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The public release of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Chat-GPT has recently brought AI to the forefront of the public imagination. Alongside mass fascination with its capabilities and potential uses, its rollout has been accompanied by ardent discussions around the legibility, trustworthiness, accountability, and even agency of AI programmes. For specialists, these issues are far from new, and the design-inflected question of AI explainability has been a pressing concern for programmers and user-interface experts for some time [1].
These recent debates have seen a resurfacing of the language of ‘black boxes’ in a broad public forum. In this context, the phrase is often used critically to conceptualise an understanding gap between a system and its users. It refers to an unknowable space that emerges when a system cannot easily ‘show its working’ to either its users or designers. For many, an accusation of a platform either being or incorporating a black box relates to the impossibility of full control or oversight over it. This typically arises from a lack of comprehension of the inner workings of that system. Prompts go into a black box style algorithm, and information comes out, but the connection between the two cannot be fully understood, even by its programmers [2].
In other words, the computational metaphor of a black box is not associated with colour or form, but with the notion that a system’s output can not necessarily be deciphered by analysing its inputs. It operates as an unknowable function in the passage of information. The sense of it performing like a ‘box’ has little to do with storage, but rather relates to an intractable containment of hidden knowledge that creates ethically-significant problems of causality (cause and effect) and accountability. For similar, largely symbolic, reasons, the terminology of black boxes finds another well-known (mis)use in the field of aviation. Again, the persistent metaphor is associated with the containment of something, in this case, the rarefied information about events that transpired in the final minutes of an ill-fated aircraft. In both, a black box metaphor appears at a moment of uncertainty between causes and effects.
The design of theatre auditoriums can help to conceptualise some of the consequences of living with black boxes at a human scale and in a spatial sense. In his influential book Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, cultural theorist Jonathan Crary points to the adaptations that Richard Wagner made to the design of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth as a turning point in the dramatist’s ability to dominate audience attention [3]. This purpose-built festival hall, opened in 1876, saw Wagner make now-famous infrastructural interventions that would, he hoped, encourage his audiences to engage with the fictional worlds presented onstage in a more absorbed, even hypnotic way. Removing the sideways facing booths from the seating, visually shielding his orchestra from the audience and dimming the lights in the auditorium are perhaps the best cited examples of the type of adaptations he demanded.
Crary, however, emphasises the significance of a less well-known innovation, an optical effect that would go on to be known as Wagner’s ‘mystic abyss’, in achieving a desired totalising engrossment of his audience in the presented scene [4]. This effect – the ‘mystic abyss’ – refers to the intentional insertion of unknowable distance between the stage space and auditorium achieved by separating the two with a series of receding, perspective-distorting proscenium arches. This intervention disrupted all continuous sight lines between stage space and the auditorium, thus perceptively and epistemologically severing the visual bonds between real space and fiction. In so doing, the mystic abyss demanded that audience members undergo a more fully-realised abandonment within the scene presented. They were encouraged to ‘pick a side’ between fiction and reality in a perceptive sense.
Contemporary black box theatres, arguably and ironically, represent a move away from these hallucinatory priorities. While on the one hand, some elements carry an inheritance from Wagner and early modern scenographers (their blank flexibility, typically low house-lighting and matt-black surfaces that visually privilege the fictional space on stage) on the other hand, their frequent ‘in the round’ layout means that their audiences tend to be more self-aware and often have the impression of sharing the event space with the performers. Again, the metaphorical name black box does not refer to their colour or shape, but rather to a more generalised aesthetic of containment of a space of fiction in a self-consistent interiority (box), supported by a humility of the playing space that bends to meet the various fictions that inhabit it (black). Unlike Wagner’s passive, hypnotised audiences, stripped of autonomy – if we are to follow Crary on this – these groups inhabit the same forum as the performers [5]. In this case, the ‘suspension of disbelief’ tends to be requested rather than insisted upon as the border of the theatrical universe is situated close to the entrance to the auditorium rather than between proscenium arches.
