LIQUID SKIN, U2'S SOLIDIFIED MUSIC
Dublin 2003
Ireland
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The projects for the U2 Studio’s tower develop the Dublin Docklands into a world-class city quarter, a paragon of sustainable inner city regeneration – one in which the whole community enjoys the highest standards of access to education, employment, housing and social amenity and which delivers a major contribution to the social and economic prosperity of Dublin and the whole of Ireland.
Inside the diagram for the Grand Canal Dock area, the U2’s tower integrates like a signal in the landscape of Liffey riverbanks. The challenge mixes inside one building programmatic spaces which spoiled their respective work because of noise pollution.
On the Britain Quay the building has thus been transformed into a vertical aquarium consisting of a double skin filled with water from the river. This double skin’s role is first to ensure an excellent soundproofing and then to filter, thanks to the aquatic fauna and flora, the industrial pollution drained by the River Liffey.
Activities which create noise pollution (discotheques, recording studios) are spread into independent glass boxes hung up in the heart of the building. In this liquid world the exterior façade stretches out sinusoidally like transparent bubbles so that it brings light directly into living spaces (offices, housing, shopping centres).
The U2’s tower seems to be in constant vibration. It is the architectural translation of the cubic sound diagrams of the soundtracks composed in the famous Irish group’s recording studios.
