Since taking the role of City Architect in 2008, Ali Grehan has initiated and facilitated projects that have connected with the city, its designers and citizens. Grehan came to DCC from the Ballymun Regeneration project. There, she had taken on more typically architectural challenges albeit in the context of urban growth and renewal. Previous to that she was part of the team planning out the early stages of the Luas, where she developed a taste for the complex world of urban design, public engagement and collaboration at scale.
The Luas project was an intense period of discovery for Grehan, as part of an architectural team led by Alan Mee within the broader engineering team. “That was a real rollercoaster of a project to be involved in. It was groundbreaking. We had to invent and design the processes and the way of working as we went along.” For her, there is a lineage through this work and her other roles in private and public organisations to the present day. Her own motivation – the design process as a means to create lasting impact – remains unchanged. “The level of scale and complexity have changed a bit,” says Grehan, “but the approach and expectations are the same. It’s still that wonderful dance with lots of different people moving in different directions, and yet somehow managing to move in the same direction.”
Under Grehan, the City Architect’s office leads and supports projects which connect designers to communities. Ongoing projects include Design4Growth – which assists small businesses in using design strategy methods to aid their development – as well as design education programmes for schools. From 2009 to 2011 Pivot Dublin brought together a community of designers and policymakers to produce a bid to to propose Dublin as World Design Capital 2014. Although the bid was unsuccessful in its initial goal, the work of Pivot remains an active strand of the office’s work. The scope of collaboration, the conversations that the bid project initiated and the many offshoot projects are a source of pride.
“It was a practical response to a complete lack of understanding of the value of design at a time when we needed it most. In 2009 and 2010 everybody was under so much pressure. Were we giving time to strategic thinking? Was anybody talking about looking at the problem and trying to design a way around it? There was huge pressure for quick fix solutions. Designers know that quick-fix solutions usually come unstuck. So it was a great opportunity to promote the value of design and designers,” Grehan asserts.
Pivot also created a lasting impression on an international audience of designers previously unused to thinking of Ireland or Dublin as centres of design excellence. As Grehan puts it, this new audience was alerted to “Dublin design and our story. We should never underestimate how talented we are and how good we are at telling a story. I know that’s a cliché, but Irish people do have a spark that is recognised elsewhere and that people are drawn to.”
Pivot highlighted the City Architect Division’s intention of maintaining a working relationship with a broader design community. There is a consideration for how communication is handled that sets the office apart from and above other civic facilities. This has been the product of a genuine engagement with graphic design, communication design and like-minded private and public organisations. And for Grehan, communication is as much about “motivating ourselves as communicating to the wider world.”
“The public sector is a competitive environment”, she adds. “You’ve got to justify your existence, prove your worth. And one of the ways of doing it is showing people examples of what you’ve *done*. That’s the only thing that really proves the point.” Seeing the impact of vision on a grand scale, and the potential for further collaboration are motivators for Grehan and her team. “The reward for justifying your existence is the opportunity to work on more interesting initiatives that other people are doing. That’s the motivation – and to see results,” she notes.
“A huge problem is finding time to actually communicate the success stories. I think every department in DCC would say the same thing. A lot of work and time goes into trying to explain the proposal when it’s in the embryonic stage, and get buy-in at the development stage. But once it’s finished, finding time to go back and fly the flag for the project is hard.” She cites the recent progress around plans for College Green as a definite success, albeit at those early stages. “We’re really chuffed about College Green – the fact that the councillors are so positive about the project. It’s not firm or definite yet, but we’re gratified by the positive reaction. That has been so long in the making with a process that has been circuitous. The proposal is a huge collaboration – the road and traffic engineers being front and centre, the city architects pushing it as a vision and a dream. It’s taken years, and here we are with it within our grasp.”
The next project for the City Architect‘s Office is a collaboration between themselves, the American Institute of Architects, and a Dublin community which has yet to be selected. The Framework project will bring together an interdisciplinary group of designers to work with a community to develop a shared vision and an action plan. The project (under the Design Assistance Program moniker) has been running in the USA for over 50 years.
According to Grehan, it is “extremely disciplined and systematic. There is protocol that is applied to projects regardless of scale. No matter what the challenge is – whether it’s an urban or rural community, the approach is the same. And it’s been hugely successful. You could be cynical about the story until you see the examples of what they’ve achieved.”
In the USA, communities compete to have the programme applied to their area, with the selected community showing commitment and an intent to apply the resulting plan in order to secure the consultation, which is provided pro bono. According to Grehan, the designers will encourage communities to “unlock solutions that already exist.” For this pilot run of the Framework project, there will be an open call online for a community to put themselves forward. The pilot scheme will test the process in the Irish context and, Grehan hopes, establish a first successful local case study and have a meaningful effect on a community.
A design-led approach has proven scalable and effective in making sense of complex organisations and relationships. But Grehan also notes that, at scale, “it can be politically inconvenient to adopt a design process. The world doesn’t work like that: life is often about compromise, about making decisions that suit some people and that definitely don’t suit others. Trying to knit design into that can be tough.”
“What you do has to have an impact. And that has to be considered from lots of different angles,” she adds. “Working in a big organisation on a city scale means that nothing is a solo run and nothing can be credited to one person. So someone can see my fingerprints on the work *[but]* there are many other people’s fingerprints on the same things too.”
In her own practice, “it’s as much about giving yourself new challenges and making sure that what you’re doing is relevant,” says Grehan. “The most important thing for me in whatever I’m doing as City Architect is that I’m constantly challenging the perceived limits of the role: doing new things, or looking at the work that we’re doing – the routine – and asking how that can be done better. So that’s how you keep it interesting. You’ve got to stay awake.”
For More:
http://designframework.ie (launching in March)
http://www.pivotdublin.com
http://www.dublincity.ie/cityarchitects
Words: David Wall