In a theatrical black box – unlike an AI-powered chatbot or a flight responder – the human element is ‘on the inside’, sharing a space and collaborating somewhat in the event that is live theatre. It might be hard to convey the full essence of what happens within a temporary theatrical universe to someone who never saw the show, but each event is always a joint venture.
The question of explainability in AI is not a settled issue in computer science, with some developers believing that too much potential is lost in the process of making an algorithm fully explainable to humans. In the context of these decisions being made away from the public forum, it is important for the rest of us to consider what costs must be paid in terms of accountability and autonomy in exchange for the enchantment and wonder earned across a mystic abyss.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
Arguably one of the most novel features of the New European Bauhaus (NEB) is its inclusion of ‘beauty’ as a core value. In tying the concept of beauty to sustainability and problem-solving, the NEB is appealing for a new sensitivity in the built environment. This will have a significant impact on how we think about architecture. Few lament the late Hawkins House in Dublin, however, the loss of its predecessor: the art-deco Theatre Royal, is mourned to the present day. Beauty matters, and retaining old buildings will require a re-evaluation of their beauty, while new-builds embodying the NEB concept of beauty might encounter fewer calls for their demolition and replacement.
The climate crisis has been addressed by the European Commission with the launch of the European Green Deal in 2019, an ambitious legislative agenda to create the world’s first carbon-neutral continent by 2050. This was followed by the NEB in 2020, a cultural programme intended to engender connections between citizens and the goals of the Green Deal and enable the scaling up of effective local actions taking place across the EU.
The NEB is structured around three core values: sustainability, inclusion, and beauty, arguing that combining a deep consideration of each of these values generates the maximum social and environmental benefit from any deployment of resources. The NEB promotes a revolution in mindsets, envisaging greater sensitivity to limiting resource use while achieving social justice, thereby ensuring a desirable, sustainable future for citizens.
By centring the plan around beauty, the NEB recognises that part of communicating a more hopeful future is to offer a more beautiful alternative vision. The NEB does not advocate for any specific architectural aesthetic. While borrowing the name of the historical Bauhaus school, it does not endorse the modernist style associated with the movement. The name instead echoes the aims of the historical Bauhaus: to address the pressing crises of the times through design and innovative thinking. The NEB defines beauty as a rich emotional and sensual experience, brought about by the application of “sensitivity, intelligence, and competences” into the fashioning of satisfying experiences for people [1].
The NEB offers guidance for those designing projects (including building projects/services/ products/community events etc.) on how to evoke the quality of beauty as understood by the initiative. It defines three levels of ambition, paraphrased here from the NEB Compass document [1]. First, projects should aspire to (re)activate the qualities of a site/context while promoting physical and mental well-being. Second, projects should seek to offer opportunities for connection between people, places, and the non-human world, fostering “a sense of belonging through meaningful collective experiences”. Finally, the highest ambition involves offering opportunities for new creative, social, and cultural currents to emerge/coalesce through the project. By considering each of these factors in relation to a project and tying them in with the values of sustainability and inclusion described elsewhere by the NEB, actors can optimise the benefits of their project and demonstrate the desirability of an NEB-aligned future.
Since the advent of modernism, beauty has often been side-lined as an aspiration in architectural design, viewed with suspicion as a reactionary bourgeois value [2], or a relic of the clash of historical styles of the nineteenth century [3]. Modernists like Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer embraced functionalism, a rational approach to form and expression, denying the role of “art” in construction [4]. Functionalism found favour as an inexpensive and ideologically credible approach to building, which in less talented hands has resulted in an aesthetically impoverished built environment. The technical limitations of modernism for much of its history have resulted in a legacy of inefficient buildings, which has led to wholesale demolition in Dublin and elsewhere. The aesthetic and energy limitations of modern architecture have gained pertinence through the reconsideration of these buildings in terms of their embodied carbon and the consequent necessity to retain them.
