Re: Re: South Leinster Street
Well a more modest one has just gone in across the road on Lincoln Place – the latest addition to this rapidly changing area,
What was hiding underneath scaffolding for months on the site of the decidely wasteful single-storey restaurant/café site…
…was this.
Designed by McCullough Mulvin Architects, it is an extension to the adjoining (much modified) Georgian building on the corner with Clare Street which houses a solicitors’ firm. The new building makes for an eye-catching – if somewhat busy – but nonetheless subtle intervention on the streetscape, at last giving some coherence and form to a street that has had a gaping tooth hole here for many years.
I’m not quite sure what to make of the metal panels – they look rather cartoonish and unreal alongside the permanence and ‘reality’ of the brick. But the protruding string courses do counter their flimsy character quite well.
Nice and simple corner treatment, acknowledging the miniscule depth of this site, as it directly adjoins the mews of the Georgians on Clare Street. Indeed somewhat redolent of the famous Wide Streets Commission turn onto Fleet Street.
Thankfully casements are being used – top hung would be so visually disruptive (and probably technically impossible anyway given their width).
A lovely pink mortar bonds the brick – beautifully soft and mellow,
It is so refreshing to see no pavilion storeys and attendant clutter ranking up behind the parapet; just a simple, unobtrusive, considerate piece of infill. The type of building that ought to be encouraged as the new vernacular – not the exploitative all-consuming behemoths we’re becoming all too-accustomed to in the city of late. Curious decision all the same to deliberately suggest a wafer-like veil of a facade by thinly profiling the joining corner alongside the Georgian building.
Alas the big metal panel directly adjoining the Georgian tips into overload I think – also evident in the earlier wide shot with the Mill Wing. It’s too insubstantial for the solid join required, overly cluttering with other panels nearby, breaks the self-contained rhythm of the storeys, and is already buckling in the middle.
But overall a job very well done. The absence of an active ground floor is questionable, but it’s such an officey/corporate area that perhaps that’s no loss, especially with so many small units directly opposite. This location is also uniquely positioned as to almost permanently experience a low footfall due to its position on the inactive side of a triangle – all the destinations around it have quicker routes than this one. Again a bit like Fleet Street…
There was a slight hiccup with this development in the form of a DCC refusal to grant permission for a linkage through a window of the protected Georgian into the new building, citing material changes to the character of the structure and increased stress on a rare mid-18th century staircase inside. McCullough Mulvin made a highy coherent and well-informed objection to ABP and they overturned it.
Interestingly McCullough Mulvin have also been awarded the contract for the refurbishment of the Dental Hospital buildings directly opposite, as well as others on South Leinster Street as pictured earlier on the thread.
