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Most Dubliners can recall the sight of unusually-dressed adolescents gathering in Central Bank Plaza on Dame Street. These teenagers often sported a variety of long blue bangs, band shirts, piercings, and sometimes broke out in impromptu musical performances. We know subcultures such as punks, goths, rockers and skaters. Some will be familiar with emos, spicers or scenes. But do you know of the ‘bankies’? These Irish-based adolescents were named after the national institution they gathered outside. They encompassed many subcultures within one community, one’s tastes or identity did not matter for inclusion. It was a community where simply being different was celebrated and safe. You might have been a rocker, a goth, a rap music fan or pop music fan.
Central Bank Plaza’s origins as a hangout space for the goth and punk scenes seem to have started in the 1980s [1]. This may have been partly due its proximity to numerous alternative shops and venues in the pre-gentrified Temple Bar, which was a hub of sorts for alternative music cultures. Large open spaces have typically been a rarity in Dublin city centre, as a space it was quite adaptable, being capable of holding protests, rallies or simply offering a respite in the city with benches and a south-facing aspect. The deep cantilever of the former Central Bank also provided a degree of shelter during rainfall. The location has been favoured in the past for many high-profile protests such as ‘Occupy Dame Street’. For a five-month period in 2012, pallets, tents and makeshift structures adorned the plaza in a protest against economic injustice and inequality.
Over time, the groups occupying Central Bank Plaza claimed the space, some even formed their identity around its location. In sharp aesthetic contrast to the anti-establishment style of punks, goths, and rockers, the Central Bank building, designed in 1980 by Sam Stephenson, was brutalist in style and authoritative in character. This begs the question, is the Central Bank Plaza an accidental success story for ad-hoc usage of an urban space? It was undoubtedly never designed for with these particular end-users in mind. I endeavoured to find out why it was popular through a series of interviews with former bankies.
One regular attendee, Jack Barrett, believed its popularity was an indication of the lack of good public spaces in the city suburbs:
’I guess it started for me, and probably for a good few people, because of where we grew up. I'm from Drimnagh, just outside the city centre. It's a very working-class area and even now, there are not a whole lot of amenities or things to do for kids from that 12-16 age range – if you're not into like football or normal things – so town was the best place for us to go to on weekends to have something to do’ [3].
Jack added that back in the days when communication with peers was more sporadic, through online services like Bebo/MSN, it was easier to agree on a familiar and established location such as the Central Bank when organising a meet-up, with less chances for confusion or required clarification [4]. The Central Bank had instant name recognition and was an urban landmark for wayfinding. Thoughts of security were critical for young adolescents. In a central, busy area, the location had visibility and passive surveillance. As Bebhinn Cullen, a frequent attendee, noted:
‘It was just a landmark that was close to everywhere and safe because we were out in the open and there was really nowhere else for us to go in town! Stephens Green was an option, but it had a closing time and was a bit dangerous too ... Everyone's bus stop was close. And we were never told to move on for loitering’ [5].
Cullen added that being able to see business workers constantly passing by, including in the Central Bank itself, was a reminder of the passive security, expecting you would likely not be harmed in such a visible location [6]. The plaza was very well-served by public transport.
Once occupied, the space could be animated and unpredictable. Bebhinn reminisces on how you could go to meet a friend and a few hours later you may be involved in recording a music video for a rap song [7]. Many of the attendees of the plaza would have been considered different by regular society, given their alternative choice of clothing and hairstyles. However, this ‘otherness’ extended past musical or stylistic subcultures into minority communities such as the LGBTQI+ community.
Lynn McGrane, a self-proclaimed bankie who met her husband during their teen years at Central Bank Plaza, discussed how a vast portion of the group were members of the LGBTQI+ community. In fact, it would have been common to see large groups holding rainbow flags as cloaks on the plaza on pride days. McGrane notes:
‘The thing that above all else we all had in common is that we just weren't considered normal. Because of how we've come on in the last few years, people often forget how far behind Ireland was in terms of social progression’ [8].
