Dublin Fruit Market
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what was the film where someone had a W tattooed on each bum-cheek so that when they bent over it spelled WoW: in that context the opposite of wow is “o”.
@jdivision wrote:
blah? It reminds me of those redbrick apartment buildings in Milltown, Dundrum etc where apartments take forever to sell because they’re so old. This is not retro cool, it’s Carroll’s Smithfield Lofts scheme gone wrong.
I’d tend to agree … perhaps i’m a bit quick to judge based on that montage but given that its essentially the same brick wallpaper twisted at will, i don’t know if i need to see any more.
@notjim wrote:
what was the film where someone had a W tattooed on each bum-cheek so that when they bent over it spelled WoW: in that context the opposite of wow is “o”.
😀
Unfortunately , the Fruit Market building shows up just how dire the new stuff is. The blurb descibes it as ‘world class’ – whose world? what class?
I’m surpised nobody’s mentioned the ‘signature’ building at Mayor Square yet.
© The Irish TimesHave to say I kinda like its expressive, sharp forms. The building in the distance looks like it has a digital audio meter on the roof 🙂
However so much of the same design across the board I suspect will either be dramatically effective or extremely tiresome. The same may also contribute to an atmosphere of a ‘designed’ 1980’s UK town centre regeneration, which is my greatest concern.
Still – we’re getting too much of a multi-faceted, softly softly approach of jumbling various buildings of late in major redevelopments. At least this has the guts to work with a singular concept in mind. Whether this concept is unduly monotonous, I haven’t quite decided. What I have decided is that ‘world class’ is not a term that immediately springs to mind.
The choice of brick is going to be crucial.
The person I feel sorry for here is whoever the guy was in DCC that came up with this idea in the first place, he must be feeling sick right now.
The whole ‘Fruit Market’ project was a really great idea that DCC, to their credit, have followed through on when it can’t have been easy to deal with all the vested interests. Potentially the ‘Fruit Market’ scheme could be as important to the north inner city as Temple Bar is to the south inner city, and, (as has been said before by Frank McDonald, I think), as a link to the under performing Smithfield area, it could be the crucial factor that makes everything else click.
There is no way that this architecture does any justice to any of the these aspirations. If this was designed by three different architectural practices, why does it all look the same?
Why could something of this scale not have been broken down into smaller development parcels to generate some diversity of design approach under an umbrella of a single masterplan.
In the HKR planning submission for the Motor Tax Office scheme next door, they showed a contextual drawing of the ‘Fruit Market’ scheme (with the roof off the market building) that looked genuinely interesting. The rigid geometry and the dodgy colonnades of the preliminary scheme were gone and the new scheme (below) looked almost relaxed and at the same time vibrant.
Some of that is just the difference between the graphics of an artist’s impression and the harsh reality of a photo-montage, but mostly it’s the quality of the design.
Either the design of the elevations changed, or else, the artist doing the line drawing couldn’t bring himself to draw all those repeating squares.
We’ve waited all these years for a decent new urban space in the centre of Dublin, I’d sooner they took another year and got it right, then put up with this.
You see I must be remembering this wrong but I thought the big clever thing for this square was that it was going to be designed in the old fashioned Georgian Sq/Grotmarket way: the council would establish a parapet line, a building line and so on and then individual lots would be sold off to individual developer to build what they wanted within that. Surely that would be better, more fun, more Market Squarish?
PS – that building on Mayor Sq is a nightmare, I hate it.
The main problem with the Mayor Square bldg is that it cuts off the ‘plebs’ to the north from getting any access through it to the middle-class nirvana to the south. Why did DCC allow it? Notjim: I agree with what you’ve said: DCC should set out a detailed masterplan and individual (but largish) plots should invite design submissions. Three architects, one design; sounds like a supermarket cartel.
@gunter wrote:
There is no way that this architecture does any justice to any of the these aspirations. If this was designed by three different architectural practices, why does it all look the same?
My guess is that Gehl Architects were brought in for the ground plan/movement/site analysis stuff, HKR for the ‘local knowledge’ aspect and Make for the ‘high profile name’ bit (is DCC turning into DDDA in allowing itself be seduced by starchitect factor?). Which doesn’t really answer your question.
I rather liked the previous proposal/visuals- was it Donnelly Turpin or someone like that? Floating around since ’03/’04. It had coherence (if a little flawed- the square was closed to the south, for example); this has monotony.
A gestation period like this says ‘This is the best we can get’. Saddening.
Is it just me or has the size of the public space to the west of the square been reduced in the latest proposal compared with the earlier one?
The idea of the Victorian market building being situated in the middle of a square has definitely been eroded somewhat in the latest proposal by new buildings.
Both schemes:
You might be right, but it seems that the overall layout has changed a bit too- there’s another square to the north now that wasn’t there before. Perhaps the site was added to in the interim? All in all, it’s less formal in appearance in the new incarnation, but I thought the previous square had a nice simplicity to it, unlike the 3D version of the London 2012 logo that’s proposed now. Ooh! Funkayyyyy!!!
Why is it that the architects were unable to propose a development involving brick and stone, voids and solids, arcades and arches, streets and piazze – in other words, a contemporary and complementary take on the classical rennaissance themes of the Fruit Market? Why is it that the best they can come up with is a quirky modernist pastiche to a tired old formula (shoeboxes but not quite)? Can nobody do inventive townscape respecting the ‘genius loci’?