The nature of architecture as a public art, with an involuntary relationship between the public and their exposure to architectural designs, has been argued to place an ethical duty on architects to strive for beauty in their work [5]. In a world where the demolition of buildings will become increasingly rare and perhaps exceptional, this ethical consideration becomes heightened. The lifespan of buildings and building envelopes will inevitably expand as carbon budgets shrink. The public acceptance of the retention of buildings can be influenced by the perceived presence of beauty. The NEB argues that public buy-in for a resource-restricted future will depend on selling it as a lifestyle improvement on the status quo. If buildings are to be retained indefinitely, they should embody the qualities the NEB seeks to imbue: a sensitive, intelligent reading of physical and social context, a compassionate appeal to our senses and emotional well-being, and the opportunity for connection and new social dynamics through thoughtful design. Whether the current crop of speculative developments achieves these goals is questionable; however, with the ever-increasing urgency of the climate crisis, building in the absence of these values may soon become unjustifiable.
The New European Bauhaus brings the concept of ‘beauty’ to the forefront of design and sustainability thinking, arguing it is an essential ingredient in creating a sustainable and inclusive future. With consideration of embodied carbon limiting the potential for demolish-and-rebuild, is it time for a rethink of the role of beauty in low-carbon architecture?
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As I watched the incredible spectacle of the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris this summer, a city that has been at the forefront of traffic reduction, I wondered whether we in Ireland would have the courage and the sense of pride in our capital city to put it on display to the world like that.
Considering cities like Paris’ transformative ambition for traffic reduction, the initial stages of the Dublin City Transport Plan have experienced disproportionate media coverage relative to their gentle impact on the everyday lives of citizens. While I acknowledge that this article contributes to that volume of coverage, I think it is worth looking at the issue with a wider lens.
In his recent book, The City of Today is a Dying Thing, Des Fitzgerald comes to the realisation that the consistent objective of town and city planning in the twentieth century, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities to Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin was “not really an attempt to transform urban space. Rather, it was an attempt to do away with the lively, messy, unpredictable city altogether” [1]. The title of Fitzgerald’s book comes from Le Corbusier’s 1929 work Urbanisme, which was feted on its publication as a solution to the “problem of the city” [2].
This idea of cities as problems to be solved may explain some of the attitudes towards progress in our own capital city. In his seminal book on transport in Dublin, James Wickham reports that one of the reasons that people use cars in cities is to protect themselves from threats of violence, real or perceived, coming from outside the car [3]. In this context there is an obvious attraction to being able to drive from your safe, leafy suburb into a city-centre multi-storey car park, from where you can directly access the shops you wish to visit. You can be in the city without ever having to engage with the city.
And perhaps there is good reason to view Dublin as a dangerous place, best avoided. The riots in Dublin city late last year and attacks on tourists have fed a narrative that the city centre is in decline and that people don’t want to go there. This narrative is not borne out by the reality.
People still want to visit Dublin city and to spend their money there. Dublin City Council’s most recent Canal Cordon Count, from 2022, records that close to 180,000 people enter the city centre each day at the morning peak period. Of those entering the city only 28% do so by private car [4]. The latest report from the Dublin Economic Monitor records a continuing upward trajectory in retail spending going back to 2018. Even the impact of the Covid lockdown, which saw a dip in retail spending for quarter two of 2020, saw a return to the upward trajectory by quarter four of the same year. The biggest increases in spending have been in overseas visitors and in the entertainment sector [5].
Therefore, the predicted negative impacts of the reduction in private cars in the city centre appear to be at best, exaggerated, while the benefits have perhaps been undersold. Recent supportive commentary on the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan has focussed on the need to reduce congestion and improve reliability of the bus network, the benefits of which are self-evident. Separately, the recent publication of a Noise Action Plan for Dublin has identified the Transport Plan as an important measure to “provide significant indirect noise reduction benefits” for the city centre [6]. The memory of the idyllic, quieter urban environment that prevailed during Covid lockdown still lingers, but we now know that reducing noise pollution is as much a public health issue as it is an aesthetic consideration [7].
Amid the recent debates about the alarming increase in road deaths there has been little discussion about the direct relationship between the number of vehicles on the road and the number of traffic-related deaths and serious injuries. Reducing car traffic will make our cities safer for all, including car drivers.
