Re: Re: Dublin Quays …latest addition.

You’re a very hard man to please Graham. It’s not often that architects get given out to for going up in standard! The stone finish here is a much higher spec than brick . . and it oozes quality, which is not what most recent city centre developments have oozed.

@GrahamH wrote:

The office park character of the building, meanwhile, suggests a lack of imagination and ambition, and an inability to deal with challenging design concepts which so sorely need to take infill architecture in Dublin to a new level.

One selectively quotes Graham at their peril . . . but, I don’t see a lack of imagination here . . . (apart from in the funky spacing of the opes in the outer frame, which, to be kind to it, is a little stiff, and maybe in the vertical strip windows, which don’t really complement either main facade approach, and perhaps in the Tegral brochure aesthetics of the recessed penthouse storey) . . . I think I see a genuine exercise in restraint.

And getting commercial clients to pay for stone is a lot harder than it looks and deliberately losing floor space (behind the facade) in the interests of depth in the architectural expression can’t have been an easy concept to sell either.

I think that the presence of a Georgian block between this building and the Four Courts is enough separation for the contextual use of brick not to be crucial here and, in any case, there’s no way the building would have turned out as refined as it did if they had gone done that route.

My only fear would be that, if we like it, and we’re all bitter and twisted, god only knows what the award citations are going to say about it!