Re: Re: One Berkley court -132m Tower

Whatever we might say about planning and architecture in Dublin in the 1970s, at least they understood a few simple principles like, that one side of a street should respect the other.

Back then, the seven storey Jurys and Berkley Court Hotels were kept back behind the existing boundary and screened by the superb perimeter of mature trees, which, I think are the remnants of 19th century botanical gardens on the site, formerly belonging to Trinity College.

One of the most unsettling aspects of the reported granting of planning permission for the Mountbrook scheme must be the acknowledgement that they wouldn’t have got away with that back in the backward, urban illiterate, Ireland of the 1970s.

I would be a lot more comfortable about a new high density urban quarter being parachuted into a mature 19th century suburban/village setting, if it was being led by a grand local authority vision and if the ‘new’ urban quarter had defined and logical boundaries.

The present plan looks a lot like an arbitrary unbalanced creation occupying perhaps half of a city block, with little obvious scope to either, fill out the other half, or detach itself from it, to become legible as a stand alone ubran scale entity in it’s own right with it’s own dynamic.