Reply To: Royal Dublin Hotel

It is so not the case of fixating on times past, or anything like that.
Stephens Court works well because of the lack of uniformity on the Green, the site layouts and parapets of buildings are all erratic, in which case Stephens Court can exist purely for it’s own sake in the midst of the jumble of surrounding buildings.

O’ Connell St is entirely different, where the maintance of a standard parapet level, similar facing materials and styles are crucial to the effect created. It is not the case of harking back and all that crap, at least 95% of it’s architectural stock is of an historic nature, and to have a tainting 5% minority of modern infill is simply unaccepable, particularly destroying the north western side/end of the street (RDH end)

I can never get over how so many people and architects just flatly refuse to even consider thinking about appropriate replicas in areas where a complete sense of character could be restored with a single building being redeveloped in this manner.
Instead we end up with either pastiche or some watered-down modernist rubbish ‘reflecting the proportions and materials of surrounding buildings, being midful of this historic area’, some have hearted 80s-influenced pile of tat morelike.

Development in the way I suggest is moving forward, not backward.