Dawson Street Area

Hey

I have found the pic I talked about earlier in the thread, but, I not sure I’ll be able to scan it. I is from Derek Stanleys “Central Dublin”.

The picture is taken from Nassau St near the Junction with Dawson St looking towards the Nassau/Grafton intersection. Despite the tight angle, two quite elegant victorian buildings can be seen roughly where the hideous conrete 1960s monstrocity (orange and white) is sited today. Due to the faded quality of the picture you can’t make out too much. However, its clear that both buildings are in a vaguely Italianate style reminisent of Deanes Palace St bank. In particular, the building closest to Grafton St seems to have very distinguished bay windows.

Very little in the way of minute detail is clear but the furthest building appears to have the name ” Wilson ” on one of its windows.

Can anybody post a better pic?? Even from the poor quality photo they seem like a fine accompaniment to Morrisson Chambers. Certainly better then their replacement!

C

Smart little Burrito Bar just a little farther along..beside the entrance lane into the Auto-mobile Association – anyone know the street name.

Its so simple…good palette of colours, details, understated design of signage. Why is it such a disaster elsewhere in the city.

There’s a good degree of vacancy on Dawson Street at the moment, and a particular lack of anchors, the the street is holding its own.

@thebig C wrote:

Thanks for that post GrahamH:)

I had never seen a pic of the corner building before. Its very interesting if perhaps a little domestic and understated for such a prominent position. The buildings I was talking about were probably a little further down towards Grafton St. I think I remember which book they are in. Obviously, they aren’t on Dawson St, but I was mentioning them in relation to parapet height.

C

I actually found an extremely good photo of the buildings I am refering to, unfortunately it was in the Porterhouse and too dark to use my camera phone effectively! It is the first shot I have seen of this stretch which is straight-on and not at a skewed angle.

C

Planner probably feels making time for a preplanning is a waste of his/her time…tea breaks to be had.

Its funny how planning pressures can be seen unfolding. A case in point is the Dawson Street/ Molesworth Street area which is surely set to see big changes as its older 70s and 80s office blocks come up for demolition and redevelopment.

It seems the passport office is first up..

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6813&p=115915&hilit=molesworth#p115915

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/commercial-property/30m-plan-for-dublin-passport-office-1.1554069

From Wednesday’s Irish Times

A 40-year-old office building occupied by estate agent Jones Lang LaSalle and the Passport Office at Molesworth Street and South Frederick Street in Dublin city centre is in line to be demolished and replaced by a more spacious block under a new planning application submitted to Dublin City Council.
The Irish Property Unit Trust, which owns and manages 58 primarily freehold properties for pension funds and charities, has sought permission to replace the five-storey Molesworth Building and the Frederick Building extending to 7,896sq m (84,990sq ft) with a four-storey block that will have a gross floor area of 12,733sq m (137,055sq ft).
The redevelopment is expected to cost in excess of €30 million.
A spokeswoman for the Office of Public Works said the lease on the Passport Office expires towards the end of next year and it was currently assessing the suitability of other sites in the city centre. It intends to locate the new office in a State-owned property, if one can be identified, to avoid entering into another lease. The current rent for the Passport Office is €529,221 a year.
The planning application describes the existing building as a “bland, characterless and undistinguised” structure of machine-made brick which did not fit in with the surrounding buildings. The proposed replacement would use brick and stone with “vertical stone fins” and “projecting stone sills” to recall the patterns of the white-painted Georgian window reveals. The new development would fit more sympathically with the surrounding Georgian buildings, the applicants claim.
The facade of the new block will be no higher than the current building, which “fails to meet modern occupier requirements”, according to one source.

Shallow height
The source said the potential to carry out an effective refurbishment was compromised by the existing shallow floor-to-ceiling heights of 3m. This is significantly less than the standard 3.75m to 4m height.
Under plans prepared by Henry J Lyons Architects, the new building will, like the present block, have a double basement car park to cater for 34 private car spaces and 58 public car spaces.
There will also be 128 bicycle parking spaces and two motorbike spaces.
The new building will have a terrace setback at fourth- and fifth-floor levels along Molesworth Street, South Frederick Street and Setanta Place.
It will also have a terrace at fifth-floor level at the corner of Molesworth Street and South Frederick Street.

Passport Office Building

It would be nice to be able to greet news of the proposed demolition of the wretched Passport Office block on Molesworth Street with the satisfaction of long awaited vengeance, but since the proposed replacement block manages to repeat all the same mistakes as its 1974 predecessor, but on a louder scale, we’re going to have to put satisfaction on hold.

the ‘Molesworth Building’, named in desecration of the family that laid out this noble street in 1726.

a view of Molesworth Street just as the hoarding was going up for the demolition of the five houses that made way for this appalling office block.

Whereas the existing block could be described as dull to the point of knowing its own worthlessness, the proposed replacement block, from the images scanned on the planning file [Reg. no. 3312/13], doesn’t even have that merit.

As we’ve come to expect in situations like this, there is an wholly superfluous Archaeological Assessment Report thrown in with the application, produced on this occasion apparently in response to a phantom Recorded Monument number that has somehow managed to linger on the RMP Map of the area long after anything remotely historical was eradicated by the 6m deep double basement car park. As bogus as the Archaeological Assessment Report is, at least it gets much of its background information on the original development of the street from an inter-web article written by Turtle Bunbury, a writer with an interest in history who had gone to the bother of looking it up.

In contrast to the weighty, but pointless, Archaeological Assessment Report, the distinctly light weight report submitted by ‘Historic Buildings Consultant’, David Slattery, manages to garble even these basic facts about the original development of the street with Slattery telling us that Molesworth Street was developed in the early 18th century on ground ”. . . within the Dawson Estate which adjoined the gardens of Leinster House.”

With a statement that geographically and chronologically challenged, it’s hard to take the subsequent architectural evaluation seriously. For what it’s worth the evaluation goes on to say exactly what you’d expect it to say; the existing office block is ‘bland and repetitive’ and the new office block will be ‘complex and expressive’, from which I think we can conclude that the cheque has cleared.

Molesworth Street was a planned street, therefore it had ‘original’ houses, all of which were gable fronted and all of which were completed within thirty five years of the initial laying out of the street. At the very least, a proper assessment of the original streetscape should be submitted with any application for redevelopment of this scale and an architectural response provided that both, acknowledges the original plot widths, and is respectful of the two surviving original houses that adjoin the site to the east.

Lobbing in another bog-standard office block with a bog-standard, overblown, corner feature [extra storey] and – concrete fins that echo the plaster reveals of Georgian windows – on a street that was characterized by flush-framed windows and subtle variations in building widths and gable heights, is an indictment of corporate ignorance and the professionals that feed off it.

Molesworth Street deserves better than this.

Anyone know where one might find a picture of the proposed building.