Only thirty years ago, in the 1990s, same-sex sexual activity was illegal [9]. Those with shorter memories may be shocked that there was such a recent time when being a part of the LGBTQI+ community in Ireland was dangerous in public. That said, even today we still hear too often of malicious attacks on individuals for merely not disguising their sexuality in Dublin city [10].
The bankies’ home in Central Bank started to come to an end when it was announced that the plaza was being sold to private developers in 2017 [11]. Initial speculation of the privatisation of the space caused unease within the community, for whom the place had personal and collective significance. The loss of public space to gentrification is not unusual, however in this case the development heralded the potential destruction of the bankies’ ‘natural habitat’. Developers, elected officials, and detached members of the public may have seen gentrification of this urban space as a way to remove the 'nuisance' of loitering teenagers. Drug and alcohol use was a regular hobby of some attendees [12]. This may have provided an argument for redevelopment as a means to apparently limit anti-social behaviour. Similar unease was created during the late 1990s, with defensive railings erected outside the steps of Central Bank, preventing access due to claims of anti-social behaviour [13].
Where are the bankies now? Some sources claim that they have relocated to an area dubbed ‘emo green’ within Stephens Green. Ultimately, Central Bank Plaza unwittingly provided a space in our community for alternative outsiders and LGBTQI+ people for over three decades. Urban planners and designers can learn from this; safe spaces for vulnerable adolescents in our cities should be celebrated and preserved. Nothing could be considered more punk and anti-establishment than the bankies of Central Bank Plaza bravely celebrating their differences loud and proud, in the public view of those that would call them unsightly. As Lynn McGrane astutely described it:
‘As f**ked up as we all were (are?), in one way or another, being around others who were willing to talk about it when everyone else wanted you to just be quiet and conform was just amazing’ [14].
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
This year’s presidential election made visible a dynamic that is often overlooked in political analysis: how campaigns operate as a form of civic infrastructure, and to what extent design plays a role in their efficacy. Far from being peripheral or decorative, the visual strategies deployed by candidates’ structure how people encounter political life; they shape perceptions long before policy is discussed or manifestos are read. Political design occupies a unique position within democracies, somewhere at the intersection of communication, civic identity, and public trust.
In Ireland, this relationship between design and democratic expression has been strained by a decades-long pattern of executive neglect. Successive governments have systematically deprioritised design and aesthetic quality in public communication and built infrastructure. Senior ministers increasingly frame design as an optional consideration, an unnecessary add-on rather than a fundamental part of how the State articulates care, competence, and regard for its people. As Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers stated during a debate concerning escalating costs at the National Children’s Hospital (NCH), ‘there needs to be much better discipline in cost effectiveness… That means making choices around cost and efficiency over design standards and aesthetics in some instances’ [1].
This position, widely cited and contested, exemplifies a broader ideological shift which sees design treated as a dispensable luxury rather than an essential civic tool [2].This framing misunderstands the function of design within public life. Design, in this case, is not ornamental; it is a mode of communication through which the State makes itself legible. When design is neglected, the consequences extend far beyond the aesthetic and shape the conditions under which political meaning, public trust, and civic visibility are formed.
In the aftermath of Catherine Connolly's election as President, commentators highlighted the design and visual expression of each candidate as decisive factors [3]. Connolly’s campaign offered me a rare opportunity to explore what an authentically Irish political visual identity might look like when grounded in cultural memory rather than branding for the sake of visuals alone. While designing, I drew directly from Ireland’s vernacular signwriting tradition: the hand-painted shopfronts, gilded fascias, and serifed letterforms that once defined the visual texture of towns and villages. These were not simply aesthetic references. They embodied authorship, locality, and a sense of civic care.
By incorporating hand-drawn lettering, a deep green and cream palette, and a postage-stamp motif, the campaign sought to restore the tactile warmth and humanity often lost in contemporary political design. The stamp, a quiet symbol of communication and exchange, is a reminder that politics is, at its core, a conversation carried between people. This concept frames Irish craft traditions not as relics, but as living cultural practices capable of shaping contemporary civic discourse.
In doing so, Connolly’s campaign made design itself an act of cultural continuity, a way of honouring the past while proposing a more grounded and participatory future. By the time Connolly declared on election night, “This win is not for me, but for us,” the sentiment had already been woven through posters, leaflets, and social media, a visual testament to a campaign that made the collective visible long before the votes were counted [4].
