Block G Spencer Dock

Who is responsible for this?

@gunter wrote:

Who is responsible for this?

I dont know but it looks nice. I guess its part of the overall Spencer Dock development.

I’m trying hard not to be controversial, but this – nice?! See how effortlessly it dialogues with the old hotel and soars majestically above all this hubbub about context, style, scale, etc. Clearly, all these concerns are just for little buildings!

Im certainly not qualified but does the sprawling manky looking blob to the left – ‘dialogue with the old hotel’ :confused:

paul h: got it in one!

paul h: I think johnglas is right, it (the Pricewaterhouse Coopers building) does, in a way, dialogue with the hotel, although I hadn’t heard that term in a while.

There is a similar attempt to address the river with a considerable degree of self importance, but neither building up-stages the Conference Centre, which is the only ‘public building’ east of the Custom House, unless you count the Point.

This 19 storey interloper could be anywhere, of any scale, any height, it could face in any direction, in it’s design, there is nothing to suggest that it responds, in any way, to it’s context. This is what planning officials are put on this earth to stop.

If this is a foretaste of the ‘Liffey Island’, we’re in big trouble.

well it sure is alot more attractive than that hideous thing that was proposed, the national conference center hotel.

The moaners are out in force I see. Its this attitude that has the Dublin skyline in the state it is in. Nothing is ever good enough.

is this conference center hotel thing actually going ahead? I thought it was refused

@cgcsb wrote:

well it sure is alot more attractive than that hideous thing that was proposed, the national conference center hotel.

I still think the hotel is a fine building….. this is just more bling

Now the NCC hotel I like, my favourite proposed tower, but this looks like something you would build by a ring road.

you mean a ring road like the near by M50 which terminates at East Wall Road via the port tunnel?

@notjim wrote:

Now the NCC hotel I like, my favourite proposed tower, but this looks like something you would build by a ring road.

I think that looks better then the NCC hotel. The NCC hotel has a bit of Hawkins House revisited about it :/ Having said that it could work in its location. A nice little cluster of proposals down there now that could give a half decent skyline.

@darkman wrote:

The moaners are out in force I see. Its this attitude that has the Dublin skyline in the state it is in. Nothing is ever good enough.

couldn’t agree more. This site stopped being about critique a long time ago. Now it’s just a forum for people who saw a nice building once but can’t quite remember when where or why they thought so.

If you can’t judge a building on its architectural merits – or lack of – go and join An Taisce.

@cgcsb wrote:

you mean a ring road like the near by M50 which terminates at East Wall Road via the port tunnel?

Yes, in fact, East Point would be the perfect location for this piece of blandness.

@notjim wrote:

Yes, in fact, East Point would be the perfect location for this piece of blandness.

And the U2 tower and Watchtower are any better?:rolleyes:

Well I think the Watchtower is a classic ordinary decent residential tower, no big deal but, assuming the materials and finish are good, I will be happy to see it built; the U2 tower, with it pretense towards the iconic, I find incoherent and ugly, I thought the Zaha Hadid was so much better and I was also a fan of the competition winner, the real one.

Again, not wishing to be controversial, but am I missing something in not believing that a good skyline has anything to do with ‘tall’ buildings? The docklands can take taller buidings (not all of a uniform height) and there is room for ‘punctuation’ marks, but as with the density debate, we need to realise that tall buildings are just a virility (sic, or lack of it?) symbol.
And don’t knock An Taisce; architecture in townscape cannot just be left to architects (alas).

I would think that a skyline is formed directly from various tall(er) buildings
example: Dublin city has no skyline , whereas most large cities of planet earth (throw a dart at a map you’ll find one) have taller buildings and that is what gives ’em their skyline.

This building looks faceless, dull ,corporate, just like the rest of the docklands, the only difference is that its a little bit taller than its surroundings.
It’s only redeeming factors are that its height attempts to break up the monotony and it’s extra few floors give us more elbow room for our large businesses to operate in.

@notjim wrote:

I thought the Zaha Hadid was so much better and I was also a fan of the competition winner, the real one.