But perhaps the least discussed and the most important benefit that can accrue from a reduction in cars is the impact it has on social cohesion and community wellbeing. It is over fifty years since Don Appleyard first drew the connection between how heavily trafficked a street is and how well people know their neighbours [8]. He found that the isolation caused by heavy traffic was particularly acute for children and older people. This lack of a sense of community on heavily trafficked streets, he found, was tolerated by those who treated the street as a transient residence. Those who found it intolerable, especially families with children, moved elsewhere if they could. Those who were too poor to move, or too old, were left living in conditions they found intolerable. This is evidently not a good recipe for a strong and resilient urban community [9].
A recent study found that Ireland has the highest levels of loneliness in Europe [10]. Ireland also has the second highest level of car-dependency in Europe [11]. This is no coincidence – the correlation between car-dependency and social isolation is well documented.
Two and half weeks after the Olympic games first put Paris on display, we saw 20,000 people gather on the magnificent urban stage that is O’Connell Street in Dublin, to welcome home our Olympian heroes. Seeing this spectacle of young and old celebrating on the street gives me hope. perhaps we can learn to love the “lively, messy, unpredictable city” that is our capital, and that we can have the courage to make the decisions that will deliver a healthier, more attractive, and more liveable city.
Dublin city is messy and challenging, however accounts of its economic decline and its surges in crime are not always reflected in reality. This article argues that braver interventions in traffic planning and management could benefit the city’s economy, environment, safety, and community.
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This case study maps the route from Pearse Street train station to St Stephen’s Green. This is a well-walked city journey with ample architectural and historical features; passing Leinster House, the National Library, and Trinity College Dublin. It features bustling cafés which spill onto the street and a plethora of office buildings. Embarking from a main commuter station, it is a route travelled equally by locals and tourists.
The choice of this route was personal in origin. I left my office on Molesworth Street one evening, hoping to board the Dart at Pearse Station within ten minutes. En route, I grabbed a pear. Ripe and juicy, it was a quick snack to placate a familiar after-work hunger. What started as a carefree nibble would soon motivate my reevaluation of Dublin’s inner-city street infrastructure. Along my 700m route in the heart of this European capital city, I did not pass a single bin on my footpath in which to dispose of the pear remnants. Vexed by my sticky hands and a fruit core that had abandoned all its structural integrity, I could only expel the smushed remnants once I had crossed Westland Row and reached Pearse St Station.
As indicated on the map below, the only two public bins to be found on either side of my route, this main city artery, were outside the National Gallery on Clare Street and St Andrew Church on Westland Row (both of which are on the easterly side of the street). Typically, city infrastructure is almost invisible to me, only noticed when it obstructs a footpath or disrupts a vista. However, when critically assessed, the traffic lights, electricity boxes, bus stops, waste bins, street lamps, make up a substantial jumble of street-junk. The lack of aesthetic consideration and coordinated layout for these components belies the strategic vision of the Dublin City Development Plan to create: “a connected, legible and liveable city with a distinctive sense of place, based on active streets, quality public spaces and adequate community and civic infrastructure… ensuring quality architecture, urban design and green spaces to provide quality of life and good health and wellbeing for all” [1].
This map was made to record the contemporary urban condition by honestly depicting all the city infrastructure and footpath interruptions, with particular focus on public refuse and pedestrian crossings. It also notes the street lamps, bus stops, bollards, and bicycle parking along this route.
Approximately 900m lie between Pearse Station and the gate to St Stephen’s Green from Kildare St. Along this route there are twelve pedestrian crossings managed by traffic lights. To travel this journey, the minimum number of road-crossings is four and the (most reasonably direct) maximum number of crossings is seven.
Following the route from Pearse St Station to St. Stephen’s Green, the westerly path is 925m. It immediately crosses Westland Row from the station, and travels along the path hugging Trinity College Dublin. From Nassau Street, and onto Kildare Street it crosses Setanta Place, Molesworth St, and Schoolhouse Lane before reaching St Stephen’s Green. A point at which the urban infrastructure feels congested is the pedestrian island at the south of Kildare Street (marked location A). Here you will find a street barrier, sign posts, traffic lights, bicycle parking, electricity boxes and a reflective traffic bollard. Along this route there are no public bins.
