Re: Re: college green/ o’connell street plaza and pedestrians

2/10/2011

@StephenC wrote:

More repro standards on College Green. It must be said that improved lighting here is very much needed…its very dark at night. Looks like they need to do a bit each Sunday due to traffic volumes….so it may be a while before we see the finished scheme. I hope the take the awful standards at Grafton Street down while they are at it – 1970s industrial park chic.

Okay, it’s confirmed – I officially give up on this city.

What appeared earlier in the week to be an innocuous enough, typically ill-informed project by Dublin City Council to stick a few Scotch Standards on College Green, has morphed into outright farce.

This has to be joke, it just has to be – there is no other explanation.

Literally centimetres apart.

More mindless clutter.

You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

Not only does this bonkers arrangement of lampposts look utterly preposterous, not only does it fail to acknowledge the format of street lighting historically deployed on College Green, not only does it fail to acknowledge even a basic axial alignment with the Bank of Ireland, not only does generate a completely unnecessary level of clutter through a ridiculous over-concentration of standards – but the scheme is made all the worse by at least five additional standards scattered all around the perimeter of the central island, including a further insane concentration at the entrance to Foster Place.

Truly, one has to ask how the city’s public authority, time and time again, can get away with such outrageously financially wasteful, visually illiterate, and what one can only describe as incompetent, projects such as this – in this instance damaging not only the setting of nationally important buildings, but also the very image of Dublin on an international level.

Who is in charge of this scheme? Where is the architectural input? The public realm design input? The conservation input?

Frankly, it is so grossly unfair to citizens and the few people who dedicate so much of their time and working lives to trying to improve Dublin city, that at virtually every stroke they come up against a brick wall with those who are charged with running this city. This scheme is an insult to everyone who wants to see change in Dublin.

It is well known that management of the city centre is now bordering on non-existent, in spite of the considerably reduced workload of Dublin City Council since the recession. How the likes of the above can still take place at a time when there has never been more breathing space to have expert input on all significant projects is completely beyond me.