capel street bridge

There’s a bit about it on this other thread:

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?p=35905#post35905

What does it actually mean? Is it something in order to allow the kiosks on the bridge?

I think the idea of using a kiosk and renting that space is a wonderful idea in principle, on paper,.. as a concept,… but to turn any concept into a reality, you need a visionary designer,.. the idea and figures on paper aren’t good enough on their own. Great idea yes,.. because the city already does own this land, which isn’t doing that much,… and it can be used to provide retail space, in a different way to the normal plots of Georgian row houses etc, etc. But, my problem isn’t with this idea of retail space in principle if executed well,… but if you cannot do that, execute the idea well, then forget it. Half-baked is not the best way to go about this kind of retail space design,… you can get away with ‘half-baked’ usually when providing retail space on a normal urban infill site, but not in this situation, not on this site,… it is a way more complex than that, and deserves, even cries out for the hand of an expert.

Those kiosks are an abominable disaster, in how they were treated…. either they were done by some state paid architect who couldn’t give a shit, or someone who clearly didn’t know what they were doing. I hate the way, it effectively just ‘splits’ the pedestrian traffic now, between a slow wide lane on the inside for ‘loiterers’,… with a zippier thin line of shopping bag carriers trying to make progress faster on the outside, while trying not to jump out onto the road and get hit from behind by a motorcycle or bus. The whole attempt just reeks of some kind of ‘cosy, bureaucratic’ time-sheet filling. I just hate to see public resources flushed down the toilet in that way, especially as our public bodies are full of talented man and woman-power, well capable of doing much better than this. Sometimes you end up in situations, where too many designers fight over ‘what it should be’,… Architects are notoriously bad at fighting over, who is going to be head Pancho, when they are asked to ‘work in groups’. Given the extremely sensitive nature of this ‘site’ and the kind of opportunity it provided to do something very nice,… you could easily end up with a failure of the ‘design team’ to pull together. In ten years time, another generation of talented young designers will be ‘removing’ the kiosks, so for the moment, it is just a damb pity and another wasted opportunity…. and yeah, a masssive understatement of the talent and professionalism contained now in DCC.

This city just has to wise up a little about how pedestrians behave and get around, in relation to heavy traffic, in relation to other pedestrians, street sellers and everything else,… and stop putting amateurs doing a job, of designing in situations, that demand a properly experienced veteran, rather than a chancer climbing up a ladder,… who will not care a hoot in a few years time, what sort of trail of disasters they left after them. On a positive note though, if you come from the Westmoreland Street direction these days and gaze over at Bachelors walk, and down to your right towards Liberty hall, there is a steady and perceptible ‘cross-current’ of pedestrian traffic using an ‘East-West’ axis route now, at the bottom of O’ Connell Street,… it isn’t all just the North-South stuff, that was so familiar for years, and the nearby Quays axis hardly even existed. The traffic planners and Architects in Dublin have effectively managed to ‘re-interpret’ the whole problem, and come up with a much saner solution I think. But the kiosk treatment on Capel Street bridge now is just another sympthom, of how architectural schools in Ireland emphasise ‘objects’ in their training of their young design students, to the exclusion of any discussion about how people need to move around, to actually navigate their way through an urban landscape in 2005.

I guess it is just strange to have space ‘provided’ on the Quays by the boardwalk and widening of pavements on O’Connell Street, whilst on Capel Street bridge, we have ended up somehow ‘losing’ space, and displacing the pedestrian. You are suddenly seeing more movement of pedestrians made possible in many situations, so it is just strange to see pedestrian bottleneck created on a bridge directly in view from DCC headquarters! Do I even want to go there? ? ? ? Lets just recall,… how DCC, tried this idea of putting large objects in the middle of pedestrian thoroughfares many times before, when they decided to build the Fountain in the middle of O’Connell Street, which became a bottleneck too… forcing pedestrians either side of the fountain, into this tiny miserable ‘tight squeeze’ where you had to fit in between heavy traffic and guys eating burgers. DCC seem ‘prone’ to having one major ‘cock-up’ every ten years,… which points the finger straight at Architects in the council who are working up a ladder, and don’t give due regard to ‘small projects’ they have to do along the way, as a duty and a formality,…. rather than an opportunity and a challenge. But if you never learn to see things like these as opportunities, in design schools, then chances are, you will not in the real world either. The challenge was to do something, which didn’t interupt the flow of pedestrian movement,… and in that task it has failed woefully.

