Ian Tracy is an Architect based on North Great George Street for 12 years.
‘The First building we were in, I think it’s still there, but going on to the roof, kind of just as we were moving out the last few days there and just being up on the roof of a building in the city centre and getting to scan around the horizon.
It’s quite nice. It’s a similar feeling if you’re ever in the cafe in Marks and Spencer on Grafton Street. It’s really maybe just for architects, I don’t know, but like the diversity of roofs and how all the roofs are formatted and built, and it’s kind of, you know, 250 years of history in roofs and how they’re formatted and built and maintained and how they’ve changed and adapted. So being up there and getting to look, getting that unusual view of the city centre. And now you’ve just triggered a memory. So it’s all architects here at the moment. But we’ve sublet to different people over the years. So we had a vegan food critic, we’ve had web designers, and we had a lovely firm of Spanish / Mexican graphic designers who took up half the front of the studio, and they were lovely, but they also lived on the top floor apartment here. So there’s offices downstairs, in the front and here. The basement and the return are apartments. And then there’s two apartments above as well. The graphic designers were working here and living upstairs. So we had the most amazing party one Halloween that went through the whole building, but the graphic designers had a little attaché, and we climbed up onto the roof of this building, and we’re looking out over this area. So maybe I just like being at height. I dunno. But I’d love it if it stayed as diverse as it is. And I think that is not a cure-all, but I believe it’s a significant component of fighting against some of the more endemic social problems we have. That if you can keep people here, keep the diversity of views, give some people a cultural output or the ability to see other people, just that, that mixing of people to keep it at our genes, I think contributes in part, maybe not significantly, I don’t know. But I think it’s a contributing factor to not just having a nice city to live in but kind of ensuring everyone is seen and helped.’
