Re: Re: One Berkley court -132m Tower

jimg, you’ve good points there. I too hate the way some shops & cafes in the Ballsbridge / Leeson Street area don’t bother to open at the weekend, or even after 5.30pm on weekdays, as they obviously make so much money at weekday lunch time.

I also hate the term ‘village’, but the centre of Ballsbridge, the area around the junctions of Shelbourne Road, Angelsea Road, Herbert Park, Elgin Road, the RDS, the bridge, the river, the U.S. embassy etc. this area has a scale and a character which might be a bit short of urban, but is still satisfying. One of my problems with this whole development is that I don’t see the satisfactory boundary, or alternatively, the satisfactory transition, between this Ballsbridge and this new ‘urban quarter’ Ballsbridge.

If the logic of this decision is that the new ‘urban quarter’ is just going to be dropped in afterwards like the way that Los Angeles, (which famously used to be all suburbs and no city), eventually got a dense urban core, then that could work, if there is a fully worked out vision for how the new urban core is going to be contained, and if the relationships between the new urban core and the pre-existing terraces are satisfactory.

In my opinion, a lot of the relationships are not satisfactory. The proposal for Lansdown Road, even reduced from 11 to 9 storeys, is particularly poor, and I would not be at all confident that the new urban core is going to be contained.

Permitting this development in the absence of a comprehensive overall vision, how can DCC refuse landmark structures, and everything that goes with that, on apparently equally deserving corners sites throughout Ballsbridge and elsewhere, when they’ve handed this one to Dunne on a plate?

I imagined that there might be some real ingenuity shown in the planning conditions that would take the high architectural ambitions of the scheme and bond them with a bit of civic responsibility to get us to a well planned and exciting place by the back door, but maybe that will happen yet with ABP.

Or am I being delusional?