Re: Re: One Berkley court -132m Tower

I know better than to touch this thread, (although it has calmed down a lot since the early days of last September), but a couple of things have been nagging at me.

It was reported early on that Henning Larsen had beaten off 8 other practices in a competition to design this scheme. Is anything known about that ‘competition’ or, what the other outfits came up with?

Was it a competition in the Elm Park mode, as reported in the IT Feb. 14 i-e ‘who could get the most on?’

It always struck me as a happy coincidence for Sean Dunne that a Copenhagen based design firm won out for such a high profile controversial scheme shortly after DCC’s chief planning officer was reported as advocating that Dublin learn a thing or two from comparable cities, notably, Copenhagen. I suppose you don’t get to be a multi-millionaire without being able to spot when the barn door is open!

I know that on a purely human level, you’d love the whole thing to fail spectacularly, but, on the other hand, we’ve all been moaning for years that our developers aren’t architecturally ambitious enough and then one comes along that is . . .

The only things that I’ve decided for sure are that:

1. The scheme subverts the Development Plan.

2. The Lansdowne Road frontage is dull repetitive architecture that is less worth having than the present set of railings and line of decent trees.

3. The slightly windy inner street parallel to Lansdowne Road is potentially stunning.

4. The other inner streets have the potential to completely transform Ballsbridge.

5. The tower is landmark quality, where a landmark would seem to be justified.

These are just my opinions. I could be completely wrong.