Dublin Metropolis – Artist’s Impression

it’s a start.
that doesn’t look bad at all.

whatever happened to fjp?

Will a massive bend in the Liffey be part and parcel of this utopian dream?

I suggest that the government move the ‘National Infrastructure Bill’ eliminate all sources of objector and proceed to bend the Liffey.

Originally posted by Morlan

:confused: It was taken with a Pano lense wide shot.

I realised that;)
I think that the concept was interesting, but it would be easier to imagine the reality of it if the ‘pano lense wide shot’ was not used!

Thanks

Phil

That image is really disturbing. Maybe it’s the thought of Apollo and Hawkins suddenly gaining twenty stories each…

Interesting to see the U2 tower never got the go ahead in this utopian dream!

Originally posted by Morlan

You may wish to start here:

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/V/Vision.html

I suggest you have a look here:

http://www.commonsensescience.org/phil.htm – 6k

All the best

Phil
😀

Morlan,
how long did you spend doing that image?

Sadly that’s probably the kind of highrise we’d get in Dublin – overblown domestic scale detailing, massing and materials. Ew.

I still can’t believe the SOM scheme (pedestrian as it was) got ditched for those four little pointy-hat excrescences.

No, I don’t think that. As I said I like the concept but I found slightly misleading because of the camera angle. I personally invision any major high rise which might eventually happen in this city as happening around the pigeon house in an era when it is no longer a power station and the two chimneys are preserved as a reminder of the past etc etc. I know it is a completely of the wall idea, but it is just a thought.

Originally posted by phil
the pigeon house in an era when it is no longer a power station and the two chimneys are preserved as a reminder of the past etc etc. I know it is a completely of the wall idea, but it is just a thought.

I’m sure that people who argued that Battersea power station would one day be a monument to deco were equally ‘mad’ once.

It won’t happen today or tomorrow but it will happen. 🙂

I don’t think that it was a waste of time but some of the buildings selected for elevation were a bit suspect .

The Ballast House on Aston Quay and Appollo House spring to mind.

An interesting exercise in the possible with modern technology. 😉

The one aspect of the photomontage that I did like was the way the loop line went between the buildings on either side. There is something about the way a raised railway seems to slice between two buildings that I think looks really good.

Originally posted by Morlan

No your right! I get slightly frustrated with the above image because I know that I’ll never live to see a high rise Dublin 😮

I guess all I can do is dream – the above is a product of that. 🙂

There are plenty of other cities with high rise, and most of it is crappy. I can see one shinig example out the window right now.

While I would argue that Dublin could benefit from increased density of development, high rise for the sake of it is most emphatically not the answer. Following that route it may well end up looking exactly like your montage.

Most of the new RTE dramas etc., or programmes that try to portray Dublin as a modern and happening city always seem to show those ‘pointy hat’ buildings on George’s Quay. Pity there’s feck all else to show. Watch the start of that new BowWow programme on RTE if you get the chance.

Maybe the new station on Tara street will add something new worth looking at on the Dublin ‘skyline’. I think they’re due to start building there this Autumn.

Interesting try but we need to know what is in the buildings – rest home for developers, demented engineers etc?

The lack of Georgian pastiche suggests no private sector involvement.

.

The picture on the first page definitely deserves more discussion

It’s still a horrendously prescient view, sadly.

Where’s it taken from.The top-floor of liberty hall, right…..It’s an awful sight….Dublin is not a high-rise town.

On a cloudy day the view is remarkably depressing – although watching the city’s weather rolling in from the west is facinating.

The idea of Dublin anything near Morlans great picture is frightening – reminicent of the initial Spencer Dock proposal. Some very tall landmark buildings away from the immediate city centre is what the city needs I think, adding defintion to the skyline whilst not impinging on the human scale of the city. I don’t like the idea of Tara St where it is, further adding to the cluster of mid-rise in this area – creeping along the quay to O’ Cll Bridge.

Thats what I thought was best about the image i.e. Tara St was at the centre of Dublin.

It is obvious that this area will never have the types of building that it has in the picture BUT within a kilometere or so to the east there will be a few mid rise landmark buildings.

What was most interesting about the image was seeing how different cladding systems reacted to being dramatically increased in scale. Buildings such as Kennedy’s bar and the Ballast house looked terrible while others had some potential to a grow.