We have a similar problem in the middle of College Green, where all sorts of artistic sculpture and rubbish in general has simply ‘accumulated’ in the middle of the street, over the years,,… so now instead of that being pedestrian territory, it is basically owned by sculptures that no one ever looks/enjoys, angry Taxi rank parkers, who protest if you even ‘brush’ against their cars, and chaotic traffic rushing past in both directions,… and a pathetically unsucessful attempt to provide a pedestrian ‘cross-over’ opposite the Central Bank fore court. That reeks just as much, of generations of nice young men and women Architects at DCC, who ‘spent time’ on projects, on their way up through the ladder of DCC. Sad really, the present condition of the city is just a lot poorer for that. I always recall in my time at Architecture School, how one of the star students won the Xmas, student design project, by placing a massive ‘cool-looking object’ in the middle of College Green,.. now it was a COOL looking object, Spielberg or Lucas couldn’t have done it much better, but what College Green needs now is another object in the middle, like it needs a hole in the head. The sponsors of these student design competitions are often large building contractors, or building product manufacturers,… so often the incentive, is to make something that it an expensive looking object, something that would be difficult to build, but look really cool. It takes some real balls sometimes, to just see a site or location, for how it should be,… left as it is,… with perhaps careful management of services and ‘stuff’ under the ground, or ‘out-of-the-way’,… just to retain that sense, of what the space should be.

That stuff, should include stuff, like Taxi ranks and Bus stopping,.. Westmoreland Street and upper O’ Connell Street, is a poster child for inefficient tidying ‘away’ of nasty stuff, and not allowing the space to be what it wants to be. For some reason, DCC took exactly the right approach with O’ Connell Street, a large profile project, and yet on a smaller job, the Capel Street bridge, it was allowed to pass through the pipeline, and noone seemed to pick up, how ill-informed the strategy was. Some state pensioned designer has now left that mess behind them, and moved onto much higher, greener pastures I would imagine. But that is the trouble with doing one very good large scale project such as O’ Connell Street – the smaller stuff, which is also important, around the town, can get neglected and left to young hopefuls, whose ‘heart’ really must not be with their appointed design tasks.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Maybe they looked better on the plans but everyone can see now that they are extremely ugly.

Even if they had been well designed, encouraging street commerce in costume jewellery and other pound-shop tat is looking like a weak idea.

I’d give them 2 years before they are replaced by a few benches looking eastwards over the river.

Yeah those kiosks are terrible.

My immediate reaction when I first saw them was that whoever designed them must have spent a lot of time working on the concourses of suburban shopping centres. They might have been rejects from the arrivals hall of Dublin airport but they are truly ugly in the context of the bridge.

Besides their ugliness, I cannot see them ever being functional.

Like Brian O’Hanlan, I find the subject of pedestrian behaviour fascinating. But even without studying the subject and in the spirit of a person with an unsophisticated appreciation of wine (“I dunno anything about wine but I know what I like”), from experience as a pedestrian, I can recognise a pedestrian hostile environment.

This fact (that the kiosks impede pedestrians) is even more irritating than their ugliness and lack of utility. The Capel St./Parliament St axis in the city could be fantastic. There’s still enough interesting building stock on both sides of the river and the vista to City Hall from all along the axis is super. But for it to achieve it’s potential, it needs to become pedestrian friendly. Both Parliament St. and Capel St. have serious problems in this regard so it’s annoying to see a retrograde step of making the bridge more unfriendly to pedestrians.

