CHQ in Dublin's docklands is now destined to become a "luxury leisure and dining emporium" - i.e. bars and restaurants. Is that the best we can do, asks Gemma Tipton. Well, at least it won't be another shopping mall ...
What is to be done with Stack A, now known as CHQ, in Dublin's docklands? Built in the early 19th century as a warehouse for tobacco, wine and tea, it was suggested for a while in the 1980s as the venue for the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Later it was proposed as a museum of silver and glass, and more recently it was fitted out to become a shopping mall, but that didn't happen either. Back in 2002, it was reported that the UK retailer Harvey Nichols was in talks to open a branch there, but now they're going to the new shopping centre in Dundrum. Once the tobacco and booze were moved out, no one, it seems, knew what to do with the place.
I'm glad that the shopping mall idea has been scrapped. Shopping has taken over our culture, to the extent that on visiting a city you sometimes have to remind yourself that beyond the call of the malls are museums, galleries, churches, architecture; layers and traces of history that are being eroded by the most voracious cultural force to sweep the globe since the crusades and the missions: consumerism.
Visiting foreign cities, it is harder and harder to differentiate between their main shopping streets. The Body Shop, the Sony Store, Zara, Gap, Vodafone, Boots ... they all lose their cachet as soon as they arrive in your home town. You could be anywhere.
This wouldn't be so depressing if the shops and the malls were interesting; if there was a real sense of cultural (as well as commercial) benefit to the experience of shopping and browsing. But main streets, and malls in particular, have become numbingly homogeneous. Looking around for somebody to blame, my first candidate is Victor Gruen. Fifty years ago, Victor Gruen broke ground on a project at Southdale, Minneapolis, that was to become one of the most influential architectural developments of our age. Changing the look, the shape, the social structure of our cities and our suburbs, 50 years ago this year, Victor Gruen invented the suburban shopping mall.
So what was so new about that? What did it have that hadn't already been seen before? We already had pedestrian zones (Rome, 45BC), pavements and magazine advertising (London 1666), cast glass (1688), glazed shopfronts (Holland, late 1600s), skylights (late 18th century), the department store (Au Bon Marché, Paris, 1852), escalators (1892), and the self-service store (Los Angeles, 1930). In fact, shopping centres and retail had existed since the Lydians (who lived in part of what is now modern Turkey) invented them, along with gold and silver coins around 680 BC.
What Victor Gruen did was to turn all the shops inwards, eliminate the external windows, add different levels of shopping and parking, with escalator access, roof the whole thing over, and create the modern suburban mall: a self-contained, self-referential world of shopping.
Victor Gruen was an Austrian Jewish émigré who fled Vienna in 1938, the same week as Freud, and who landed in New York with $8 in his pocket and the advice of a fellow passenger in his ears: "Don't try to wash dishes or be a waiter. We have millions of them." Gruen already had his degree in architecture from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (the school which had turned down Hitler), and in New York he got to work. His early projects were storefronts, and he brought some of the distinction and charm of Vienna to Manhattan with shops that lured you in, seduced you with their beauty, made shopping something emotional, and turned it from a necessity into an event that made you feel really, really good.
Drawing on the markets of medieval Europe, Gruen's intent was social as much as commercial. Inspired by Le Corbusier's studies, he had noticed that what the American suburbs were lacking were centres for gathering, and that this contributed to their lack of "heart". America's obsession with the car meant that people could move around their suburbs all day and never really meet anyone. Gruen's Southdale Mall also included a garden court, magnolia trees, orchids, fountains, cages of exotic birds, and places where people could gather, meet, sit and talk in comfort. And America loved it. Well, most of America. Frank Lloyd Wright was less impressed. "What is this," he wanted to know, "a railroad station or a bus station?"
One of the advances that made the world of the mall possible was air-conditioning. Ideas for air conditioning had been around since the 19th century, and were developed and perfected during the course of the 20th. Billed in the 1950s as "manufactured weather", air-conditioning made it feasible to build massive, windowless, roofed structures with a constant internal temperature, winter and summer. In American suburbs such as Minneapolis, with impossibly high temperatures and humidity in summer, and freezing weather in winter, this made absolute sense. The problem was that as malls developed, the focus shifted from civic to commercial goals. Gruen had believed in the American way. "It's the merchants who will save our urban civilization," he said, but he eventually returned to Vienna, and died bitterly disillusioned in 1980, even going so far as to call malls "concentration camps".
