college green/ o’connell street plaza and pedestrians

@Morlan wrote:

The absolute gem of the south city centre. Buy out the car parks, force Dublin Bus to change their routes, get the Luas in. Pedestrianise all streets. What a fantastic city Dublin could be. 🙁

good idea. but

be over the dead bodies of dublin bus and shop traders.

I’d be for it (killing the above especially)

Many thanks lauder. Okay, so the above is a tad ranty for what some may see as comparitively minor quibbles. But these poorly detailed works are symptomatic of a broader ignorance in the city of the importance of a well-presented public realm. It is frustrating to see one of the few oases of sophistication and good craftsmanship in the city centre, that was entirely self-maintaining year round, with a timeless, hard-wearing charm, being so crudely butchered with finnicky, badly thought out and unnecessary detailing. Never mind generating it from new, we cannot even recognise when we already have quality.

Passing this evening, the rusty setts have, as expected, since been relaid with a surgical scar running along the length of the driveway, while some of the larger angular gaps between the Chinese granite kerbing and the paving stones have just been filled with cement. The Chinese curved stones look ridiculous emerging from the Dublin kerbs of a third wider dimension. And as if to prove the unnecessity of the fawn tiles, the Dame Street side driveway has been left as was, with simple dished slopes of granite.

It is deeply sad that there appears to be no mainstream contractor capable of carrying out repaving in the robust but elegant spirit of the Dublin tradition. This is not just a matter of laying slabs and choosing the right pointing in a localised fashion. It demands designing an entire pavement as a coherent architectural ensemble, with correctly chosen or tailor-made pieces to compose the picture. The ingenuity of the 19th century paving recently featured over on Lincoln Place is but a minor example of such artistry.

Such craftsmanship applied on College Green would dictate that there would be no angular gaps plugged with cement, curved sweeps of kerbstones would be robustly and generously scaled. and surfaces comprised of increasingly scrappy off-cuts of granite generated by service interventions over the years would be rationalised. And need it even be said that expensive and well-sourced granite setts would be treated as an asset and long-term investment of the public realm – not something to be slashed through with a chainsaw at the public’s expense.

The outrageous condition of the granite paving over at Trinity beside the gates has long been a blight on the presentation of the environs of the West Front. However, things are so bad thus far that one almost hopes this will not be ‘refurbished’ as part of these works.

As Stephen mentioned also, not a single item of clutter has been rationalised anywhere on College Green or College Street. Even the rank of three preposterous traffic signal megaboxes dumped outside Fox’s have not been sunk underground – they still sit alongside a redundant international telephone kiosk, a car park display, numerous traffic signal poles, a Malton View, a rank of Eircom phoneboxes and various other random municipal knick-knacks. What a wasted opportunity this project has been. A quick-fix engineering job at its most short-sighted.

Thats exactly it….quick fix engineering solutions. I dont get it. College Green is so disfunctional as a civic space. It ooozes potential, its constantly being refered to by people like Dick Gleeson and Ali Grehan as the grand civic space of the city centre and yet no one can see beyond providing more space for traffic. Everything else must take second place to the need to accommodate buses and cars and (lets not forget the rank) taxis. The result is that while you want to linger there; you want to sit in that shadow of all those gorgeous builidngs; you want to explore the statues and fountain – you can’t because there is just no room for people.

By all means keep up the pressure Lauder…hopefully it works. A call to the Heritage Officer might be in order.

One of the reasons I so respect Frank Pick (1878-1941), the legendary chief executive of the London Passenger Transport Board, is that he made common places shine.

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=427&storycode=3143607&channel=783&c=2&encCode=00000000019c24d7

Sham sans?

@GregF wrote:

My Jasus, what a bunch of morons!

ah yes the DCC motto

They’ve put hideous little brick-pavings in the pedestrian platforms which jut out from the paths at the pedestrian crossing to Pearse St. They look awful in the context. In the middle of our capital and in the vicinity of what could be our greatest public square these little things bring the tone down.

These build-outs should have large, broad flagstones over them with proper masonry work so that, as GrahamH has already stated, they do not need equally awful cement line-fills.

Fat chance

the building has a trinity feel about it?

http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/7355/mapasol.jpg

Each year the American technical journal, Engineering News-Record published by McGraw-Hill, nominates a man of the year in the construction field. In 1990, Prof. Pietro Lunardi was included as one of those who had contributed with his ideas to the achievement of significant progress in the construction field, “he invented the ‘Cellular arch technique’ to excavate wide span underground caverns in cohesion-less ground”.

This original construction system can be employed to drive bored tunnels with very shallow overburdens up to a diameter of 60 m. in very poor ground without causing surface subsidence.

One significant application of this system was for the construction of the Venezia Station on the Milan Urban Link Line. A cavern 30 m. in diameter and 270 m. in length was bore tunnel excavated right in the centre of the city with an overburden of only 4 metres and under the water table.

http://www.rocksoil.com/arcocellulare_en.html

@gunter wrote:

That’s a very good assessment, rumple, but you’re too harsh on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. It’s a cracking street and who cares if it sold it’s soul to tourism, at least it didn’t sell it’s soul to Spar.

I wasn’t being harsh on the Royal Mile. I love it. I’m saying that Dublin city council could learn a lot from it when regenerating Dame Street. When I was younger I never even heard of Dame Street in Dublin; O’Connell Street was always the main street. But O’Connell Street is now rather grotty and actually contains little of any significant historical value besides the GPO. Dame Street, if treated properly, could become the very centre of Irish national life, in the way the Royal Mile is in Scotland. It could become symbolic of Dublin. This would obviously involve sorting out Dublin Castle and finding a good use for the Bank of Ireland.

@ac1976 wrote:

Why would the regenerate Dame St? It’s probably the most lively street the city has!
They will only make a mess of what has naturally become our real main street if the stary interfering with it.

Because it’s literally packed with historical buildings of national, even international, importance that you barely notice because of its tiny broken up pavements and ridiculous amounts of traffic – as well as a lot of the shopfronts and facades being uncared for. The whole street smells of neglect.