Well as a society, we have been very carefully manipulated into responding to our environment and changes to our environment on a purely aesthetic kind of level. It is contained much in the language,.. responding to something that effects your environment, the Irish nation tends to use a lot of words like ‘pretty, ugly, gastly,…etc’., and you know what? At the end of the day, this kind of stock vocabulary, we have been ‘lumped’ with as a means to responding to any environmental issue – it is harmless, and results in very ineffectual attempts at criticism of any and all interventions into our environments. That really does put the public on the back foot and incorrectly suggests that the public isn’t capable of responding to issues, at any higher level, than merely at an aesthetic one. I was watching that movie ‘The Field’, written by John B. Keane the other evening, and it could be possible that here in Ireland, the subject of land and our environment, was something too deep and murky to even discuss to any great extent. Could it be, that we as a nation, have somehow managed to create our own over-simplified way of talking about the environment, to avoid saying anything much about it? Has something been buried here, really deep inside the mind of the whole nation? I refuse to believe for an instant, that other countries in Europe experience the same inability to respond to their environment as we seem to – otherwise, you wouldn’t be seeing the talented individual architects we do see emerging in other countries – as naturally, as Brazil keeps on producing good soccer players. We seem to have ‘lost our Samba’ as far as architecture and the environment is concerned. This is really I think, what Merrit Bucholtz down in University of Limerick might be trying to deal with, and I do look forward to that very much.

Of course, what really puts the tin hat on it all now, is having two splendid new Santiago Calatrava bridges, which are both aesthetically ‘awesome’,… can I use that word? … yeah, aweeesssooomee. Druuull…. but they also manage to be pedestrian friendly, functional and appropriate. Which is making the attempt on Capel Street bridge look even more ugly, and more pedestrian un-friendly than it would otherwise be. So Chapel Street bridge, if you take my point about ‘giving the junior architects at DCC something to keep them occupied’,… is a very good example of what happens, when you put lesser talents with far too much time, to do anything to an existing bridge. On Capel Street bridge they managed to disobey practically all the good basic points about urban design for cities in 2005. But the trouble is not the concept of using DCC owned land and creating alternative uses, or any uses for it,… That idea is very sound I think,… but you still need a capable designer to execute that notion into anything useful. Indeed, to illustrate this very point, I am going to post up a few shots in the coming weeks of some other DCC owned land, some of which is being used very poorly at the present. A space near the junction of Clanbrassil Street and South Circular Road springs to mind,… could they possibly make bottle bank disposal points any less appealing? This is what I am talking about when I say, the mis-direction and mis-use of valuable talented resources in DCC. That particular bottle bank area is a nice oppportunity to see what you can do with a space,… I mean, if one actually takes it, that delivering your bottles to the nearest bottle bank, and doing your bit for waste disposal, is or should be part of urban living,… why make it so unattractive for the urban inhabitants. This of course, is underscored further by the way in which ‘the bin charges’ were brought down upon the inhabitants only lately,… so why haven’t some of the bin charges been used to make bottle banks more accessible to the inhabitants of the city? Or even more appealing at least?

I believe firmly that a little bit of effort in other areas, and less attempts to flagship themselves on Capel Street bridge would have been a better allocation of finite design talent resources. There is a huge tract of underused urban space down in front of the Custom’s House, which is devoid of anything retail, or anything where you could even buy an ice-cream cone. I passed it on Sunday, and it was one of the few areas along the Liffey that didn’t have a sinner using it’s space. That was a key site, which could have accepted at least two of those blocky retail things that are now on Capel Street Bridge. Those blocky retail units are bulletproof enough too, to take any sort of nightime abuse they might receive in front of the Custom’s House. Those retail boxes, coming all the ways from Barcelona, you would expect them to be ‘toughened’ for use in bad areas. Something lighter and moveable, would have been just fine on Capel Street bridge because it does get plenty of patrol from both Garda and public at all hours. Now I guess, on Capel Street Bridge, you have a kind of ‘Packman’ environmental condition created,… like that old arcade game that used to be in all the pubs years ago, where the bums run around the four retail blocks, with the security forces in pursuit like a Pack Man game.

On the subject of government owned property,… this land swapping and affordable housing thread,… is going very much in the right direction I think. It gets away from a ‘charity approach’ to social housing maybe, and acknowledges the challenge rightly, to go and do something for the less fortunate amongst us.