Across the Atlantic, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City attracted attention first for his democratic socialist views. It was the striking coherence of his campaign design, however, that propelled him into broader public discourse. Not since Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster, for Barack Obama, had a political image circulated so widely. It gained the kind of immediate recognition associated with Jim Fitzpatrick’s image of Che Guevara.
The Mamdani campaign was intentionally rooted in the material and cultural vernacular of the city itself. The cobalt blue and yellow palette was drawn directly from everyday sights in New York: bodega awnings, taxi cabs, MetroCards, hot dog vendors, and the signage of small independent businesses [5]. In this way, the campaign aligned itself with working-class infrastructure that defines the city’s public life, situating Mamdani not as an outsider but as a candidate embedded in the city’s social, cultural and economic rhythms [6]. Central to this strategy was the premise that design could serve as a communicative bridge to the constituency Mamdani sought to represent. In doing so, the campaign framed visual culture as a mode of continuity and care, a reminder that political communication can affirm belonging as powerfully as it persuades.
Irish election materials, as well as the State's political design more generally, don't attempt to convey substantive meaning through visuals. Their long-standing reliance on formulaic portraiture, generic slogans, and minimal graphic refinement mirrors a broader campaign strategy in which candidates are packaged as approachable local figures using highly-conventionalised visual cues. This approach reduces design to a mechanism for name recall rather than a vehicle for articulating political values or fostering civic engagement. The environmental waste associated with poster production only heightens the sense of outdatedness and underscores how Irish campaign materials often lag behind the more considered, narrative-driven strategies emerging elsewhere. As such, this tradition of visual identity crystallises the limitations of Irish political branding: a dependence on repetition, familiarity, and low-risk aesthetics at the expense of meaningful visual communication.
A strong democracy depends on sustained, accessible dialogue between the State and its people. Visual identity is structurally embedded within this exchange. Visual languages that are familiar or culturally resonant reduce cognitive load and strengthen affective engagement, whereas generic or stylistically flattened forms tend to weaken meaning-making [7]. In this sense, campaign aesthetics function as a form of civic infrastructure, shaping perceptions of authority, intention, and legitimacy before a single word is spoken.
When design is framed as a luxury rather than an essential component of civic life, it erodes the shared visual language through which democratic communication occurs. Such an approach initiates a feedback loop. Minimal investment in design yields fewer meaningful symbolic or material expressions of public life. As these expressions diminish, the State becomes increasingly illegible to its people. Over time, the corporeal presence of the State, its visibility in the everyday, degrades. What was once a free-flowing dialogue becomes generic, flattened, and emotionally inert. Political branding therefore mirrors the State’s broader orientation toward public infrastructure. When design is treated as secondary, a dispensable aesthetic layer rather than a civic medium, its communicative and democratic potential collapses. When taken seriously, however, design becomes a point at which cultural belonging, political intent, and civic participation converge.
Ireland’s future civic health depends not on dispensing with design but on recognising it as a central component of public life. It is the medium through which the State becomes visible, legible, and trustworthy.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Highly visible and emotionally charged, electoral campaigns are often the first instance in which a state’s people encounter their elected representatives. In this article, Anna Cassidy, designer for Catherine Connolly's presidential campaign, examines how political design is indispensable to the democratic process.
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“[W]asn't this all started by some terminally online moron in trinity? … Nobody gives a shite so long as the statue isn't actually being damaged” wrote [Deleted] on the reddit page r/Ireland in a thread to discuss Dublin City Council's proposals to stop the repeated groping of the Molly Malone statue on Suffolk Street — her breasts repeatedly touched by the sweaty hands of tourists, so much so that the dark patina has been worn away to reveal the earthy metallic dark orange of the bronze from which the mythical fishwife was cast. Thousands of images of Molly #mollymalone circulate on TikTok. A group of men dressed in Jack Chalton-era Irish football jerseys stand in line to rub their faces in her breasts. In the comments section one user posts, “reminder she’s 15 in this statue,” others disagree, claiming she was older, as if somehow the behaviour would be permissible if the statue represented Molly as 17 – the legal age for consenting sexual acts. Others use the platform to protest the behaviour.
