college green/ o’connell street plaza and pedestrians
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Ah, yes, but gunter’s point is the Brit obsession with mown grass (it’s because we can’t get rid of the toff cringe, don’t ye know). Mown grass and municipal planting are the sine qua non of public open space in GB.
Get rid of the grass and get in some decent paving/gravel; forget the American examples – WASPs are even more Brit than the Brits themselves. Look at the continent – gravel’s the boy.@notjim wrote:
Ah you are trying the west-brit trick but the bit of grass, apart from setting off the grey stone, is part of the traditional look and feel of the great university we could be: some American examples
I felt sure you would take umbrage at that attack on your hallowed ground.
Do you know how careful I was not to use the term West-Brit! However, your American examples just prove my point, although I should have used the term Anglo-Saxon to cover that lot, instead of ‘British’.
I stand by my statement, no self-respecting German square would tolerate a single blade of grass! Go on find some and prove me wrong. I won’t accept any ‘Englischer Gartens’ either.
Thank you johnglas, I knew the Scot in you would recognise the truth.
Well gosh that was easy, first German university I thought of (Göttingen) and what, oh! mown grass in front of the main university hall, with twee topiary no less.
And twee is kind of a point, I don’t trust the college with paving, have you noticed they have put planters, planters! on the podium by the Berkeley library.
@notjim wrote:
Well gosh that was easy, first German university I thought of (Göttingen) and what, oh! mown grass in front of the main university hall, with twee topiary no less.
You’re not calling that a urban Square?
Behold Gottingen Market Square: I rest my case!
And who would want grass on College Green, the urban square, the crazy British maybe, not me. However, the bit behind the railings is the front of TCD and, as I would have hoped you would be able to admit, the ground in front of a main university buildings has grass, be it England, the US, Germany or what ever other country you’d like to name,Scotland you imply elsewhere doesn’t do this, well here is Glasgow U:
Glasgow University is located in a Regency / Victorian suburb. Which is again the point I was making. I’ll stop this now. We can always revisit it on a slow day.
Yes; we are drifting off topic. You see the urban space first and then the university building as a part of it, I see the university first and then the urban square in front of it. Hard landscaping is often best for urban spaces, ironically in the context of this discussion some of our most british spaces, the castle, the imma quad, are paved but university main buildings are almost always fronted by grass and because research universities live and die on some peculiar metric of prestige it is important for them to exhibit trophies like a grass fronted neo-classical or palladian building, who should win, well here we have different loyalties.
Yes it’s a trophy isn’t it – I couldn’t put my finger on the term. It’s a breathtaking display of decadence and ostentation consuming prime urban land at the ceremonial heart of the capital/country with a manicured lawn. Of course the ingenuity of the whole concept is that it is just that – a manicured lawn; so completely unassuming and reticent that it couldn’t possibly be working towards such nefarious or underhand ends :p
And I absolutely love it – feck off gunter with your manky students! Off to the Bashery with you.Completely agree about the planters outside the Berkeley notjim – I like to think of them as a subtle piss-take, just to avoid the mortification that they’re actually serious.
Again, not to flog the topic to death, but GU (founded 1451) was located in the 17th, 18th and most of the 19th C in the High Street right in the heart of the old town. However, Victorian snobbery and prudery wanted to remove the students away from the vice and smells of the city and fly to a more salubrious west-end suburb (as it was then). The railway company also made them an offer they couldn’t refuse (another Victorian trait). The new site was on top of a drumlin (good Irish word), much of which was too steep to build on (even in Glasgow), hence the grassy areas; it’s also contiguous to a major public park (Kelvingrove, hence Lord Kelvin),which reinforces the green aspect.
If you really want to see how not to do a municipal square, look at George Square here; an elegant if dull late-Georgian square trashed with cheap red tarmac in the interests of commercialism.@johnglas wrote:
If you really want to see how not to do a municipal square, look at George Square here; an elegant if dull late-Georgian square trashed with cheap red tarmac in the interests of commercialism.
That’s the one where the statues are all painted black and they wear traffic cones on their heads, or is that just after matches?
And gunter will not be ‘fecking off” thank you.
But missarchi you seem to be widening roads, taking land from TCD, demolishing buildings on fleet steet, building a car tunnel and adding car parking: facilitating vehicular through traffic. This is all wrong.
I’m not really widening any roads that I can think of except for the new one for custom house
I’m not demolishing any buildings except for the department of health!!! and some others on this axis
The car tunnel is just an idea I would prefer not to have it same as the car parking just to discuss
Okay, I was confused by all the lines. I still don’t really get it I am afraid, what is the main point: you think a new road should be built radiating diagonally from the junction of townsend steet and hawkins st? Why?
to create a visual link with custom house and the liffey assuming we pulled down the loop line.. and to provide a wide link road for a luas or bus route that would avoid lots of lights right hand turns ect
hawkins st is so narrow and I don’t want a temporary bridge and custom house has 2 good exit roads….The main idea of this is to show what public space is being created like college green I mean can you imagine more buses noise pollution its just mad… The transport links at college green can be broken it will be a better space with no major criss crossing same for o’conell st bridge
does that make more sense???
emm…wow, I don’t know where to start.
Well I can start by asking you to please be a bit more realistic.Metro
– Please stick with the actual T21 plan for the metro north tram with the stop under O’Conell bridge.