As a conservationist I have a problem with buildings of the scale in the image being errected within the existing city core, on the sustainability side I feel that a number of midrise builings in the port end of the docklands are highly preferable to existing settlement patterns.

The worst by a long shot is the Ulster Bank, 5 storeys is bad enough – 30 is just scary! And as for Aviation House!
It’s funny to see the almost reticent bow facade of AIB/IFSC suddenly morph into the intimidating headquarters of a faceless multinational 😀

Sorry Diaspora – I was referring to the Tara St Station development rather than the street earlier – I don’t think such a height should be permitted in what essentially is the city centre, especially in this already congested area in height terms.
The idea of a main street though cutting through a bend in the river is indeed an attractive one though – as are embankment promenades, river boats and snow-capped mountains as a backdrop :p

Dublin a Metroplis, who the hell came up with that?. A Metroplis?. I can’t get my head around that one, DUBLIN IS A SMALL CITY, understand. Tokyo, Paris, London, Cairo, Sao Paulo, Mexico Ciy, Beijing, Shangai, Manilla, Jakarta, New York etc etc are metropolises not Dublin, ah ah what a joke, the people who say this have never been outside of Dublin or they are just plain ignorant or stupid, or got delusions of grandure.
Ive heard O,Connell street is the widest street in the world, give me a break, far from it.
What next, the only city with trams, the only city with an airport, the only city with a tunnell, I could go on but I won’t.
Wake up and educate yourself about the world and broaden them narrow little minds of yours.
Thank You.

Location: Cardiff

Thank You.

Originally posted by Sean Carney
Dublin a Metroplis, who the hell came up with that?. A Metroplis?. I can’t get my head around that one, DUBLIN IS A SMALL CITY, understand. Tokyo, Paris, London, Cairo, Sao Paulo, Mexico Ciy, Beijing, Shangai, Manilla, Jakarta, New York etc etc are metropolises not Dublin, ah ah what a joke, the people who say this have never been outside of Dublin or they are just plain ignorant or stupid, or got delusions of grandure.

Sean, I think most people who use this discussion forum on a regular basis realise that Dublin is not a Metropolis. Morlans images from the beginning of this thread (if you actually looked at it?) were merely pointing out what Dublin could look like in Morlans future utopian plan for the city.

Ive heard O,Connell street is the widest street in the world, give me a break, far from it.
What next, the only city with trams, the only city with an airport, the only city with a tunnell, I could go on but I won’t.

Where did you hear that? That has never been said here nor have I heard it anywhere else!

Wake up and educate yourself about the world and broaden them narrow little minds of yours.
Thank You.

Thanks for enlightening me 😀

If anything, the Metropolis – meaning mother city – title of this thread was meant to be ironic. Oh and here you go by the way smart boy, the actual dictionary definition:-
me·trop·o·lis ( P ) Pronunciation Key (m-trp-ls) n.
A major city, especially the chief city of a country or region: Chicago, the metropolis of the Midwest.
A city or an urban area regarded as the center of a specific activity: a great cultural metropolis.
Ecclesiastical. The chief see of a metropolitan bishop.
The mother city or country of an overseas colony, especially in ancient Greece.
So aside from being a would-be smart-ass, you’re wrong as well.

Hadn’t seen this thread first time round.

Dublin looks like Croydon in that first picture.

One of the forums better threads,

I found the extra images of the Central Bank very interesting, I know people knock pastiche but 23 storeys of the Central Bank close to the Point Depot would do it for me!!!!!!

Thank you for pointing out the defination of “Metroplis”, my mistake.
When you say that if I have nothing good to say don’t say anything at all I just want to verify that when it comes to anything being developed outside of Dublin it seems to be alright to criticise and to put down.
Also I no longer live in Cardiff I live in Ireland where by the way I grew up.
I have travelled a bit so have taken my experiences of different citites with me.
Thank You.

P.S: I will have to update my profile.

ahhhhh! mystery solved

The original photo that spawned this thread (courtesy of http://www.fantasyjackpalace.com ) is in this months The Dubliner Magazine with an article on Dublins architecture by Mannix Flynn the actor.

