Why Not Just Build a Giant Replica of Bono’s Penis?

Perhaps they can rebrand the incinerator tower in Meath as such.

It’s naming stuff after yourself I can’t abide. It doesn’t impress anybody unless they’re far too easily impressed. Let other people put statues up to you, preferably after you’re gone.

From the linked article:

This monstrosity is going to be looming over the Dublin docklands in just a couple of years’ time, despite being totally out of keeping with the character of the area….

Surely that’s the whole point? Would any sane person have wanted to preserve the character of the area in question? It’s not St Stephen’s Green we’re talking about.

fq morris: energy-bloated towers aren’t ‘new’ or ‘modern’. They are old-fashioned, 20-th C architecture, born of a combination of architects-as-Nietzian-heroes modernism and corporate oligarchy. Old-fashioned, anti-human, anti-natural-world, destructive beyond measure. Sir Norman Foster’s just another useless, oil-guzzling old fart.

Bono didn’t set the record, he is the record!

By God… it’ll weigh more than 1 million Courics!

@dooby #7: “Because Bono’s penis is actually less aesthetically pleasing.”

How do you know?

@william sjostrom #14: “When did you get so reactionary?”

1840. Before it was fashionable.

U2 has always been through-and-through insufferable. If they had stuck to just playing their godawful music that would have been quite insufferable enough, thank you. Yet they (or at least Bono) had to launch perpetual world-saving crusades all the time.

In that perspective this tower actually looks surprisingly moderately offensive. I mean it’s offensive, but not as much as one might expect. But then I have no relationship to the Dublin skyline whatsoever. I didn’t even know it had one.

What I can say for certain, though, is that I think Bono himself looks like a penis. A bespectacled penis.

That thing in front of the GPO in O’Connell Street also has something of the replica penis about it, I always think.

Katherine:

Honest? I think such towers will always face resistance from small-minded, unimaginative, regressive reactionaries such as myself.

But when they’re proposed by insufferable and irritatingly, incomprehensibly (to us) successful people who furthermore are earnestly endeavouring in proselytising causes, well…

“What shall I do with this absurdity –
O heart, O troubled heart – this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail?”

You can’t really tell from the postage stamp picture Splintered provides whether the thing is actually any good or not. It might very well be. Plenty of modern architecture is in fact awe inspiring and beautiful in a skiffy sort of way (although plenty more is ugly, derivative rubbish made of inferior materials and guaranteed to make the people who use it ill).

I’m not agin modernism. I’m agin putting that thing there, where it’s clearly disproportionate and contextually incongruous. If Foster was as good as they claim he is he would take account of the built environment in which he proposes to place his stuff. That he doesn’t appear to do so suggests that he is more interested in drawings than buildings (and not an arrogant solipsist who doesn’t care whether his designs are actually useful at all, oh no.)

26 – neither a Palladian villa nor a vast, look-at-me, over-lit tower is appropriate for the kind of urban environment currently surrounding the site. Just because you find a number of the neighboring buildings ugly doesn’t give star architects and the Ozymandian rich (Mr. Hewson) license to treat the surrounding area as a blank canvas.

…neither a Palladian villa nor a vast, look-at-me, over-lit tower is appropriate for the kind of urban environment currently surrounding the site.

Okay, so you can tell me what is not appropriate for the site. What is appropriate?

Haussmann? That built Paris so the mob could be kept down by the cannon? So, so, very humane…

That was part of it, but you’re ignoring the huge improvements in the quality of life for most inhabitants that the transformation of Paris brought, e.g. sanitation and transport.

Anyway, my argument about the humane quality of this type of architecture was more aesthetic than sociological, and whatever Zola might have thought at the time, I think there’s a reason why Paris is considered one of the world’s most beautiful cities, if not the most beautiful, by a large majority of people.

What is appropriate?

The area is indeed awful, but building a swanky scyscraper won’t solve that problem. If you want to regenerate such an area you have to modernize the existing buildings that are worth it and integrate modern buildings in between, all within the restrictions of an overarching aesthetic. Then you have to attract the right people and businesses to buy or rent flats, shops and offices.