardiner estate in the centre of Dublin. “This area used to have 4- and 5-storey Georgian tenements, all destroyed in the 1970s and 80s. Instead, rows of standard two-storey suburban cottages were built here – in the heart of the city, whose very fabric was ruined as a result. This is a good example of how the whole of Dublin was emasculated and made into something that looks truly horrendous.”

“What is the solution, if any?” I asked. “To begin with, there has to be a comprehensive development plan. The City has to purchase land in the centre and take it from there...” Simon jumped on his bike and pedalled away. I watched his receding figure for a while – until he turned the corner and disappeared behind a dilapidated Victorian chapel, now functioning as a garage. It was dark and pouring. To get back home, I got onboard a yellow City Tour double-decker. Most of the “sightseers” on this last tour of the day were – like me – refugees from wind and rain. One could see nothing behind the misted windows, and the driver-cum-guide tried to make up for the lack of visibility with a series of bearded jokes, featuring himself, his wife and his mother-in-law. He ran out of steam soon and fell silent.

When the bus came to another seemingly permanent halt in a traffic jam, the driver grabbed the microphone and announced apologetically: “I wanted to show you folks some bits of Dublin, but you can’t see anything anyway...” Maybe, it was for the better.