Daft Property - Irish Property News

Real austerity brings inclusivity, inspiration and invention... CULTURE SHOCK: The Cultúrlann in Derry has been shortlisted for the architectural Oscars, the Stirling Prize. With its modest design, it shows good aesthetics make for good politics. Photo - Irish Times MODESTY AND restraint are not the virtues one associates with Irish culture in the Celtic Tiger years. But one of the finest pieces of contemporary Irish design is brilliant in part because it is contained, understated, and so supremely self-confident that it doesn’t have to shout. John Tuomey and Sheila O’Donnell’s Cultúrlann building in Derry is on the shortlist for the architectural Oscars, the Stirling Prize. I was in it for the first time last weekend and it deserves all the praise and prizes it can get. Apart from its own merits, it points towards a kind of genuine austerity aesthetic, a way for Irish art to be modest and serious without being dull and impoverished. The Cultúrlann is the baby of the Stirling s

Life for the boom's dead spaces... The Irish landscape is scarred with the remnants of failed or unfinished building schemes from the Celtic Tiger years. GEMMA TIPTON asks some leading architects to use their imaginations and suggest ways to put them to some use. EVEN DURING THE boom, it was difficult to see some of the things we were building and imagine them as a success. Enormous luxury golf and spa hotels in the middle of nowhere, shoe-box apartment blocks in small towns, ghost estates where no houses were ever sold , and massive out-of-town retail and industrial parks – all these have blighted the landscape, and now stand in various stages of construction or dereliction, mocking us with the question: what should we do with them? Some ways out of such waste have already been proposed: turning the hotels into nursing homes is one example. Or we could look to SoHo in New York, where inner-city factories and warehouses became, first, artists’ studios and then ultra-desirable loft