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4083

We as a society tend to associate housing the poor in this city, with things like religious orders, charity work, humanitarian causes and sympathy giving all round. Something to feel good about. But that is just the problem, because homeless-ness in Dublin became ‘such a do-good campaign’ always, a good-will jesture on behalf of good people to the poverty-stricken,… we sucessfully managed to avoid going any deeper into this issue or looking into it seriously at all. Homeless-ness is just as much a feature of urban living as public transport, bottle banks and pedestrian bridges are. I would hope for a look at housing supply and its challenge without any of the ‘Saint this or that’ overtones which usually accompany it.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

@garethace wrote:

. But the trouble is not the concept of using DCC owned land and creating alternative uses, or any uses for it,…

Brian I agreed with most of the other things you have said but the statement above is significantly flawed. The bridge is hardly what one would describe as land it is a bridge that was paid for by a now passed on set of taxpayers to perform a simple function of conveying people to both opposite sides of the river. If that weren’t enough the structure is also as a result of that function a public right of way, this public right of way takes absolute precedence over ownership. An ownership that is vested in the Local Authority who are elected and or appointed to serve the citizens that elect and or pay their salaries. The structures on the bridge do not have planning permission and were marketed as retail space which by definition requires development consent as commercial development.

I am not going to put my fashion police hat on but DCC should do the honourable thing and all the points other than the one highlighted above that Brian and the other contributors have made should be acknowledged and these structures should be removed. There has been enough trickery and chicanery in the attempted cover-up, and of all things 4 retail premises visable from 4 postcodes are nearly impossible to cover up.

Not intending to be overly tabloidish about it in questioning, but do you think it was simply the desire on the part of DCC for revenue-generating outlets that drove this move, or was it part of a higher-minded ‘plazaisation’ scheme for the bridge with citizens in mind? Or were they just an after-thought that were encouraged by the incentive of revenues?

Agreed also Brian with a lot you have to say about pedestrian activity, but on the central issue of the fridges, surely you are not suggesting that they/some of these would be more appropriate outside the Custom House – turning a petty crime into a full-scale criminal offence?!

I think Brian hit the nail on the head this is a direct result of people having too much time ‘to come up with original ideas’ This concept has gone too far and the number of checks and balances that have been ignored is breathtaking.

If these structures are allowed to remain then DCC will have destroyed one of the finest bridges in the City without having either legally closed a right of way, or gaining development consent for commercial space that their own retained commercial agents describe as offering “a truely unique retailing opportunity in the Heart of Dublin City Centre”.

I think that pursuit of an ink line drawing beyond or without professional legal advice has led to this situation. 48 sq m of retail will yield a very small amount of rates in the longer term. DCC have indicated their confidence in their ability to retain these ‘ink line drawing inspired disasters’ by limiting tenancies to one year licence agreements which it would appear that two out of the three occupiers would be very happy to surrender. The third open unit is selling confectionary which is food to my mind and cigerettes which are diometrically opposed to the description of book stalls that they were described as pre-installation.

Only when I see these kiosks selling programmes in Croker they will have become book-stalls in my mind. I also have significant doubts of the existing layouts ability to allow two wheelchairs pass each other on any of the three little channels that remain of what you could easily have described as a plaza prior to installation.

It is ironic that the explictly pedestrian-serving structures on this bridge are the very items in the way as a result of the units, i.e the benches.

Yes, fundamentally it seems the scheme simply was not thought through – rather a supposedly ‘innovative’, idealised concept was conjured up that simply did not confrom with the reality of the context – in every respect.

It took so long for these structures to go up (it seemed like they were working on them for years) that it will be hard for DCC to row back and remove them. It’s really hard for anyone to admit a lengthy mistake and make a u-turn. I think DCC would be delighted if they could find an escape route that allowed them to knock them down without losing face. Can anyone think of a way this could happen?

Maybe it could be discovered that the correct planning was not in order or that they were in breach of some clause of their development plan. Or maybe the person responsible for commisioning them could switch job and his successor could make the decision. Sadly they are too heavy to be shoved into the river by the citizens, as happened to the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Gurrier’.