The length of the route walked along the easterly path is 920m long. Turning left onto the path on Westland Row leaving Pearse Street station, it travels along the street before using the traffic island to cross onto Lincoln Place. Continuing along the bollard-lined curve to Clare Street, the third pedestrian crossing of this route brings you to Nassau Street. After rounding the corner to Kildare Street, it is a straight 260m to the Shelbourne Hotel, where you find yourself crossing to the westerly path to reach the Green. A point along this side of the street at which the urban infrastructure feels crowded is at the south corner of the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street (marked location B). Beside a grid of established trees around a statue of William Conyngham Plunket, there are two postboxes straddling an electricity box, several bus stops, signposts, and bollards. Leaving the station on Westland Row, along this route you pass three bins. The first two are clustered at the station, and the third can be found at the National Gallery. This confirms that from St Andrew’s Church to the Shelbourne Hotel, there is only a single public rubbish bin.
By recording the erratic distribution of street infrastructure, this map also highlights that simply providing physical infrastructure is not sufficient when aiming to protect and enliven urban character. While the DCC Development Plan states “The preservation of the built heritage and archaeology of the city that makes a positive contribution to the character, appearance, and quality of local streetscapes and the sustainable development of the city” [2], this is not reflected in the layered mess of electricity boxes, sign posts, and bollards. It is important to acknowledge the architectural richness and quality of the street in this case study, and that this issue of street-junk is just as evident throughout the city, on streets such as Camden Street, Church Street, and Frederick Street.
In its endeavour to foster “a distinctive sense of place” in this area of the city, DCC has been successful. However, while the overriding impression is a civic character envisioned by the Georgians and Victorians, it is hard to ignore the layers of haphazard and visually disruptive infrastructure that have been added in recent times.
There is an understandable conflict between the provision of urban services and the maintenance of our architectural heritage. Yet, looking at previous generations of lamp posts, manhole covers, and paving, this wasn’t always the case. In The Ancient Pavement: An Illustrated Guide to Dublin’s Street Furniture, O’Connell explains that the nineteenth-century street lighting would have begun as traditional oil lamps, before being modernised to gas, and then, in the 1890s, electricity. While this resulted in the preservation of traditional infrastructure, the decision to adapt the existing lamps would have been an economic one: “During times when many other cities introduced more modern lighting schemes Dublin, through economic necessity, was often forced to adapt such new fittings to older lamp-posts” [3]. The more frugal decision at the time has unconsciously allowed the preservation of beautiful nineteenth-century lighting street infrastructure, including manhole covers, bollards, and railings: “Street objects were accidentally preserved from many eras to produce what is now one of the most unique city collections of street furniture in Europe”. Kildare Street still acts today as a palimpsest of Dublin ironmongery. The ornamentation of earlier interventions reflect a dedication to both place making and necessary modernisation.
Working in the relatively well-preserved Georgian core of south Dublin city is a privilege – today’s converted office buildings, galleries, and cafés are identifiable in the terraces of Smith’s 1846 map of Dublin, first published by the Illustrated London News. In addition to the red brick and sash windows, the architectural character of the small city blocks are defined by granite curbs that have been smoothened by thousands of footsteps, railing-lined light wells, and generously proportioned streets. This emphasises that fostering a sense of place does not solely depend on the buildings, but how they touch our public space.
This case study concludes that in order to achieve a vibrant urban realm, more thoughtful, place-specific, infrastructural design is needed. And some more bins for a pear.
A key aim of the 2022-2028 Dublin City Development Plan is the fostering of a positive urban realm; striving to “ensure that Dublin City is a real and vibrant city where people live and work, not merely a tourist destination”. Now two years into this Development Plan’s six-year strategy, this article maps a primary pedestrian route along popular city streets, presenting a micro case study of the contemporary urban condition.
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