Cork Street Ghetto

@burge_eye wrote:

Anyone been up Cork Street in Dub lately? I’ve rarely seen such a blanket demolition job with apartments lashing up everywhere. Think I’ll open a coffee shop.

http://www.lisney.com/subnav.aspx?tabid=3&tabindex=2&inc=commProperty&ID=1141

There ya go 🙂

To be fair they started demolishing stuff way back in the 50s for the Coombe by-pass thats why The Donnelly Centre (Sausage Factory) was set so far back but it took an eon to buy up all the necessary properties consequently there was a heap of dereliction all the way along this route (designed to serve the new outer suburbs of Crumlin/Drimnagh – that’ll tell you how old this plan was) good to see it starting to turn into a street at last

… it’s St. Luke’s Avenue.

All four corners of the Ardee Street / Coombe Relief Road crossroads are currently having new development. Two of the corners are complete (the northeast and southwest), one is under construction (the northwest), and the last one (the southeast) has just had local authority planning approval.

This building (above and below) is one of the two completed corners (northeast). I actually like it. It’s broken up well and creates a bit of visual interest. It’s not going to win any awards, but something has to fill these large development sites in the city.

It incorporates refurbishment of a couple of Georgian-house stragglers on Ardee Street, which you can see below. Although the new building is two stories taller than these Georgians, it is ok in this instance because you are moving from a narrow street onto a very broad street, and the new building maintains the rhythm of the older buildings.

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I’ve seen the plans for the two corners not yet completed and, to a greater or lesser extent, they achieve a reasonable standard of urban regeneration development. The real problem is this thing (above and below), on the southwest corner. It is a BLOATED MONSTROUS LUMP OF DEVELOPER RUBBISH. Is stuff like this not coming before senior planners in the council, you have to ask?

Just look at the way it ignorantly hangs its seven stories right in front of the fine 3-storey Georgian brewer’s house on Ardee Street. No effort at all to integrate…

Don’t worry the inevitable SPAR shops will finish the developments off nicely!?! 🙂

While i do like a bit of variety in design to break up a steetscape, the last time i walked up here i noticed an overwhelming lack of unity amongst all the new developments, totally disjointed and broken up, no flow to the street, just random buildings shouting out. That overhang is so unneccassary too!!!!, the whole set back top storey is so unsuitable for that building. One thing that really annoys me about the majority of new developments is the complete lack of character on the ground floor, usually just some kind of polished stone/marble and sheet glass… plain and simple, no personality or style, this is our street, why does it have to be so bland, shopfronts on the old style individual buildings usually have very individual styled fronts, now its one monotonous block of repeated bland shopfronts, where has the joy gone in architecture,? no flair, no personality, no room for adaptation, no fun is to be found on street level. Think Camden street, then think of how bland street level on this development will be.

Also in the second picture, wouldn’t the side leading into the georgians have fitted in much nicer without that silly piece of wood between the 2 windows, completely puts it at odds with the georgians when it could have so easily fitted in.

Yes it is everywhere – and unfortunately for the material, as evident above it is being used as a token gesture to improve the ‘quality’ of thoroughly cheap developments. You can just imagine the earth-shattering intellectual discussions going on in certain practices – ‘Ah sure tack on a couple a sheets of that green stuff – all the young ones are into it nowadays’.

Coincidentally I had to go out to Crumlin village the other day and so walked from O’Connell Bridge all the way out (:eek: ) via the Coombe. The monster building looks even worse in real life when you see it lining the motorway-like road – it just dominates the area in the most horrible way, its main facade like a cliff face alongside the road.
What is so bizarre though is that the copper development a comparitive distance away from the Georgians are actually lower in height, and their massing significantly more graded, with something of an organic form compared to the shoebox (or chest freezer box more like) across the road.

This element of the facade treatment looks so much worse in real life – truly appalling:

The Ballymun towers are positively elegant compared with this.

Yes – the brazen height of it is the worst element. There’s a lot more apartments going up too further down, a mix in quality.

I found it interesting that out of all development in the area, despite the negative associations St Theresa’s Gardens is one of the most attractive residential schemes you came come across in Dublin, made up of rows and rows of elegant wine-red blocks geometrically sited on green lawns flanking the canal – all marching into the distance.

I’ve passed this development for many years now and have always admired it, though admittedly never been inside – must go in some time.
What is striking is how exclusive and po-faced this scheme could be in the hands of a developer, even with the same architecture – ‘waterside setting’ ‘nestling on a mature site’ ‘manicured lawns and walks’ ‘tens minutes from the city centre’ etc etc.

The ranks of imposing chimneys are most impressive – I think they used to be brick but were renderded over when the de-steeling and PVC era swept in about 5-7 years ago 🙁
There’s an interesting skyline of little hump-backed plant rooms etc too – always wondered what these are…

Anyone have thoughts or info on this scheme?

@Graham Hickey wrote:

I found it interesting that out of all development in the area, despite the negative associations St Theresa’s Gardens is one of the most attractive residential schemes you came come across in Dublin, made up of rows and rows of elegant wine-red blocks geometrically sited on green lawns flanking the canal – all marching into the distance.

St Teresa’s Gardens is off Donore Avenue and not by the canal. Are you thinking of The Dolphin House flats in Dolphins Barn?

St Teresa’s Gardens

I’ve passed this development for many years now and have always admired it, though admittedly never been inside – must go in some time.
What is striking is how exclusive and po-faced this scheme could be in the hands of a developer, even with the same architecture – ‘waterside setting’ ‘nestling on a mature site’ ‘manicured lawns and walks’ ‘tens minutes from the city centre’ etc etc.

The buildings lived in by the poor become associated with their poverty in the mind of the public. Eventually people see some kind of causal relationship between the architecture and the poverty. At some point the building is knocked down by the city, and the residents rehoused in another style of building, in the hope this will cure their poverty. Rich people sometimes move into their abandoned poverty blocks which then gain associations with being chic. eg Yuppies living in Trellick tower, the many poorhouses and orphanages in London now converted to loft apartments etc.

Eventually people see some kind of causal relationship between the architecture and the poverty. At some point the building is knocked down by the city, and the residents rehoused in another style of building, in the hope this will cure their poverty.

This is a very interesting point. However I’d go further. I feel that this is actually quite an insidious process because it gives the appearance that the authorities are doing something to combat the cycle of poverty and social exclusion. It seems obvious that spending lots of money, effort and resources on such projects should help but in fact, because it does nothing at all to allieviate social exclusion, I feel that it’s worse than doing nothing. When you think about it, some of the cycles are obvious:

1. From early 20th century Georgian tennements to custom built “modern” flats.
2. From flats to semi-d suburbia.
3. From semi-d suburbia to La Corbusier style modernist.
4. And back to custom built “modern” flats (now called apartments).

I’m thinking about Ballymun here. And this is one reason I have misgivings about the current “regeneration” of Ballymun.

So you shift these people around spending vast amounts of money without every really doing anything. Even well meaning people who anguish about social exclusion are generally too short sighted to see this greater pattern, I think. Instead all you hear about is the mistakes of the previous iteration; there was a series on RTE last year I think were sociologists, planners and politicians were happy to critique the relocation of people in the seventies to bleak out-of-town suburban semi-detached housing estates without any realisation that the style of residences and even the general environment is, if not completely irrelevent, a very minor factor; the middle classes seem to be capable of living in semi-ds, apartments, terraced victorians, etc. without their social order collapsing. This idea won’t appeal obviously to archictects and/or planners who have convinced themselves that they can solve this difficult problem using THEIR tools.