The Z.H design is being considered for an adjoining site formerly Tedcastles

@StephenC wrote:

The Z.H design is being considered for an adjoining site formerly Tedcastles

Tedcastles was on the north campshire wasn’t it, isn’t it part of the proposed island or am I confused?

paul h: the point was about tall bldgs; Dublin city does have a skyline – try towers, spires, pinnacles, domes, chimneys, etc. Skyline has as much to do with topography as architecture – Dublin is flat. And most public bldgs were of a different scale to domestic bldgs; just have a look at illustrations of pre-modern cities – they very much had a skyline. The obsession of some architects with (very) tall buidings, which you must have to rate (with whom?), just baffles me. Many American and ‘developing’ cities do have very tall buildings – in the centre – but they also have an endless sprawl of formless suburbs. Where you have an endless sprawl of tall buildings (as in what you see of Chinese cities), there is equally ‘no’ skyline, because when you are in amongst it you are just dwarfed by it – fine and exhilarating in Manhattan, but elsewhere?

…….just baffles me

Likewise the aversion to anything tall baffles me

Many American and ‘developing’ cities do have very tall buildings

What you mean is – many Asian, Australian, African, North American, South American and even a rapidly expanding number of good old European cities

@wearnicehats wrote:

This site stopped being about critique a long time ago.

So what’s your critique of this?

To me, what makes this a particularly bad proposal is the total disregard for context.

We shouldn’t see this proposal in the context of the NCC hotel, or the Watchtower or the U2 building. These are genuine attemps at ‘Landmark’ buildings, located at points in the Docklands cityscape where puntuation would add depth and legibility to the urban form.

This Treasury proposal is not about ‘punctuating the skyline’, it’s the first act in the Spencer Dock / Liffey Island bulk-up. We need to see this building in the context of maybe twenty five similar blocks, all hovering just under the proposed new 20 storey height restriction, all jostling for attention and spilling out over the campshire like a random piece of Detroit that got mixed up with the jig-saw puzzle of Dublin.

Schemes like this and the whole DDDA revised Development Plan which spawned it, seem to misunderstand or disregard the essential character of Dublin, and the central role that the grand set-piece of the Liffey quays plays in maintaining that character. The biggest mistake that being made here is in under-valuing this asset. The coherence of the Liffey quays depends on maintaining a hierarchy of civic buildings, bridges, punctuation points and ordinary streetscapes.

With the National Conference Centre taking shape, (whatever may end up being the judgement on it’s tilted drum), we can see that this hierarchy is still capable of working for us in the 21st century. If we add into the mix a greater flexibility to add dramatic punctuation in the right place, then this great 300+ year old Quay model, that set Dublin on the road to being a significant European city, can be reinforced and the character of the city reinvigorated, not further damaged.

@notjim wrote:

Well I think the Watchtower is a classic ordinary decent residential tower, no big deal but, assuming the materials and finish are good, I will be happy to see it built.

I’m happy to agree with that.

@paul h wrote:

I would think that a skyline is formed directly from various tall(er) buildings
example: Dublin city has no skyline , whereas most large cities of planet earth (throw a dart at a map you’ll find one) have taller buildings and that is what gives ’em their skyline.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Prague+skyline

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Oxford+skyline

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Edinburgh+skyline

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Rome+skyline&m=text

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=San+Miniato+skyline&m=text

Just a few examples of beautiful cities with beautiful skylines which have nothing to do with tall buildings, but topography, punctuation, and the historical overlay of layers in the city’s development. There’s an art to creating a quiet, ordinary building.

reddy: thanks for illustrating my point, and I don’t have an aversion to all tall bldgs, just the assertion that they are the defining principle of ‘modern’ urban design.

Yes excellent examples of beautiful cities.
But you cant honestly compare us to Prague or Rome? Somewhere more like Liverpool would be a closer comparison i would have thought

@paul h wrote:

I would think that a skyline is formed directly from various tall(er) buildings
example: Dublin city has no skyline , whereas most large cities of planet earth (throw a dart at a map you’ll find one) have taller buildings and that is what gives ’em their skyline.

This building looks faceless, dull ,corporate, just like the rest of the docklands, the only difference is that its a little bit taller than its surroundings.
It’s only redeeming factors are that its height attempts to break up the monotony and it’s extra few floors give us more elbow room for our large businesses to operate in.

If it is so awful, which I don’t think it is, actually it’s probably the most pleasing to the eye buildings that has been proposed for Dublin in recent years, Would you enlighten us with what you would find acceptable?

I wish you had posted your . . .

@reddy wrote:

examples of beautiful cities with beautiful skylines which have nothing to do with tall buildings, but topography, punctuation, and the historical overlay of layers in the city’s development. There’s an art to creating a quiet, ordinary building.

. . . yesterday, you could have saved me a lot of time last night in trying to suppress my rage enough to get down a few sentences.

