32-floor building planned for Dublin

[FIN]

stuck in traffic!!! :-)

i think that medieval planning they used the landmark as a navigation and street evolved in such a way as to be able to see it from anywhere. this gives the whole street/city a human feel and people could travel through the spaces easier with a knowledge of where they were.

[garethace]

Actually you really have to get out and about around Dublin city, to really see how things like St. Patrick's cathedral do provide that orientation function within the city of Dublin, even still today.

I mean, St. Pat's probably isn't true medieval, medieval no more than ChristChurch. But the function it does in the urban fabric is quite similar.

There is a nice Church in Dawson street, that really marks it spot quite well too - even if in years to come, it became a bank, or an office, or headquarters for a company - it would still function architecturallly within the entire city, in exactly the same way.

So maybe there is an important lesson in studying religous architecture - for doing commercial projects.

[FIN]

yea the urban planning took that idea into even now with out "landmark" buildings. not quite the same cos the idea just got a bit mangled but u can see it's ancestory.

[PVC King]

St Annes Church an Dawson St has many admirers, it is a fine building.

When people talk about true Medievel landmarks they are talking about buildings such as the Cathedral in Milan which can be seen from a great distance.

Where the cathedrals of Commerce came in as that the Church(es) no longer provide the lead when it comes to landmark buildings.

Where the skyline was once dominated by church steeples in most cities people must look to property developers to provide new landmarks.

As time has gone on these landmarks have tended to get ever higher. Given the problems with open balconies most cities tend to build their tallest buildings as offices.

Tall buildings are in essence the pinacle of our built environment it is therefore essential that they are perfect.

[garethace]

I have a couple of images lashed out in the computer recently, but I forgot the damn disk again today - so tomorrow maybe.

Computers are really a top alternative, when looking for ways to design those things to be 'as perfect as you say'.

It looks like Ireland is going the 'Earth Simulator' route soon, with the Science Federation Ireland thing.

http://www.sfi.ie/content/content.asp?section_id=226&language_id=1&publication_id=1085

My best guess, is that some heavily fortified bunker out in Sandyford industrial estate will house a big computer for scientists around Dublin to log into and run calculations.

Apparently, this is a very lucrative area indeed - Japan currently lead in this field, beating the USA for a number of years now.

Maybe, they could get a few little 'Total Architecture' games to work for us. :-)

[PVC King]

Do you remember the begining of Robocop when the news broadcaster spoke of all the corporate HQ's moving to Iceland to avoid urban chaos?

But back to simulators, definitely the way to go the addition of more perspectives can only be a good thing.

It is good to see investment going into this area, the biggest problems with the blunders have the past have involved insufficient calculations.

A little overcalculation would be great!!!!!!

[garethace]

Well how many calculations do you want? Earth Simulator can do roughly a thousand, thousand million sums per second.

Basically it can simulate all the weather systems around the world, as they happen in real time.

I have a bit of a talk going on here;

http://www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=105065626

about supercomputing too.

But the whole area of digital storage technology is getting really interesting too.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13688

So it will be possible to actually store a lot of high quality info.

[garethace]

Couple of more images at the bottom of this thread, just click the links.

http://www.cgarchitect.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=8&t=000061#000009