He called developers "bastards" in a speech in London in 1978, his disappointment stemming from the way in which his idea for a rich social environment had been manipulated into something soulless, as malls became standardised machines for processing people as units of consumption, sucking the life out of the downtown areas of the city centres. In his lifetime, Gruen built more than 44,500,000 square feet of malls, but "Hell," he wrote, is "inescapable sameness." Made to be approached by car, malls are not concerned with having attractive exteriors. Gruen's "hell" is replicated in the inescapable sameness of the outside walls of malls the world over.
Unlike public streets, malls are private space which can be policed, so that undesirable elements (activists, demonstrators, non-shoppers) can all be excluded. The meeting and talking, agitating, sharing aspect of the market place has been eroded, and in financial terms, the formula works. But if we must shop, why can't it be, well, a better experience? There are so many shops that are both interesting and good, that there is really no reason for the blandness, the awfulness and the sheer boredom of so many modern malls.
Malls allow the visitor to be tracked, and subtly experimented upon, from the moment they enter the carpark. In a "science" called Atmospherics, temperature, music, colour, product placement, surfaces, light and smell are all carefully calculated to maximise money spent in the mall. Music (muzak) tempo speeds up at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., when our energy levels naturally dip; and lights gradually go up as daylight fades to prevent shoppers from thinking that it is getting late.
In Las Vegas, where heat and humidity make malls a must, this science is a fine art. Having to compete with the lure of the city's other attractions, Las Vegas malls are a spectacle and entertainment in themselves. In the Grand Canal Shoppes at the Venetian Hotel, the air is oxygenated, lighting mimics an early twilight, the temperature is balmy, and direction signs draw you back into the central area to begin the experience again. Gondolas glide under bridges along turquoise canals which meander through Venetian streets, and all this is indoors, up an escalator and on the second floor. It is an enclosed world of wonder. Jet-lag is forgotten, as the visitor is seduced into shopping. Retail now outstrips gambling for revenue in Las Vegas. In my first 20 minutes, I had already purchased a vastly overpriced jacket, just for the joy of feeling genuinely part of such a spectacle. Buying gives you not just ownership, but a sense of belonging.
In many ways, Stack A, now renamed as CHQ, could have made a stunning mall, in the Venetian, rather than the Liffey Valley, mould. Still, I am glad that it won't be one. With massive malls in train for Mahon Point, Cork and for Dundrum in Dublin, things are a little out of balance: as with all consumerism, there may be a desire for more shops, but there isn't an actual need.
Inside, CHQ is rather beautiful. It has a soaring metal-framed roof, and a fabulous vaulted area below. Designed by John Rennie, on the north side of the Liffey, it is just up from the Custom House, beside George's Dock. No one is quite sure when it was built. George IV was supposed to officially open it in 1821, but bad weather delayed him in Slane, and so it was launched without him. According to a Docklands briefing in 2001, it was due to reopen as a mall for pre-Christmas shopping this time last year.
Missed opportunities seem to have abounded. As an art museum, CHQ's 13,000 square metre ground floor area could have had the unbroken wall space that the IMMA lacks for showing really large-scale works. While Daniel Libeskind's planned Performing Arts Centre will be nearby, there is still a vacuum created by the absence of a significant cultural centre in the Docklands. The Docklands Authority has the facility to levy 63 cents per square foot on IFSC office space for cultural use, so the resources are available, if unused, and CHQ has now been divided up. Part of it will become a Conran restaurant. Another area has been taken over by Urban Capital Projects, a consortium involving Hugh O'Regan, who is also planning the development of the former Hibernian United Services Club at 8, St Stephen's Green into a more modern-style club with a gym, café and restaurant.
O'Regan has been responsible for a series of bars in the Dublin area (Thomas Reads, Ron Blacks, the Bailey, Searsons, the Harbourmaster, and the 40-Foot in Dún Laoghaire). The specifics of O'Regan's plans for CHQ have not yet been revealed, although they focus on "luxury leisure and dining", which is his area of expertise. Perhaps this is appropriate, given CHQ's history - it was, after all, the site for the 1856 Crimean War Banquet, where 4,000 diners consumed a menu including 250 hams, 230 legs of mutton, 200 turkeys, 200 geese, 3,500lbs of bread, three tons of potatoes, and 8,500 quart bottles and 3,500 pint bottles of port. Current plans for CHQ also mention an "exhibition and event space" although the available area will obviously be rather smaller than the potentially extravagant luxury of space offered by the entire structure.
From tobacco and booze to a banquet for 4,000; to false starts as a gallery, a museum, a shopping mall and a design centre; and to Victor Gruen's dream of a civil consumer society: CHQ, whatever it is when it finally opens, has a lot to live up to. Just one thing is definite: it won't be a shopping centre. And it is a testament to how all-pervasive shopping is in our culture that it is hard to think what it could be, if not a mall ...
WHAT WE'D LIKE TO DO WITH CHQ