Others will argue that the absence of any topography east of Parliament Street and the pretty shallow historical layers out that direction justify a big brash splash down in the Docklands, but I don’t agree. I think the set-piece of the quays themselves provide all the framework we need to work up a new area of the city that has a real legible connection to the existing character of the city.

It comes back to that question of whether we want to replace Dublin with something else, a different image, a different vision, or whether we actually love Dublin, despite all it’s faults, and we want to repair and reinvigorate it.

If you see the quay walls as a plinth, the scale of the river front buildings suggest themselves at the six to eight storeys that they’ve been using to date. At this scale, even the boring buildings perform a valuable function as the setting for the better ones, the public buildings, the corporate headquarters, the feature towers. At this scale the the landmark towers, the Calatrava bridges, the tilted drums, work as punctuation points. Punctuation doesn’t work if someone’s been scribbling on the page, which is what these geniuses are now at.

To the extent that darkman and cgcsb see something attractive in this scheme, I can only attribute this to the skill of the 3D guys who have excelled themselves once again and set up a superb colour contrast with the redbrick hotel. I would suggest that Hawkins House, cut and pasted into that view, would look stunning!

it’s a little known fact that the miniature statue of liberty in Paris was not, as is popularly thought, dedicated by american parisiens grateful for the gift of the original statue. It was, in fact, made by Irish emigrants, arriving in New York, who presented it to the city as being “of a far more suitable scale for this prominent waterfront area” How it ended up in Paris is lost in the mists of time, rather like An Taisce

I have to admit that I’m with wearnicehats on this one. Every time I see a new thread opened, with it’s title referring to a new planning application, I feel a little sense of hope. “Maybe this time the proposal will be well received”, I think.

But pretty much 100% of the time the discussion veers towards hoping that the scheme be rejected. Off hand, I can’t remember a single thread that was generally positive towards a new proposal (don’t worry, I’m sure there was a couple that you can point out to me, but for the life of me I can’t remember them).

I believe there is a chicken and egg situation occurring – by constantly rejecting cutting edge or “different” buildings, we’re closing off any debate within the general public. Most of what gets built now is bland, simply because it causes the least offense. Which means that Joe Public doesn’t care about or recognise good architecture, because what he lives with, in and around is all so grey. I’m leaning towards the “build it anyway” viewpoint – we may end up with some crappy buildings in the short term, but at least it will generate debate on the ground or in the pubs. And that may well encourage the great unwashed to think about the built environment more, so that the next time they decide to move house, they won’t simply be happy to purchase an identikit semi-d. Unless we can get this discussion raised as a topic among the average person, then we are going nowhere fast.

And it will lead to more and more of this lowest-common-denominator type stuff getting churned out…..

wearnicehats:

Entertaining as always, but what about a critique of the scheme?

Don’t make it too cryptic, some of us went to Bolton Street, you need to keep it simple.

@gunter wrote:

wearnicehats:

Entertaining as always, but what about a critique of the scheme?

Don’t make it too cryptic, some of us went to Bolton Street, you need to keep it simple.

is that the only image / drawing? I’d hate to be judged on my passport photo

some people seem to like office park architecture, as long as it’s tall office park architecture – this is dull

It is that photo that looks off scale not the building, I work down beside the conference centre and from the front it has significant presence on the river. This larger building if built will not look out of place beside the conference centre. The conference centre although not that tall highlights what a mess the IFSC 11 extension has been – – never more so if standing on the south side you look down the river towards the east link and look at the AIG building next to the conference centre.

@gunter wrote:

It comes back to that question of whether we want to replace Dublin with something else, a different image, a different vision, or whether we actually love Dublin, despite all it’s faults, and we want to repair and reinvigorate it.

No not change but ‘add to’ or ‘grow’
You really think some taller buildings in the docklands will ‘replace Dublin’ or change its image??
What exactly is our image?
Dirty?
junkie/bum/wino filled?

Dublin is big enough and bold enough to soak up a couple of taller buildings down in her docklands
Chill out kid.

So…nobody knows what this building is supposed to be then??!

Looks kinda like the new Eircom building up at Heuston Station. Looks like that building out at Blanchardstown as well.

However regarding the image, look how bad the concrete pile is on the left. What a mess of cluttered horizontal lines and dull grey concrete!

Hadn’t even heard of this – haven’t found any indication of it’s discontinuation either. At least the docklands will have some height!