The immediate setting of the development on all sides is an important consideration in announcing the development, in this context, with the thresholds of the familiar Guinness gates and entrances carefully worked so as to retain their current identity, function and prominence. For an already dense mature city site, much of the context will nevertheless be evolving, new elements beside the re-imagined old, likewise for landscape, with artefacts retained or re-incorporated alongside new interventions such as areas of bespoke surfacing replacing industrial strength concrete.

Currently the open space is a concrete car park, but nevertheless has many artefacts worthy of retention and reuse within the open space itself. The tram tracks are again evident and of great value and will once again need to be taken up and re-laid once the services are in and the new surface of bespoke concrete, (rich in fragments of the demolition as a constituent) laid down around them.

The central seating feature, arranged at a scale appropriate for this key nexus point between two key entrances into the development (the other being the laneway from Crane Street), and the East-West linking street into Main Square. This feature will
enable seating facing towards any direction, allowing autonomy of choice to follow the sun’s orientation, or people-watch in the direction of a particular pedestrian flow.

The southern end of Main Square forms part of a tripartite new street corner, a key orienting point in the centre of the site. While the southward direction leads through Cornhill to Robert Street and the Guinness Storehouse, turning eastward brings the visitor to some of the quieter ‘eddies’ of space, where a greater density of nature is intended. The larger of the two spaces is named Middle Square, though it will likely end up have more characteristics in common with a garden space, than a paved square.