Re: Re: Dublin Fruit Market

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.