The debate so far about the proposed development of six million square feet at Spencer Dock has focused on its density, its height and its likely impact on vistas from O'Connell Bridge or the "Georgian Mile" of Fitzwilliam Street. But it could be argued that these are not the only issues of importance.
The critical issue, it seems to me, is whether the Docklands area of Dublin is going to be developed to meet the real needs of the city or simply exploited for short-term gain and commercial expediency.
It is timely now to reflect on the 1997 draft master plan for Docklands. This was an inspirational document, well-researched and optimistic, which projected a future for the Docklands as an area of real employment and lifestyle mix. Mr Lar Bradshaw, chairman of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, said at the time - in December 1997 - that it would be "a living, breathing and self-sustaining community" developed in a focused, sustainable manner.
There was talk of a landmark project, such as an opera house or an Olympic-sized swimming pool and, at face value, the Spencer Dock consortium's proposal to build the long-delayed National Conference Centre at North Wall Quay. It seemed to be a project consistent with the concept of developing the Docklands as a new urban district.
Here was an opportunity to make a landmark building relating the Docklands to the wider city. As the first public building of the new century, it would have to be a first-rate architectural statement, a worthy successor to the other great public buildings on the River Liffey: the Custom House, the Four Courts and Heuston Station.
Examples of similar projects elsewhere include the Sydney Opera House, the Portuguese pavilion at last year's Lisbon Expo and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. If these were used as models, it would suggest that the National Conference Centre should have been treated as a major civic project.
Because of the Government's refusal to fund its construction (apart from earmarking it for a £25 million EU grant) and the question mark over some urban renewal tax incentives, it has now become reduced to an appendage of an over-scaled American-style speculative development rather than the centrepiece of a new urban neighbourhood in the city.
If the current plan is approved, it will inevitably set a precedent for the development of the overall Docklands area. Unless there is a radical rethink, this would result in the area being developed purely as a commercial real estate exercise rather than the sustainable urban community promised in the master plan.
It is no coincidence that the predominant architectural influence behind the pressure for this type of high-rise development in Dublin is American - Skidmore Owings and Merrill at George's Quay and Roche Dinkeloo at Spencer Dock; they both come from the milieu of US corporate architecture, which is singularly inappropriate as a model for urban renewal in historic European cities.
To understand this argument, it is necessary to reflect on the difference between European and American cities. The classic idea of the European city - what Richard Rogers calls the "Compact City" - is dense and diverse, a city where economic and social activities mix and where urban communities are focused around neighbourhooods.
BY contrast, few American cities resemble this model; in response to profit imperatives, rather than social or cultural objectives, they are zoned in concentric circles, with a central business district surrounded by ghettos and then by a band of suburban, car-based residential compounds, all within an outer ring of office parks and shopping malls.
Kevin Roche - undoubtedly the pre-eminent Irish architect of his generation - left Dublin in 1948 to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology with Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hillersiemer, both figures reputed for their pathological opposition to the European urban model, even though they were European emigres to the US.
In Architecture, A Crash Course, Hilary French rates Roche's Ford Foundation in New York as one of the greatest buildings of all time. But despite such unsurpassed achievements, he has never built in Ireland and has no experience of working in a European city of Dublin's scale. After 50 years largely spent in the US corporate culture, he may well be culturally disconnected.
By comparison, many among the generation that graduated from the schools of architecture in Dublin in the 1970s and 1980s gained direct experience of the European urban renaissance of the last 20 years by going to work for the likes of Stirling and Rogers in London or Klieheus in Berlin. They were also influenced by the urban theories of Colin Rowe, the Krier brothers and Aldo Rossi.
When these architects came back to practise in Ireland in the 1980s, they got involved in projects such as the Quays Project and Making a Modern Street, which challenged the dominant planning policies of the time, based on zoning, road plans and suburban expansion, and proposed instead the idea of consolidating the city with new buildings and mixed uses and urban spaces.
The great success of the Temple Bar project, ironically in an area once targeted for a bus station designed by SOM, was achieved through further elaboration of these ideas. The HARP project on the northside, which is an equally exciting project about restoring the grain of the historic centre, and the project for O'Connell Street are further examples.
The achievements of the new Irish architecture have been noted abroad, most recently by Yves Lion, a leading French architect, who wrote in his introduction to this year's AAI awards that he could sense the "vigour" of contemporary Irish architecture, as exemplified by the work he had seen. It was "modern architecture as it ought to be", rooted in tradition yet looking confidently to the future.
One would have hoped, therefore, that we had left behind the era of redevelopment projects in the city based on the anti-urban ideology of American planning - the ideology that produced Hawkins House, the Central Bank, the Civic Offices and SOM's plan for the bus station in Temple Bar. It would be a cruel irony if development projects based on this model again became the norm.
The 51-acre Spencer Dock site is the right size for creating a sustainable urban community with between 5,000 and 10,000 people, including families, with associated work, social and educational facilities. What is now proposed, however, has no connection to the wider Docklands area, the structure of the city or the scale and grain of Gergian Dublin.
Not only does the present plan represent the squandering of a unique opportunity, it would also be a reversal of the aspirations of Dublin as a European city and would set a precedent for further such schemes. If the Docklands development is given over to the culture of corporate capitalism, it would be an unfortunate aberration in what has been a very positive tendency in Irish architecture and urban design.
The five or six-storey urban street is still a perfectly valid model, even for the 21st century. What has been proposed for Spencer Dock raises issues of scale, use, typology, architectural character and, not least, the quality of its open spaces in their high-rise setting.
If the cost of the conference centre in urban terms is that we lose what might have been the opportunity of the Millennium to construct a whole city quarter for the first time since the 18th century, it is highly questionable whether we should proceed with the project at all.
To paraphrase Ms Giovanna Melandri, the Italian Minister for Culture, the urban environment is one of our greatest assets - "our equivalent of mines and oilfields". It is much too precious to be sacrificed for short-term commercial expedience.
Paul Keogh is an architect in private practice, a Fellow of the RIAI and from 1991 to 1998 a member of Group 91, the team of architects who developed the Temple Bar Framework Plan.
AAI Awards
In an article on the AAI Awards for 1999, published last Thursday, reference was made to Domestic Acupuncture by Dominic Stevens Architects and to the fact that the four projects submitted under this heading all had relatively small budgets. The figures quoted were incorrect, however; they should have read £6,000 to £20,000.
