Re: Re: Carlton Cinema Development

Fingal will be gone in its entirety and Dublin Bus re-faced as it is a Protected Structure with a near-fully fledged townhouse surviving behind its deceptive curtain wall. Just a correction from earlier, the RDH has vanished in its entirety, with only the gable walls left standing for the benefit of No. 42 and the AIB.

Looking at the replacement building online, permission was granted exactly a year ago. It’s a standard, uncontroversial, anodyne affair, divided into two blocks to give the appearance of two buildings, one wider and taller than the other. Minimally dressed upper floors with expansive double-height retail at street level, the reinterpreted Georgian language works well with the compact No. 41 (left) but is repetitive, bland and wholly uninspired on such a large scale at No. 40 (right).

© Dublin Central Architects

No. 40 was originally to be faced entirely in red brick, but this was changed by condition upon the intervention of the case planner. The use of brick on such a scale facing a visually independent major commercial building would be unprecedented on the thoroughfare. Brick dressed with stone in a contemporary manner could have been successful, but the lack of faith in modern architects to pull this off without descending into pastiche tends to draw one over to the planner’s favoured comfort zone of stone only.

Both buildings are now going to be faced in granite, detailed in a manner similar to the Ussher Library in Trinity, which is quite elegant. The window opes feature an opaque light box to one side which illuminates after dark.