If you ask Google’s AI Gemini about the practice, it tells you that “this practice is now discouraged by authorities for preservation reasons.” This is artificial stupidity, a view blind to a far more important problem, one that philosopher Sylvia Wynter described as an urban planning that assumes the male-coded subject as the norm, while others—women, Black, Indigenous, and colonised peoples – are excluded, marginalised, or rendered invisible [1]. For Wynter, urban space is ontologically male, in that its logics of design, governance, and belonging reproduce a gendered and racialised “Man” as the universal standard of being. Speaking to RTÉ Radio One, DCC Arts Officer Ray Yeates (a man) suggested that one solution could be to “just accept that this behaviour is something that occurs worldwide with statues” – human stupidity [2]. Perhaps Yeates might agree to a plaque being added, inscribed with a quote from Wynter: “Man …overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself”[3].
As images of the statue circulate online, they both promote and raise awareness of this deleterious practice. But this is the means and not the end of their circulation. These images turn Suffolk Street into a space for the production of a strange kind of economic exchange. With one sweaty hand on a breast, and the other on a smartphone, tourists become workers. Here, as in all of everyday life, a distinction can no longer be made between work and play. In our age of contemporary digital technology all of everyday life is a factory. To play is to work; the digital proletariat; to use a technological prosthesis is to be used by that prosthesis. These interfaces, designed for the many by and for the benefit of the few, manage life by means of ‘fun’. Spaces like Suffolk Street are, as Letizia Chiappini writes, where “[a]ffect, desire, pain, and love, are digitally mobilised for direct spatial impact” [4].
Henri Lefebvre called this abstract space – “[t]he predominance of the visual (or more precisely of the geometric-visual-spatial)” [5]. He described this kind of logic as a planetary mesh that has been thrown over all space [6]. Any space, anything, anywhere, no matter how banal is subject to this logic. 13,461 km away from the Molly Malone statue is an underpass in the Chinese city of Guilin. Each night crowds of outdoor live streamers gather to steam content on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), their faces glowing in the phosphorus white of selfie lamps. Geolocation means that if they are closer to more prosperous neighbourhoods then they make more money from the wealthy clients who live there. These leftover urban spaces that are seen as unattractive and once disregarded in a capitalist economy have become spaces where new economies and ways of working emerge. I have written elsewhere about the disproportionate role that Ireland plays in facilitating the infrastructures that produce these kinds of spaces [7]. This is a new kind of geopolitics, one facilitated by State fiscal policies, such as in Ireland, home of one of lowest standard corporate tax rates in the EU.
This is capitalism incarnate – capitalism become flesh. Everything has an exchange value. There is not a thing that cannot be transformed into a commodity to be circulated in an economy of flesh, thoughts, drives and desires. This is an economy governed by images, subject to what legal scholar Antoinette Rouvroy calls algorithmic governance – the governance of “the social world that is based on the algorithmic processing of big data sets rather than on politics, law, and social norms” [8]. The statue of Molly is a public surface subject to an extractive logic, via the lens she is engineered for constant circulation, interaction, and capture. The statue as code has her meaning flattened into content for the purpose of data extraction and ad revenue. This kind of collapsing together of work and leisure is a weapon of mass distraction. It removes us from everyday life, producing what philosopher Henri Lefebvre called a “transcendental contempt for the real” [9].
Lefebvre also called for a right to the city, by which he meant the right to the production of truly democratic space. Space that is not subject to capitalist abstraction. To what extent this is even possible in our precarious age of algorithmic governance is questionable - but nonetheless we must seek to understand, hope and act.
The groping of the Molly Malone in Dublin reveals a complex new urban condition – the algorithmic production of space. Social media, viral images, new modes of capitalist production, foreground the emergence of an entirely new logic of spatial production. What does this mean for the possibility of a right to the city?
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On visiting the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, one might be struck by a couple of things. First, on entering the building, the air in the hallway is stale, a result of the inoperative original air-conditioning system. Secondly, the planning of the basement service floor is surprisingly chaotic. These two observations suggested to me a narrative about modernism’s dependence on technology and about Mies’ attitude to that technology – and the situation of architecture in general in relation to technical measures.