– Kill the other unrealistic metro lines. What is that east curve? I hope its not going near Connolly Station which is unsuitable for underground tunnelling, hence the metro north tram line not going near it.
– And what is that line going straight under TCD. Do you not remember that the metro north tram line was moved to avoid going under TCD because of architecturally sensitive buildings .Luas
– Please separate Luas lines from Bus. Very confusing.
– You forgot the line from the Green to head up O’Connell Street in which the Lucan line WILL be joining.
– Kill the CURITIBA idea. Dublin streets are too narrow for that .Roads
– This Road tunnel, is it suppose to go deep under the metro north tram line
– The new road through Hawkins Hse (which none of us will miss) seem to join Tara St which currently is one-way heading north. What are your plans for traffic around customs house/IFSC/Georges Quay area?Underground Car Parks
– Considering that this area is reclaimed land with a high water table, what geological studies have you carried out.
– What are the effects of the construction of these car parks will have on architecturally sensitive buildings like TCD and the Bank of Ireland etc…
– How deep are these car parks. Will they go under both the metro north tram line and your proposed road tunnel.:rolleyes:
@weehamster wrote:
emm…wow, I don’t know where to start.
Well I can start by asking you to please be a bit more realistic.
:rolleyes:agreed lots of things unrealistic!!!! but its nice to get the crayons out!!!!
but we are both for knocking Hawkins house in half!!!!
and what 2000 bicycle spaces?@GrahamH wrote:
. . the entire Westmoreland Street/D’Olier Street/College Green/Dame Street axis is continuously deteriorating; the very places that should be the beating heart of the city.
I’m inclined to believe that, in Dublin, streets have to hit rock bottom before they start to come back up. I think Parliament Street would be an example of this and arguably Parnell Street could be another example. The problem with Westmoreland Street /D’Olier Street/College Green/Dame Street is that they have been on the slide for two hundred years, so we can’t tell whether we’re three months, or eighty years, away from rock bottom.
On a slightly related topic, there’s a couple of interesting passages, as always, in the president’s column of the current (July/August) edition of the RIAI journal.
They’re hard to find because It does ramble all over the place stumbling from one name drop reference to the next, but the theme seems to be a discourse on whether we are essentially Euoropean in mind-set, or whether Ireland is a ‘state of mind between Nashville and Old Trafford’ [Tony Parsons, English critic and pundit], which, in fairness, is a great quote.
I don’t want to antagonize people, but those lawns behind the railings at the front of Trinity are a potent symbol that we’re not really ready to embrace European urbanism fully again. I say again, because we were full members of the European urban club once, but somewhere in the 18th century we lost it, we imported the anglo-saxon obsession with controlled nature.
English landscape gardening in the 18th century is rightly regarded as revolutionary, but it had a dark side. The campaign to perfect nature proved too successful to be left out in the sticks. The guys with the Palladian country houses, set in Capability Brown designed rolling estates couldn’t resist the temptation to deck out their town houses with tiny patches of controlled nature as well and so the Georgian square, as miniature country estate, was born.
This notion still pervades our thinking. It may be a stretch to say that the current state of Westmoreland Street, for example, has anything to do with the importation of the ideas behind English landscape gardening, but I think that our absorption of those ideas blunted our urban sensibilities to the extent that we don’t really notice when our urban realm has been damaged, in the same way that it would be noticed in a comparable mainland European city.
Do we really notice that there’s a grassy hill beside Christchurch Cathedral? This is at the very heart of our medieval core, between the cathedral and the first port, where the urban grain should be at it’s tightest, we have a grassy hill!
It’s bad enough that the Christchurch Place side of the cathedral was turned into a English style, lawned-up, ‘cathedral close’ in the 19th cuntury, where once there was a warren of lanes and taverns side by side with the old law courts, but to compound this by sticking in a north facing grassy hill (as the good part of the Civic Offices development) would have been laughed out of the planning office in any other (mainland) European city.
notjim will now find some obscure Romanian city with an identical feature.
BTW, the other interesting passage in the president’s column: ‘. . if . . WW2 was not the spark under the cauldron of Modernism, it was the catalyst for it’s diffusion – for good, bad and ugly’.
Assuming that he’s talking about architecture, which may be a rash assumption, it could be an interesting exercise to imagine what the course of ‘modernism’ might have been had it been allowed to develop in a even curve from WW1 to WWW without the intervention of WW2.
Would modernism have become discredited, if it hadn’t been forced into an obligation to provide quick and cheap post war housing, and had it not been pushed into an uncomfortable comparison with the urban qualities of the bombed out cities it had suddenly to replace?
We’re going to need johnglas for this one.
Gunter this obsession of yours! anyway, you have, again, misunderstood my stand on the grass in front of Trinity, i agree, or at least generally agree with you, regarding hard landscaping in urban settings, my point regarding Trinity is that main university buildings almost always have grass in front of them, the examples I provided weren’t obscure, and for me, and for tcd, the fact the small piece of tcd-owned land in college green is in front of a university building trumps the fact it is part of an urban landscape.
I say I generally agree with you, rather than always agree with you because I have been in NYc for the last four weeks and with your obsession in mind have been looking at the small garden parks here and yes, some of them are very effective. Of course, the NYc urban parks exist in a completely different context, some NY city compositions are effective precisely because their lack the coherence, of logic, emphasises their essential muscularity.
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