@garethace wrote:

Of course, what really puts the tin hat on it all now, is having two splendid new Santiago Calatrava bridges, which are both aesthetically ‘awesome’,… can I use that word? … yeah, aweeesssooomee. Druuull…. but they also manage to be pedestrian friendly, functional and appropriate.

You can use that word, if I can disagree with it. 🙂
As objects, I’d be a fan of the bridges, but as sympathetic elements of the urban fabric I think they fall very far short.
And pedestrian friendly? I’ve slipped on the Joyce and nearly been clipped by a bus at the south crossing/junction (though that’s not exclusively the fault of the bridge).

From day one, they’ve struck me as ’emblems of the contemporary metropolis’- “we must have them, even if we’ve no real need for them, and even if structurally/aesthetically(/functionally?) they run counter to all the other bridges along the Liffey. We’re in the big league now and we must show it!”

I just don’t think Calatrava was the man for the job- and I’d be a big fan of most of his work.

Dublin City Council could easily remove the kiosks without loss of face. They did it with good intentions, but it hasn’t worked out.
Indifference greeted their installation and their departure would be the same.
I was all in favour of them in theory but not only are they visually wrong for the site, commercially they don’t appear to be successful.
Of the many projects the City Council have undertaken in the past five years, this is the only one that has been a complete failure.
The Boardwalk, O’Connell Street, the Millennium Bridge, the Calatrava Bridges, Smithfield, have all been very successful and the fiasco in Eyre Square makes you appreciate the good job that is being done by and large.
The kiosks certainly wouldn’t look out of place in Croke Park – in terms of their design – and the City Council should just hand them over for free.

In recognition of the massive contribution the GAA makes to the viability of a number of hosteleries in the City that make a large contribution to the rates base.

Well I can’t think of anywhere in the city centre where they would be suitable or indeed commercially viable.
The GAA would hardly pay for them.
And it would be a waste to just scrap them.

If that weren’t enough the structure is also as a result of that function a public right of way, this public right of way takes absolute precedence over ownership.

I think in your response, you have probably reinforced my point,… that some non-spatial-designing person or member of DCC came up with the concept to use Council owned land to and see what alternative uses can be made with that land – such as retail uses etc. My point was, that somewhere between that idea emerging and the ‘spatial designers’ getting their grubby like claws on the notion,… it all fell apart. It is a shame to knock down the original concept, even if the execution of it was all warped. DCC like any other public body, is full of very many non-spatially thinking but nonetheless creative people, who want to try out ideas,… but as always, you are dependent upon the designer to implement the verbal idea, or expression, into something in reality.

I mean, lets just not throw the baby out with the bath water, that is all I can say. Lets encourage, the spark of creativity, that someone had to put retail boxes on bridges in the first place. Lets not dis-courage that creativity,… as I have mentioned, it is a non-spatial-thinking kind of creativity, and for the most part deserves to be encouraged. Especially as this young nation strives to define itself in terms of visual expression and spatially in the environment – you are talking about centuries of repression here – and slowly it might be softening out a little bit. I wish DCC would screw up on a regular basis and attempt to learn from their mistakes. Where we really do have a problem, is in how our creativity and more ‘spatially-minded’ public servants, interpret what is handed to them as a brief from DCC. There are tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of sites around Dublin, where this exact kind of retail space is badly needed. And for some unearthly reason, all four of these retail boxes managed to find themselves stacked on a bridge in the middle of Dublin like it was a container warehouse or something. That is a spatial ‘mis-interpretation’ of what was a decent and sound enough idea to begin with day one. But that often happens – good ideas can lose their original impetus during the design process – Strange it make seem, but happen, yes, unfortunately it does. Compare this story to that of another young emergent nation during the 1960s, the Sydney Opera house which might have bankrupt the whole city for years afterwards. Architecture has always operated in this ‘space’ from the dawn of civilisation onwards.

