City Limits

Emmett was commissioned to write a new essay on Dublin in response to a set of films about Dublin. The films were commissioned by the Irish Architecture Foundation as part of Open House 2020.

Set across on evening, Emmett wrote about walking in Dublin, music, songs that we sing and measure. The essay - “City Limits” is published in Holy Show, Issue 3 and is available for purchase here. An extract from the text is below.

“19.04

I am inside, upstairs in a room overlooking the Liffey. There are fifty-two precise plan drawings of tiny city rooms with rising rents, pinned to a frame, leaning on a party wall. The plans are drawn from the digital domestic digest, Daft.ie. A full-scale room is rebuilt within the actual room. It is made entirely of white. There is labour here, and intense control of many details of domestic life, stitched and rolled and folded in stiff paper. A drawing come to life. An exquisite exhibition of measurement.

 In his colour memoir, Chroma, Derek Jarman was suspicious of white. “It takes hard work whitewashing. What are we shutting out?” he asks. White is the interior camouflage of real estate. It is a colour of neutrality, used to eradicate personal identity so potential buyers are not offended. Baudrillard, too, wrote that the “world of colour is opposed to the world of value”. He meant economic value; white is simply worth more. For almost a century, the use of white has stripped walls of their material value. They become gaunt, pulled taut across every available surface to suffocate all thoughts and all traces of dirt and desire. Visitors are required to wear royal blue shoe-slippers over their dusty-city soles, to keep the white, white. (Put it on, I can feel so much. Put it on, I don’t need to touch).[1]

19.34

I withdraw. I step-down, step after step after step. I count and I count. The job of an architect. One, two. Turn. Landing. Seven, eight, nine, ten thousand nine hundred and fifty days of architecture later, I note a growing acceptance that my architecture-counting is now reserved for words; instead of finite bricks and mortar, I am drawn to the sonorous, immeasurable potential of the white page. Compelled to flood that page with the colour drained from rooms, I teeter on the edge of this city’s grey granite steps, my eyes dancing on the laps of the infinite green river, heart giddy with the golden and the garrulous. Fall, cry the gulls. Fly. I extend my arms and step, finally weightless into the opening night. “

[1] Extract from Blue Dress, Depeche Mode. Written by M.L. Gore