Mies worked in more than one register when designing the villa. The top floor, with the entrance hall and bedrooms, is fairly straightforward: lucid and rational. The floor below, what I suppose in German could be called the Beletage, has a flowing and expressive plan comparable to his single-storey Barcelona pavilion. Like the Barcelona pavilion, it has a representative purpose: it contains spaces for entertaining, constructed with fine materials which convey the wealth of the inhabitants. The basement below is half-buried in the hillside and contains mostly service spaces. The layout of the basement feels strikingly unresolved in comparison to the other floors.
The plan of the basement is not often published. It contains, among other things, a boiler room, a laundry room, the room-like processing chambers of the air conditioning system, a photographic darkroom for Mr Tugendhat, and a “moth chamber” where fur coats were stored. These functions are arranged in a way that is partly determined by the layout of the floor above. For example, the dumb-waiter is at the end of a narrow corridor around which a contorted storage room is wrapped. It’s as if the occupants of the basement scurry around this warren of spaces to pick up the loose ends of the freely-planned floor above. There is no functionalist virtue on display here. Indeed, the tiled and napthalene-impregnated moth chamber, accessed through the darkroom, is at the end of a chain of five rooms. It gives a claustrophobic impression tainted by the idea of moths as vermin, and of a cruel method of industrial extermination. The technology of circa 1930 is reflected in the primitive air conditioning system: a piece of apparatus firmly fixed in history, but one in service of the apparently timeless perfection of the upper floors.
It seems that Mies did not consider the basement floor to be part of his architectural expression. He didn’t optimize it. The terse open-plan geometry of the main living spaces reflects not just freedom of movement for the inhabitants, but Mies’s freedom of design. It is simple in comparison to the complex technicalities of actually keeping the house running.
The closest thing the villa has to a centrepiece is the orange onyx wall, non-load-bearing and composed of five slabs. While one could interpret this as a pure display of luxury, it is also an object of contemplation (or at least a talking point). The Tugendhat family were cultured as well as wealthy, and I want to attribute to them some kind of elevated curiosity about this object. What can we recover, in the way of intellectual depth, from reflecting on the onyx slabs? A suitable source might be the French philosopher Roger Caillois, who, in his book The Writing of Stones [1], discerned in geological patterns “some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.” In relation to the Villa Tugendhat, where the setting sun causes the backlit onyx to glow translucently, Caillois’s words evoke an understanding beyond the codes of architectural modernity. Mies’s obsessive refinement of his constructional poetics certainly has something to do with striving for a universal syntax, and the connotations of cosmic grandeur must have been intended as well, but the awkward, “puny” insignificance of humanity, in contrast, doesn’t seem to find a direct expression in his design. A stone is an indifferent thing.
Caillois wrote “Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.” [2] Although Caillois did not have architecture in mind, these vivid words evoke, in contrast to the timelessness of the onyx wall, the more fragile reality of the Villa Tugendhat, a reality of uncertainty that undermines Mies’s confident form-making. At the most basic level, the presence of humans means the presence of water vapour and all manner of microbial impurities. These are perennial problems for the architect: problems of climate control and hygiene. The handling of the response to them (the concealed inventions and intricacies of the air conditioning equipment) is arguably a truer token of humanity than the stony perfection of polished onyx panels.
The flight of the Tugendhat family from Brno in 1938 in the face of the impending Nazi occupation is emblematic of the precariousness of civilization and of an industrial society gone astray. The grand formal spaces of the villa have an appropriately monumental character, as Mies intended, but the technical floor tells another story of historical contingency, unresolved difficulties, and of all the problems we try to sweep under the carpet.
Editor's Note: An exhibition on the architecture of the Villa Tugendhat will run in the Irish Architectural Archive from January to March 2026.
Throughout its evolution, architecture has been required to engage both with imperfect technologies and the contingencies of life. This is clearly evidenced in Mies Van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat. The villa has a public face of rare perfection, but other aspects make one wonder about the architect’s ethical stance in relation to functionalism and humanity.
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