I am merely worried that the board here, is just seeing the problem in this case, in isolation, and missing the whole wider issue, that is a much, much, much more serious challenge facing the city and its public servants. One reason, I wanted to twist the discussion into the theme of ‘Land’, was something mentioned in the affordable housing, government land swapping scheme for Dublin City Centre. It was mentioned, that flooding the market with land swaps, would be dodgy,… Well, going way back into this whole deep and murky ‘Land Issue’ that has been an issue in Ireland for centuries,… well, what are the religious orders doing now out in the fashionable suburbs of Dublin,.. I would say they are dumping land on the market for all they are worth. It is funny how even the religious orders have noticed how ‘prime’ the market is right now, and sell off their prime sites, so that developers can build astonishingly expensive apartments. I wonder exactly how the religious orders got this way – wasn’t there something always about underpriveleged benefitting from the Church? Wasn’t the Church and Religion, and Land Issues, and all of that ‘Irish History’ stuff,… all kind of inter-related,… or was that just some sentimental historian, writting the Irish history, from his/her own perspective? I would be greatly appreciative of anyones’ views on that matter – I think there is a much larger crime being committed by the Church presently, than DCC could possibly match with their retail boxes on Capel Street bridge. How many poor devils paid for the land, the Church is off-loading to private speculators now?

I think Brian hit the nail on the head this is a direct result of people having too much time ‘to come up with original ideas’ This concept has gone too far and the number of checks and balances that have been ignored is breathtaking.

I think the original idea, if you go back far enough, to find the verbal equivalent of this idea,… was in truth,… just fine. Because the orginal verbal expression of this particular kind of project, wouldn’t have any specific site in mind,… just a master strategy,… to look around Dublin city and try and see, if DCC owned territory could be put to some sort of use, we had never thought of before. Where DCC officials were really badly let down in this case, is in the lack of counterparts, in the spatial-thinking end of it,… to translate the original idea properly. It is these ‘spatial-thinking’ translators, who have too much time on their hands I think,… not necessarily the original idea-makers. I feel sympathy for the original idea-makers now, that they could not find the kinds of spatial-fluent public servants capable to making something better of that original strategy. I know the sort of design talent that is in our public service nowadays, and it is considerable, but for one reason or another, it underperformed in this case.

Agreed also Brian with a lot you have to say about pedestrian activity, but on the central issue of the fridges, surely you are not suggesting that they/some of these would be more appropriate outside the Custom House – turning a petty crime into a full-scale criminal offence?!

Lets just call a spade a spade here, … the Custom House area, is a rough enough area, and it would be useful to have something bulletproof, if you are going to do any sort of retail down there. Another thing, is how dis-used the space in front of the Custom’s house is. It is a magnificent space with absolutely no people using it, and at nightime, is could get pretty rough too. I don’t know exactly where all of the pedestrian traffic, that should be coming from the IFSC living quarters has evaporated into… one would imagine, if the IFSC is such a thriving hub of inner city, classy, European-style, apartment living, then, you would find the space in front of the Custom’s house irrigated with many more pedestrian users no? DCC put nice designer-looking dustbins all along the Canal in Portobello and the local kids had them wrecked in no time at all – and these were made of toughened stainless steel with heavy-duty rivets and all.

It is ironic that the explictly pedestrian-serving structures on this bridge are the very items in the way as a result of the units, i.e the benches.

Well this is the whole reason, that pedestrian behaviour and its study for architects should be enshrined much more than it currently is, in the curriculum of the architectural schools in this city. You can easily pass through and qualify as an Architect, a spatial designer par excellence,… without even dealing with the kinds of issues that relate to pedestrians and their movement. Remember, a regular human being though being modest in scale, covers an enormous amount of ground everyday, every week of their lifes. Even the youngest kids,… so to view people, like they usually appear in architectural drawings, as static creatures, as opposed to dynamic ones, is a fatal mistake in the countries architectural school curriculum I believe. Most architectural colleges encourage the student to sit in a ‘studio’ for vast amounts of hours, and then go home and spend more and more hours in the evenings and at weekends, bank holidays and church holidays,.. slavishly bent over a drawing board, drawing mostly static objects, and people as static installations in those static objects. The whole design concept of a lot of students work, is therefore mostly informed by static motionless objects – the same kinds of ones visible to all, now on Capel Street bridge. So it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. As an architectural student, you are never asked to ‘walk about’ in case you would wast one hour’s drafting and designing time on a drawing board. Bear in mind, that students who enter architectural school at 17, as I did are very impressionable at that stage, and may never have explored that much further than home-school-home-school-home-school, all their short and pathetic little lives. To emerge into the working scene, with bad skin and very stiff limbs from doing all the late-night drawing and graphical designing. I got enormously satisfaction this year, when Herman Hertzberger expressed the opposite to that which you normally expect from Architects, when he attempted to re-define young people in different terms – as dynamic, as skateboarders, as in other words, young people.

