A NAMA courthouse in Docklands, Nama dungeons in Dublin Castle and a Nama memorial casino in Fleet Street are among the wide range of radical ideas proposed by this year’s graduates of the DIT school of architecture.
In an innovative project called “NamaLab”, they have mapped what is known about Nama’s portfolio in Dublin for the first time and put forward 48 alternative proposals for these sites based on “recapturing the identity of Ireland in a post-credit crunch society”.
Fifth-year studio tutor and award-winning architect Dermot Boyd says their first port-of-call was the website namawinelake.ie, where they started identifying the sites. “We don’t claim it is an entirely definitive map, but it was sufficient for this academic exercise.”
After consulting the Land Registry and other sources, the students were “amazed to discover the scale of Nama’s portfolio”, which they say represents as much as 5 per cent of the land area of central Dublin.
Working with the aid of a grant last year from the Department of the Environment, they began formulating alternative proposals for the sites “to maximise the social cultural and strategic value of the Nama lands and set a precedent for change through architecture.”
These include Paul O’Sullivan’s scheme for a contemporary art gallery in the shell of the mooted Anglo Irish Bank headquarters on North Wall Quay, to house what is left of the art collections accumulated by Bank of Ireland and AIB and put them on public display.
For the Irish Glass Bottle site in Ringsend, with its value slashed from more than €400 million in 2006 to about €60 million today, Irene Walsh has made an interim proposal to develop it as a “productive landscape”, with allotments for the community and glasshouses for growing tomatoes.
The proposals have been on show in vacant retail premises on King’s Inns Street.
