City Council Flats

Best looking Corpo scheme was Mercer House on Cuffe Street behind the Ardilaun centre, looks like some of the better designed ones in London and the Mansard Roof is superb could do with being another 2-3 storeys high though and enclose the rear courtyards

rperse – the developers around this town are very limited in terms of design and the City Council are the ones who do innovate (social) housing.

You can’t keep chucking people out of areas so that they can be redeveloped and sold to investors to fill with a transient community. What this town needs is sustainable development with a healthy social mix (and the abilty to chuck problem tenents out quickly) rather than ghettoising a whole social class.

I lived in some of the “great redevelopment” apartments around town (IFSC, Wintergarden, etc) and there is fuck all of a community there because of the lack of people who want to live their lives in an overprice shoebox (which is what you get from these schemes). Purely there for rental purposes which is unsustainable.

I’d love to live in the middle of the city, but in somewhere of a decent size, 3 bedrooms a separate kitchen and a dining room or god forbid dual aspect but unless I become a lotto millionaire I have no chance of affording this.

Get real! Developments in Dublin are there to maximise the profit of the developer at the expense of the “community” who move in there.

I agree Rory W, Mercer House is by far the finest, good design and quality materials used, indeed it’s so good it looks like one of the Iveagh Trust buildings. Unfortunatly, it’s wooded sashes have recently been replaced with cheap & cumbersome uPVC.

The solution to these developments I think is to demolish and rebuild on the same sites, undertaken solely by the CC. There’s a huge amount of wasted space in around these buildings/blocks, that inevitably has become barren wastland, which could be utilised to build at a higher density, whilst not ‘ghettoising’ such developments.

As always, the key is good design and quality materials.

Agree with the rebuilding on same site context – just an interesting thought though, if the government wants developers to set 20% of a development aside for social housing, should the city council set aside 20% of its developments for private housing, which could be sold at a profit? After all the whole idea is to promote a social mix

CC have done up the flats on Buckingham Street and Empress Place fairly recently and done a very fine job of it too. The central play area is done in astro turf and looks cool. May be the way to go re: scrubland…? All looks good and well maintained for the moment anyway. The original buildings are very well built and designed so they had a good starting point on these.
I love the 20% private housing idea Rory, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard or thought of it before.
Has anyone been into the flats on Jervis street? I always though the idea of living over a toy shop was pretty neat. I hope the sceme is being looked after.

Enclosed internal green and play spaces are a far more appropriate solution for housing complexes of this type, particulary in Dublin.
If the residents choose to make shite of them, then at least everybody else in the city doesn’t have to look at them.
As you said, Bridgefoot Street is the best example of that.
Its ‘front garden’ is potentially the complex’s most impressive feature yet it ends up looking like no-man’s land, except more dangerous.

The ‘Living Over The Shop’ scheme….

As far as I can see the only project this seems to have invloved are the two buildings at the (quay) end of Capel St. But you are right Roy – there is loads of potential for accommodation over shop innthe city….Abbey Street is a case in point.

Not too many months ago, Dublin City Council admitted that the Living Over the Shop scheme, although a great idea, had not worked out.
The take-up was far too low apparently and as far as I know, it’s being phased out. It was supposed to come to an end in December 2004 regardless.
The original idea was to create around 3,000 housing unit but I think it was used only for two properties at 3 and 4 Capel Street (both of which belonged to City Council anyway).

To hear such talk of demolition from environmentally aware Architects surprises me.These developments are ripe for refurbishment and extention. To me they are far mor interesting than the absolute crap thats been built some eighty years on (just stand on the Liffey bank outside the Four Courts and look in every direction !), by the current generation of Developers Architects. The problem here is planning. I proposed a pre-planning design for a building adjoining one of these blocks on the canal at Harolds Cross. I wanted to match the height and give reference to the style and upgrade the open space and boundary treatments of the existing CC block, thus maximising the intergration of both communities and Architectural styles. The planner told me the building was too tall and so the scheme falls on its face.
By the way is it me or are those Circular stair wells a sly reference to Konstantin Melnikovs’ 1928 house at 10 Krivoarbatski ,Moccow, just look at the hexagonal windows ?
ps. most of these CC blocks are dual aspect,and many have three beds. if 20%(dotted within the social tennants) were sold privatley, how many of this sites suscribers would buy in ??

On a related issue, the OPW are to sell their 1 acre yard/warehouse site in the centre of Dublin off Ely Place/Baggot St. It’s expected to raise 15 million at auction for the state, to be used in the refurbishment of local Garda Stations. Yet again, prime state assets are being pawed off for political purposes, no money for refurbishments, sell off some prime real estate now, instant cash, and stuff future generations.

Why can’t the City Council take over this land, 1 acre remember, and develop it for much needed social & affordable housing. At a time when Dublin is sprawling like wildfire to Cork, Galway and Dundalk, and when there is a dire need for building land in and around Dublin for the CC to build upon, it is a disgrace, nonsenseical & crazy to be selling this land off speculatively.