Re: Re: Grafton Street, Dublin

Assuming the public domain revamp will go ahead!

While the majority of this planning application is perfectly acceptable, it is quite clear this should have gone to further information. It is completely unacceptable that any building, especially that on the main shopping street of the city in a premier ACA, is proposed to be completely altered to its exterior with no architectural impact assessment or design rationale. Indeed, it appears Grafton Street elevation drawings were not even submitted as part of the application! Certainly they are not online, while details of rendering, reveals, sills, capping out etc are not mentioned by the planner. Has this information been provided?

No information is available about the proposed new windows, about making good the ‘inelegant’ proportions of the opes as mentioned by the conservation report, nor any detailed description of the new shopfronts. There is far too much important information missing in this application to be ‘satisfactorily addressed by way of condition’.

While I have no image to hand, No. 57 is the nastiest little building on Grafton Street – a cheap piece of brick-clad concrete infill in the idiom of its ugly 1980s colleague over on Upper O’Connell Street at the junction with Parnell Street. Not only does prominent site on Grafton Street’s most tawdry stretch demand design excellence, it arguably also requires an extra storey. Agreed with Stephen that more emphasis should have been placed on restoring the Protected Structure at No. 58 too, with the Council making efforts to stimulate action with the matching building of its pairing at No. 59. It is the lack of joined up thinking like this that makes you pull your hair out in this city. The stripping of brick on these two buildings would transform the entire southerly introduction to Grafton Street and help redefine this tatty quarter of the city.

Half-baked proposals like this coming through and we’re applying for World Design Capital 2014. Good luck lads.