This is counter balanced by an article by Frank McDonald, well worth a read but unfortunately not online at http://www.thedubliner.ie 🙁

Looks great at a glance. What the pictures dont show is the large shadows the buildings will cast, not to mention the winds associated with large buildings.

I forgot to say that the Dubliner is available at €1.99 and has an advance preview of Gerry Stenbridge’s new novel. 🙂

Originally posted by Gar
Most of the new RTE dramas etc., or programmes that try to portray Dublin as a modern and happening city always seem to show those ‘pointy hat’ buildings on George’s Quay. Pity there’s feck all else to show.

LOL!

I was trying to get a few photos of the “modern” side of Dublin a few days ago, and I didn’t know what to take a photo of, except for the Georges Quay offices and about 4 or 5 other buildings.

http://www.scs.ie/

Any thoughts on the image

Wow! Dublin really has come on a lot since I was there last. (3 weeks ago)

@Thomond Park wrote:

http://www.scs.ie/

Any thoughts on the image

That image was shown before in the Dublin Skyline thread.

i know, it was i who posted it.

Not as that link; it is not the image that it is interesting it is the group that are putting it up as the main image on their homepage.

I note just how unclear the Custom House is in the image it looks to have received some attention from the artist.

@Sean Carney wrote:

Thank you for pointing out the defination of “Metroplis”, my mistake.
When you say that if I have nothing good to say don’t say anything at all I just want to verify that when it comes to anything being developed outside of Dublin it seems to be alright to criticise and to put down.
Also I no longer live in Cardiff I live in Ireland where by the way I grew up.
I have travelled a bit so have taken my experiences of different citites with me.
Thank You.

P.S: I will have to update my profile.

Ah Cardiff! Now that’s a big city isn’t it Sean?!

No one is saying that Dublin is a metropolis ala New york, London et all, but it’s certainly not a small city. Would you say Glasgow, Liverpool, Copenhagen are small? They’ve all got populations similar to that of Dublin.

I think you’ve got a provincial attitude to be honest. It’s the same argument I’ve heard lots of times from people who want the “green image of Ireland” untained by the big grey crab of Dublin which stretches out saying “I’m here too”! These same people hate any image or recognition of urbanity creeping into this romantic “sound of music” nicely boxed off notion.

Cities like Cork, Limerick, Derry, Lisburn, Killkenny are small. Places like Liverpool, Dublin, Glasgow are big. But places like New york, London, Paris, Rio are feckin “houige”;-)

……….I agree

Isn’t urban sprawl muddying the waters when trying to measure the size of a city, though?
Standing in the middle of Liverpool, it certainly doesn’t feel like a bigger city than Dublin, however many miles of semi-ds stretch out across Merseyside. I’m not sure what difference it makes if there is a similar large city a few miles up the road either. Is half-a-million-population Edinburgh made magically bigger because it’s near (ish) to Glasgow?
Ireland will never be as densely populated as Britain, but I’ve no doubt Dublin will eventually become a large conurbation with towns like Drogheda, Navan and Naas continuing to swell and everything in between being slowly swallowed up by housing. A lot of these people still won’t consider themselves Dubliners, though. If this ‘Liffeyside’ greater Dublin has nearly three million in it, will that make it a major city?
Also, if a million-strong shanty town with no industry, commercial life or infrastructure springs up in a developing country, is that a major metropolis?
It’s not all about numbers.

@PDLL wrote:

Its all relative – someone from Shanghai might think that London was small and Dublin was tiny! I think what is missing here is a sense of proportion. Dublin is a standalone city of 1,000,000. After you leave Dublin, there is no other town of any reasonable size for at least 180km (this is particularly obvious when you fly over Ireland at night). Compare this with Liverpool – it is part of a much larger urban conurbation which effectively spreads to Manchester and incorporates many large suburban towns. Glasgow is only an hour from Edinburgh which has a population of .5 million in its own right. In short, Dublin is – by international standards – small. I remember going round this block in another thread. It seemed to end up in a Freudian line of thinking there too. There is nothing wrong in simply accepting that Dublin is not a major metropolis by international standards

Ignoring national boundaries – our friends in Belfast are but 164.5Km from us. There is a ‘conurbation’ of sorts (comparable to Glasgow – