The Sunday Times

Everyone was dressed in black, and all eyes were on two Americans who had never met before. Martha Schwartz, the colourful landscape architect and artist, had driven out with her clients from the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) to a country house near Dublin airport to unveil her radical design for the capital’s most spectacular new plaza, Grand Canal Square. The developers and architects for the buildings that will form the edges of the new square were there to meet her, eager to see what she had come up with. In the cultish world of high architecture, where people wear black and buildings come in shades of grey, Schwartz’s exciting designs stand out like psychedelic peacocks.