Analysis: Fresh from the failure of their plans for the Carlisle Pier in Dún Laoghaire - even though it was the public's first choice - property developer Mr Terry Devey and international architect Mr Daniel Libeskind have bounced back with Grand Canal Square.
Mr Libeskind, as Mr Devey said yesterday is one of the world's leading architects.
He made the headlines with his sensational Jewish Museum in Berlin and has since been commissioned to redevelop the World Trade Centre in New York.
His projects include the controversial Spiral extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Imperial War Museum in Manchester; the Bremen Philharmonic Hall in Germany; and the Denver Art Museum in the US.
It was Mr Devey who persuaded Mr Libeskind to come to Dublin - for the Carlisle Pier project. And it was largely as a result of their intervention that the Dún Laoghaire Harbour Board held a major competition which, ironically, Mr Devey and Mr Libeskind lost. But Mr Devey was determined Dublin would get a Libeskind building.
So when the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) invited expressions of interest in developing Grand Canal Square, he saw an excellent opportunity.
The docklands authority has reason to celebrate, too. It had tried to lure the Abbey Theatre to this site at the north-western corner of the Grand Canal Dock, but that project was quashed by the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, who wanted to keep it on the northside.
Asked yesterday if he regretted the loss of the Abbey, the authority's chief executive, Mr Peter Coyne, said: "Not now we don't."
What's proposed is certainly dramatic - a huge wedge-shaped building, flanked by "galleria" malls to rear and forming the centrepiece of a new public space, with a light and glazed office block on one side and a hotel seemingly hewn from stone on the other.
It is possible to imagine the interaction of buildings, space and people in the irregularly-shaped Grand Canal Square as being not unlike the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The aim is to enliven the area "24 hours a day, seven days a week", as Mr Libeskind said. Apart from his own quite extraordinary building as its centrepiece, the square will benefit from the enormous contrast between Duffy Mitchell O'Donoghue's light and airy office building and Mr Manuel Aires Mateus's dramatic Park Hyatt Hotel.
The hotel's design, with its cavernous undercroft and heavy stone façade punctuated by window cut-outs, seems to have been inspired by the Giant's Causeway or the Cliffs of Moher. It will have two parallel blocks of 94 serviced apartments to the rear.What this scheme has is diversity - something that's been lacking in other parts of Docklands.
There is a sameness about the International Financial Services Centre just as there is a sameness about much of what was built in its 12-acre extension.
According to Mr Devey, the combination of uses and architecture proposed will ensure that Grand Canal Square becomes as recognisable in our "memory map" as the Lincoln Centre or the Barbican are to New York and London respectively.