Re: Re: Should the Clarence Hotel redevelopment get permission?

@paddyb wrote:

This plan is a catastrophe. I cannot fathom how seven members of ABP could take this grossly overscaled Disneyland facadism and hold it up as ‘exceptional design’.

I don’t know how the inner processes work in APB, but the selection of the inspector would appear to be a critical decision. While I wouldn’t dissagree with too much that was in the inspector’s report on the Clarence, there are a couple of things that stand out:

1. That ‘Conceptually brilliant, but contextually illiterate’ phrase, and

2. The name of the inspector.

If a particular inspector was possibly prone to grandstanding and had a back catelogue that included a withering evaluation of another large scale redevelopment proposal for a contextually challenging site in Dublin, that had been abruptly and properly overturned by the Board, would that be the inspector you would pick to take this particular file?

I think that ‘Conceptually brilliant’ phrase is undeserved, I suspect it was introduced to give maximum effect to the ‘contextually illiterate’ part of the couplet, which is deserved. To me, this is the Achille’s heel in the whole report, it gave the Board the soundbite they needed to to justify their Grant of Permission. Who wouldn’t want a building that even it’s most vocal denouncer conceded was ‘Conceptually brilliant’?