Dublin Fruit Market

[TLM]

According to the IT Patrick Guilbaud may be involved in a cookery school in the new scheme and Fallon & Byrne may anchor the development - good news to hear high profile restrauneurs are showing an interest in being involved!

[fergalr]

When are we getting this little square? It looks like a very nice proposal but one that I would've imagined should be done by now.

[TLM]

Here's the full text.... The developer was announced yesterday so hopefully things will get moving shortly.

Restaurateur Patrick Guilbaud and the team behind food -emporium and restaurant Fallon & Byrne are understood to be in discussions to be potential tenants for the Victorian Fruit and Vegetable Market in Dublin's north inner city when it is redeveloped.

The developer chosen by Dublin City Council to transform the wholesale market located between the Four Courts and Capel Street, just to the north of the river Liffey, into a new retail development was announced yesterday, almost three years after the plans to redevelop the market were first published by former city manager, John Fitzgerald.

The Markets Regeneration Consortium is the council's preferred bidder and hopes to shortly sign contracts. The consortium is 50 per cent owned by Blackrock International Land, the property arm of Fyffes, 25 per cent by car dealer turned developer, Joe Linders and the remaining 25 per cent by developer Paddy Kelly.

It is understood that the fruit and vegetable market will remain as a market hall, with most of the new business devoted to retail and a smaller wholesale offering.

A new culinary school is also planned, which will possibly have involvement from Patrick Guilbaud, while Fallon & Byrne have been identified as possible anchor tenants for the market.

Next door on the old fish market site there will be apartments and an open square, with some office and retail space. An underground car park with about 300 spaces is also planned for the area.

Approximately 34 predominantly wholesale traders selling fruit, vegetables and flowers are currently tenants of the council in the market.

A spokesman for the Dublin Market Traders' Association, which represents the majority of the traders, said last night that neither the consortium nor the council had made any approach to them in relation to their future in the market.

The majority of traders have been renting pitches from the council for decades, with businesses passed down through some families for more than 100 years.

© 2008 The Irish Times

[StephenC]

Its incredible that this project has taken so long to come to fruition (pardon the pun). Even despite this story we are only at preferred tender stage...not tender agreed. There is still further design (and no doubt substantial changes to the original plan), planning, appeals (likely), construction and then no doubt we'll have a CHQ-like saga of finding tenants.

Zzzzzzz Wake me up when we're there

[missarchi]

i think we will get there!

[Alek Smart]

Oh we `ll get there all right,just as soon as that 300 underground car park spaces figure can be improved upon......any mention of a non-Luas Public Transport quotient...?

[jdivision]

Has anybody seen the images of the proposed scheme yet. Oh dear. Dodgy Marbella here we come.

[notjim]

Have you seen something other than the framework plan?

http://www.dublincity.ie/Planning/OtherDevelopmentPlans/FrameworkDevelopmentPlans/Pages/CityMarkets.aspx

[Paul Clerkin]

I have just received the images - will post before 4pm. It's not great to be honest.

[Paul Clerkin]

http://ireland.archiseek.com/news/2008/000069.html

[StephenC]

Ho Ho! I can see clouds of steam from the ears of various contributors already rising...

HKR Heaven!!!

[manifesta]

I don't know, but for some reason I'm craving waffles.

[StephenC]

Or an enormous tub of melted chocolate to pour over it all! a minute on the lips.....

[Peter Fitz]

whats the opposite of wow ?

[jdivision]

blah? It reminds me of those redbrick apartment buildings in Milltown, Dundrum etc where apartments take forever to sell because they're so old. This is not retro cool, it's Carroll's Smithfield Lofts scheme gone wrong.

[notjim]

what was the film where someone had a W tattooed on each bum-cheek so that when they bent over it spelled WoW: in that context the opposite of wow is "o".

[Peter Fitz]

blah? It reminds me of those redbrick apartment buildings in Milltown, Dundrum etc where apartments take forever to sell because they're so old. This is not retro cool, it's Carroll's Smithfield Lofts scheme gone wrong.

I'd tend to agree ... perhaps i'm a bit quick to judge based on that montage but given that its essentially the same brick wallpaper twisted at will, i don't know if i need to see any more.

[Peter Fitz]

what was the film where someone had a W tattooed on each bum-cheek so that when they bent over it spelled WoW: in that context the opposite of wow is "o".

[LOB]

whats the opposite of wow ?

mom!

[Paul Clerkin]

as had been pointed out to me by email - the brick is Aras Ui Dhalaigh for the 21st century.

[johnglas]

Unfortunately , the Fruit Market building shows up just how dire the new stuff is. The blurb descibes it as 'world class' - whose world? what class?

[GrahamH]

I'm surpised nobody's mentioned the 'signature' building at Mayor Square yet.


© The Irish Times


Have to say I kinda like its expressive, sharp forms. The building in the distance looks like it has a digital audio meter on the roof



However so much of the same design across the board I suspect will either be dramatically effective or extremely tiresome. The same may also contribute to an atmosphere of a 'designed' 1980's UK town centre regeneration, which is my greatest concern.

Still - we're getting too much of a multi-faceted, softly softly approach of jumbling various buildings of late in major redevelopments. At least this has the guts to work with a singular concept in mind. Whether this concept is unduly monotonous, I haven't quite decided. What I have decided is that 'world class' is not a term that immediately springs to mind.

The choice of brick is going to be crucial.

[gunter]

The person I feel sorry for here is whoever the guy was in DCC that came up with this idea in the first place, he must be feeling sick right now.

The whole 'Fruit Market' project was a really great idea that DCC, to their credit, have followed through on when it can't have been easy to deal with all the vested interests. Potentially the 'Fruit Market' scheme could be as important to the north inner city as Temple Bar is to the south inner city, and, (as has been said before by Frank McDonald, I think), as a link to the under performing Smithfield area, it could be the crucial factor that makes everything else click.

There is no way that this architecture does any justice to any of the these aspirations. If this was designed by three different architectural practices, why does it all look the same?

Why could something of this scale not have been broken down into smaller development parcels to generate some diversity of design approach under an umbrella of a single masterplan.

In the HKR planning submission for the Motor Tax Office scheme next door, they showed a contextual drawing of the 'Fruit Market' scheme (with the roof off the market building) that looked genuinely interesting. The rigid geometry and the dodgy colonnades of the preliminary scheme were gone and the new scheme (below) looked almost relaxed and at the same time vibrant.

Some of that is just the difference between the graphics of an artist's impression and the harsh reality of a photo-montage, but mostly it's the quality of the design.

Either the design of the elevations changed, or else, the artist doing the line drawing couldn't bring himself to draw all those repeating squares.

We've waited all these years for a decent new urban space in the centre of Dublin, I'd sooner they took another year and got it right, then put up with this.

[notjim]

You see I must be remembering this wrong but I thought the big clever thing for this square was that it was going to be designed in the old fashioned Georgian Sq/Grotmarket way: the council would establish a parapet line, a building line and so on and then individual lots would be sold off to individual developer to build what they wanted within that. Surely that would be better, more fun, more Market Squarish?

PS - that building on Mayor Sq is a nightmare, I hate it.

[johnglas]

The main problem with the Mayor Square bldg is that it cuts off the 'plebs' to the north from getting any access through it to the middle-class nirvana to the south. Why did DCC allow it? Notjim: I agree with what you've said: DCC should set out a detailed masterplan and individual (but largish) plots should invite design submissions. Three architects, one design; sounds like a supermarket cartel.