Belfast the Banal

RIBA Presidents Medal Entry 2011 - Link Below
http://www.presidentsmedals.com/Project_Details.aspx?id=2761

Belfast the Banal lacks a reason for being: a seemingly eternal monotony only interrupted by a weary and trivial political struggle. The city clings to its last remaining memories of once great achievements, far beyond its now melancholy existence. What Belfast needs is to be shaken free from a stagnant mindset and to realise, once agin, the great feats people are capable of.

The 'Voisin' scheme does not claim to have found the final solution. Out of the shodows of history its incision across the face of Paris is a leap of faith into tomorrow, to provoke and awake us from a long sleep.

My plan for Belfast is an experimentation into urbanism and architecture reminiscent of a time when architecture was based on simplicity of form, social need and in direct violation to the extravagant preference for the 'iconic age.'

The resulting project is a Neo-Metabolist ideal, an urbanism and cultural heart born onto this decaying post-industrial site. A system constantly reacting to socio-political and economic changes set amidst a landscape of a post industrial prairie. In the open grain of a shifting urban pattern a space is made to play, dream and exchange our ideas. It is a cultural machine born of an industrial city. Like the tides it moves with the forces that shape us.

The intrinsic problem within our profession is our obsession to define the future. This is impossible. We need an architecture that moves, that grows and dies. A building based on absolute spacial and structural simplicity, a perpetual building site ever evolving which utilises the most basic materials and techniques to do so. Its ability to react and change is the only hope to be suited for the future.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Belfast
• Belfast architecture
• architecture
• metabolism
• neo-metabolism
• hilberseimer
• le corbusier
• Belfast docks
• Titanic quarter
• Titanic
• Vincent McIlduff

[moondoggggg]

Lethal lad!! Well done