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Devin wrote:The idea of the Victorian market building being situated in the middle of a square has definitely been eroded somewhat in the latest proposal by new buildings.[/HTML]I agree with you there Devin.
Whatever about the architectural quality of the first plan, and you’d have to worry about a square that conforms so closely to the johnglas ideal, at least you would have known that you were in a ‘square’. Furthermore, in the original scheme, the existing markets building was, quite rightly, the focus of the square. I’m not too sure that those seemingly simple objectives are achieved so well in the new scheme.
On the other side of the equation, I quite like the less formal arrangement, simply because most great squares that I can think of, the ones that work really well as great urban spaces, are nearly always the ones that are less obviously planned. (exceptions : St. Marks Sq. Piazza Navona, anything baroque from Italy).
A surprising number of the great European squares are semi-accidental in that they came about after fires destroyed existing city blocks. The great square at Nurnberg, where they hold the christmas markets now, was apparently only created after the citizens of the city burned down the original Jewish quarter (which shows how far back those particular tendencies go), and the huge square at Erfurt was only created in the early 19th century, when a fire destroyed the blocks separating two smaller medieval squares.
Quite a lot of the great formal squares of northern Europen are actually only great architecturally, they’re not great urban spaces, if you you include ‘hubs of activity’ in the criteria. You’d find more life in the courtyard of a nursing home than you’ll find in Robert Adam’s Charlott Square, and Place des Vosges, for all it’s sublime beauty, isn’t all that much livlier. The square in front of the Neu Residenz in Wurzburg is so vast and so formal (on three sides) and so dead, that it can only be used as a giant surface car park.
O.K. Fruit Market Square was never going to be in that league, but it is still, potentially, an important urban space and, as such, it still has to decide what it’s trying to be. Is it trying to be a formal square, as originally envisaged, or a fluid organic space?
If the answer now is the latter, then straight away you’re into a dilemma, how do you design an undesigned space? Do you just contrive it crooked and to hell with issues of logic? Do you try and pick up clues from the surrounding urban patterns and then contrive it, but with answers (Libeskind style) if anyone asks why bits are slanty? Do you divide the development up into parcels and let the contrived result be a ‘Making a Modern Square’ by Group 91 – 08? This would get my vote, if I had one.
Whatever way you go about creating a new fluid informal space, what you don’t do, surely, is go around all the architecture that you’ve carefully contrived not to be formal, and stamp it all with the heaviest square pattern template you can find.
gunter: I agree with you completely; I was not advocating the ‘creation’ of a planned series of ‘squares’ (or spaces) – as a former planner, I know how difficult that is to design and execute. But the FM bldg must be the centrepiece of the whole project, not just an incidental (or even a ‘nuisance’ for some great planned sceme). I was advocating retaining the ‘spirit’ of the place – difficult i know, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. So what if you design buildings and spaces deriving from the neo-renaissance of the FM; we need architects and designers with the balls to resist howls of ‘pastiche’ from the modernist lobby. You don’t have to ape old styles, just draw your inspiration from them.
An example: one of the best (and most actively used) spaces in Glasgow is the area (really an elongated triangle) in front of the Concert Hall (an awful neo-1950s lump), with a long prospect down Buchanan street (Grafton St eat your heart out!). It was not ‘planned’ to be a happening space – it just is. And it links old posh Glasgow (Sauchiehall St) with the new trendy (Buchanan St). So the statue of our esteemed late leader gets a few traffic cones and loses its specs – that’s life!johnglas, That fine, it’s just you worry me, that’s all I’m saying.
That space in front of the concert hall at the elbow of Suciehall st and Buchanin works as a space, surely, because the steps to the shopping centre function like an outdoor theater and the footfalls are huge, again because of the shopping centre.
If you can guarantee a constant supply of people and throw in a few steps you can probably make any urban space work.
The Fruit Market, like Smithfield, is going to have to face the challenge that, there isn’t really any reason to be there, unless they can make the spaces themselves, and the uses that are accommodated around it, attractive enough.
I just don’t think the architecture is right yet. I know we’re only judging it from one render (sorry photo-montage) but to me it’s just a coat of white paint away from being a dodgy hotel complex on the Costa Brava.
gunter: no need to be worried; I’m quite harmless really (so I’m told). Take your points about footfall and the current design. I still think the FM developed as a mid-end retail, food, pub area (shock, horror) could create such a footfall. Coincidentally, look at the Fruit Market in Glasgow, Designated as a high-end shopping area it was a flop, but now exclusively a noshing and boozing area it works very well (and is full) – the old Fruitmarket Gallery next door is a useful space (the play Black Watch was performed there) and this is adjacent to the City Hall (a refurbished concert venue). Synergy, dear boy, synergy – events, dear boy, events!
Maybe I’m architecturally illiterate or something but the first scheme looks much better to me than the latest. The latest one looks a bit gimmicky, it jars with the fruit market buildings, I think simply because the proposed buildings are close to (distance-wise) the modest 19th century ones. It looks a bit claustrophobic. A little children’s park in front of the market would have been lovely, and very civic! Then the new buildings wouldn’t look like they are about to topple over onto the market buildings. Oh well, I know space is always an issue with these developments!
It’s so true, as someone pointed out, that the 19th century buildings really show up the blandness of the proposed ones.
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