Re: Re: Thomas Street & James Street, Dublin!

Heh – and the ultimate irony being that ‘the listed redbrick’ is not listed, and if one had to make a harsh call of a cull in the group, that would be one of the first to go, not the last.

I spoke at length with two of the students involved in the above, who were actually quite considerate (perhaps one was Mr Jordan), but they kept restating, upon my no doubt grating incredulity at the project brief, that the lecturers were insisting that the site was to be cleared and that maximum scope be taken from the ‘contemporary presence on Thomas Street’. In fact, they were genuinely interested in the challenge of accommodating what was there once its significance and interest was explained to them.

As with the UCD GPO Abbey Theatre proposals a year or two ago, the mind boggles at the thinking behind what one can only describe as wasteful and corrupting exercises of this nature. Not only, by definition of the brief, are the buildings crude and non-contextual, they just look plain daft. That’s the main point, not really the historic streetscape aspect: one feels embarrassed both for the students trying to satisfy lunatic professors, and for the marooned civic buildings sandwiched in a rambling merchant terrace which would quite clearly like to be somewhere else. Like Coventry.

In other news, the vacant site a few doors up from the former library at No. 25ish currently has a large scaffold being erected by, presumably, The Digital Hub. Looks like they’re consolidating the exposed party walls of the flanking houses – a decade after the tooth was extracted.