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3933

If you are interested in these issues, take a look at Herman, it is worth it.

Yes, fundamentally it seems the scheme simply was not thought through – rather a supposedly ‘innovative’, idealised concept was conjured up that simply did not confrom with the reality of the context – in every respect.

What you really, really have to understand, in this whole Capel Street Bridge debate, is how good a job that DCC managed to do over in O’ Connell Street. With O’Connell Street there was a major incentive not to screw it up, and that motivated DCC to do a very good job indeed. What it highlights, is that when DCC have less incentive to do it well – how easily they drop back into an older, hopeless and loose kind of style that doesn’t get the results at the end of the day. More than likely you had huge man hours too, being poured into getting O’ Connell Street and LUAS through the pipeline… we will not always be doing LUAS and O’Connell Street,… so I imagine that Capel Street bridge messes will not happen too often. I think it is still crucial to highlight the problems with Capel Street bridge though, in some way,… feedback should be viewed as positive.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

@kefu wrote:

Dublin City Council could easily remove the kiosks without loss of face. They did it with good intentions, but it hasn’t worked out………

The kiosks certainly wouldn’t look out of place in Croke Park – in terms of their design – and the City Council should just hand them over for free.

It should be noted that the kiosks were not designed in house by DCC, but were designed by Gilroy McMahon who strangely enough also designed Croke Park.

I do hope the paper, verbal, ideas-makers, in the Dail and City Councils… properly get to the bottom of this Aquatic Centre issue too,… when the state wishes to build something, anything,… when it has some vision,… it should be able to go about it’s business,… while receiving the best possible service and advice from the designers and planners they pay to get on with the job. I have never once heard the GAA complain of how bad their Croke Park Stadium is. This is what still separates Ireland from other first rate European countries,… other European countries have been hosting Olympics and what not, for decades, and they manage to build minor projects and ‘stuff’ for society all of the time.

Ireland still cannot get to that stage, where it can just flick a switch and make things happen. A lot of it must boil to how we work together as a team. The Government obviously has money to do things nowadays, and has land they always had, and ideas abounding. What surprises me, is how availability of land, surplus of money and design ideas are ‘not’ all coming together quite right for the State. I still think, one has to respect their attempts, even if heavy-handed at times – it is a new departure for this young nation – let’s look forward to the future. Here once again, Herman Hertzberger gave us a really good pointer, in highlighting a scheme in Holland, where the competition brief was merely to provide a bookstore and cafe at a bustop,… instead of doing that, the designers, came up with a brief to build a bookstore and cafe, at a bustop, with a basketball court on the roof! So I think, what we really need is spatial designers who are strong enough to sometimes alter the brief they are handed it, to flesh it out in a 4-dimensional way, in both space and time.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

I wrote this paragraph, as part of my Herman Hertzberger post a while back, and I think it is particularly useful in the context of this argument about Chapel Street Bridge:

Herman is someone, who struggles to find meaning first and then form. Hence his use of physical models through which he tries to understand the existence of what he calls ‘view lines’. All of the ideas about the building as a city, and how to raise people – are thereby incubated and encouraged through his process of using physical models. ‘I am one of those older Architects who tries desperately to find meaning first and then form, as opposed to form first and then look for meaning’. Though the above is a rough approximation to Herman Hertzberger’s comments on the search for form in Architecture, the are very similar to the words uttered down through time, by other people in other fields of expertise. I always like this quote from Sun Tzu in the ‘Art of War’.

Quote:
What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated. Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.