LIBESKIND AT CENTRE STAGE

Dublin’s dockside regeneration may have faltered, but its new Grand Canal Theatre heads the cast of the revival plans, opening with a Bolshoi performance and a light sprinkling of stardust

Words Shane O’Toole | Photos Ros Kavanagh

As the opening production at the Grand Canal Square Theatre takes to the stage on St Patrick’s Day, the curtain falls on efforts to rejuvenate Dublin’s post-industrial docklands. As Bolshoi ballerinas glide gracefully through the Russian State Ballet’s production of Swan Lake, officials from the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) will be looking on, aware that their years of paddling furiously below the surface to stimulate and keep pace with a rapidly transforming city have drawn to a premature close.

In fact, had Daniel Libeskind’s theatre been even six months later getting out of the ground, it is unlikely it would ever have seen the light of day, instead joining the growing list of projects that have been euphemistically ‘pushed out’, or cancelled, during the past year. Buildings we won’t be seeing for some time, if ever, include Foster + Partners’ U2 Tower, West 8’s ‘island’ urban blocks in the Liffey, Agence Ter’s Royal Canal linear park, JDS Architects’ Dublin harbour bath, Heneghan Peng’s Custom House plaza and Antony Gormley’s 48m-high sculpture of a figure standing in the Liffey.

The DDDA was established in 1997 to plan the future of 520ha, or 1,300 acres, of former docklands, but a series of ill-advised decisions and speculations in 2008 expanded its debts by E200m, while its assets fell in value by E150m. After the crash, it is a spent force. But the new theatre and square will stand as one of its crowning glories.

DDDA had long appreciated the urban potential of this corner site on the derelict Grand Canal Dock. Covering an area of 14ha, enough in its heyday to accommodate 300 square-rigged sailing vessels, the dock opened in 1796 at the mouth of a navigation system of canals, rivers and estuaries cutting through the heartland of Ireland, connecting the Irish Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.

The west bank of the dock housed a gasworks for most of the 20th century. The expressive, constructivist forms and ship-like profile of the gasworks’ vertical retort house, which burned coal to produce coal gas and coke until it was demolished in 1985, was a rare icon of architectural modernism in depressed and dreary mid-century Dublin.

DDDA acquired and cleaned up the heavily polluted site, and built a new square on the empty lot in 2001 to stimulate confidence among developers after the post-9/11 market shocks. It also decided there should be a ‘major cultural building for the performing arts’ at the heart of the new waterfront square, to add animation to the area.

Discussions took place with the Abbey Theatre, which wanted a new home. DDDA offered the site free of charge but the Abbey backed off when Taoiseach Bertie Ahern expressed ‘surprise’ and ‘disappointment’ at its plan to move out of his constituency. Later, the Office of Public Works commissioned Hopkins Architects to prepare a feasibility study for the proposed National Concert Hall; the required footprint would have swallowed site and square.

Having exhausted potential public uses, DDDA invited tenders in 2003 for a commercial theatre that would be a ‘landmark of outstanding architectural quality’. The tender required a sustainable business model for the theatre, which is integrated with a commercial building complex comprising 35,000m2 of leasable office and retail space.

The site was part-traded to the developer in return for building the theatre. There was no hope of returning the theatre’s E80m construction cost from operating profits. In fact, its lease, which runs for 200 years, was recently sold by the developer for a mere E10m.

Unveiled in 2004 and exhibited at the Venice Biennale that year, Libeskind’s winning concept, which he sketched at short notice while flying, had the startling impact of a UFO mothership landing on the site. For all that, his ‘crystal on the rock’, as he called it, with its artfully ripped and torn metallic skin and cascade of roof-garden terraces overlooking the docks, was more humane than at first sight, handling the urban theatre potential of the brief with aplomb.

At a review meeting in Libeskind’s New York studio in December 2004, the shortcomings of the existing square suddenly became clear, however. It was too introspective. Conceived in a vacuum and set below the surrounding street and quay level, it didn’t relate to the buildings now planned for its edges.

And the space was too neutral for Libeskind’s guiding concept of stages: the theatre stage; the multi-level stage of the theatre lobby, illuminated at night, with patrons displayed on its projecting balconies and incised gardens; and the square itself a stage for civic gathering.

Martha Schwartz was commissioned by DDDA to knit the theatre into its surroundings. She interpreted its angular, skewed aesthetic and applied it to the ground plane. ‘Now it’s no longer just a building sitting on a square,’ she says. ‘It spreads itself out and makes its way all the way to the water.’

She laid a glamorous red carpet, studded with a thicket of woozy red lights, across the square from the theatre lobby to the quayside and beyond. Its promise is exotic: imagine arriving by river taxi for a performance, having embarked at a point along the Liffey; or savouring a pre-show dinner on board a slow barge from Portobello. It will happen.

The theatre design has changed considerably over the years but Libeskind held on to his core concept, even as the original developer sold on in 2007, new clients and operators came on board, the brief was altered and 13 different planning applications were made.

McCauley Daye O’Connell was appointed architect for the commercial part of the scheme, which is based on a standard 9m by 6m office grid and has been 70% let, although Libeskind collaborated closely on the modelling concept and playful office facade details, including decorative louvres and multi-coloured solar fritting.

Multi-national operator Live Nation brought RHWL’s Arts Team on board to advise on the 2,019-seat theatre and backstage design and specification, which it tailored to receive blockbuster West End shows, particularly musicals, plugging a gap in the Dublin market.

‘Every architect has to be able to work with changing conditions,’ Libeskind told me from New York. ‘It is part of the evolutionary nature of architecture. The architect is responsible fiscally. You have to know what is key and what can be given up. We reduced the overall volume to make the theatre compact and more sustainable.’

Individuality of form is the dominant theme in Libeskind’s work and the concept section for the theatre – which is in four parts: back of house, auditorium, front of house and a vast rooftop shed full of plant – is very smart. But the project has been squeezed to a damaging extent during the design process, particularly the front of house bars and foyers. What once was generous and soared vertiginously, is now cramped and stacked, with some ceiling heights as low as 2.4m.

Cost pressure is obvious throughout, except in the technical equipment. The roof is aluminium, not stainless steel. Auditorium seating is far from luxurious. Paint and plaster abounds. It feels like Libeskind-lite, except where the theatre, glimpsed through a metaphorical waving glass curtain, meets the square.
Yet visitors will enjoy themselves here. The sub-Deco auditorium is a warm, cosy people’s theatre, despite the hokey, tricked-out ‘ribs’ intended to resemble large ship’s timbers in a maritime allusion gone wrong. Nor am I sure that Libeskind’s seminal ‘Chamber Works’ series of drawings should have been used as a basis for decorative embellishments to balcony and box fronts. But the acoustics are great. And I grew giddy with excitement in the upper circle, flashing back more than 40 years to the thrill of the gods in Dublin’s long-demolished Capitol Theatre.

Perhaps that’s it. For a work of ‘starchitecture’, there is very little hubris on display. Icons are usually out there, but this is a modest, well-scaled icon that sits back happily in its space, inviting in the pageantry of life. It bows to its setting, like a well-loved actor taking a curtain call, and sways like a drunken sailor. Populist and warm-hearted, it is no masterpiece. It is too compromised for that. But it sure is likeable, a real character, like a chirpy little fella with big dreams.