This is fantastic! Particularly in the light of the ideas I am working with in "Small Spaces" which is a kind of manifesto for the small and pragmatic space. According to the author, the land of blarney, leprechauns and my ancestors is going in exactly the opposite direction of my current work. A really great article from the Irish daily. Check it out:

IrelandA few years ago, the philosopher EF Schumacher propounded the idea that small was beautiful. He had a point and in a world where a new brutalism was becoming everywhere apparent — in the scale of commercial enterprise, in architecture, in the size of our cities — he soon had a following.

But not so much in Ireland. In Ireland we were fed up of small. We were, we were endlessly told, a small nation and we came from small farms on a small island where small shops served our needs in the small towns and cities which were our typical urban centres.

Nor did small is beautiful seem to make much sense as an aesthetic doctrine. Why should it? But you may think that it made and makes at least as much sense as its opposite, a fact which it is necessary to emphasise just now because in Ireland at this very moment we seem to be moving fast towards a general view that Big is Beautiful without reservation or further qualification.

In fact, judging from a lot of what is admired merely for being big, aesthetics has very, very little to do with it.

I live beside an infant school where young mothers (the "yummy mummies" of David McWilliams’ mythology) deliver their small children in the morning and then collect them in the afternoon. Almost one and all, they use SUVs and people carriers for this. Mostly the ratio is one small child per one large vehicle. But the attraction of these monstrous conveyances is not their practicality. Nor is it, I need hardly say their beauty — in fact they are amongst the ugliest motor cars ever made. What makes the young women’s eyes shine when they sit in behind the wheel of one of these dangerous monsters is simply their size, their power and their cost.

There was more than a touch of the yummy mummy about many of the responses when the plans for a new building on the Jurys-Berkeley Court site were unveiled recently.

The proposed building will be 37 stories high, or more than three times the height of Liberty Hall and 12 metres higher than the Spire in O’Connell Street. In other words, it will be a giant, even among the many other huge new skyscrapers which are planned. Mr Michael Colgan’s eyes evidently shone at the thought.

"I think we have to start producing really, really magnificent architecture, and this is it," he told a reporter for this newspaper. Mr Colgan is an arbiter elegantiarum — artistic director of the Gate Theatre, former member of the Arts Council — but this seems to be a reference to size rather than beauty.

However, art will be suitably looked after. Mr Colgan is to be in charge of what is described as a "cultural centre", provision for which is included in the plans. What will go on there?

"What I have planned is that you are going to come in here during the day and you are going to hear music. You are going to see dance studios through glass partitions. You are going to have public art."

Actually, it sounds a little more like Soho in the old days than Ballsbridge in the future.

Mr Paul McGuinness is also, in a sense, an arbiter of the True, the Good and the Beautiful — manager of U2, former member of the Arts Council, etc. But in relation to ultra-large buildings he seems more concerned with hard-edged stuff like inevitability, progress and size than with aesthetics.

"The city has to go up … we have to allow high-rise in the city," he said.

But he did not say why.

more here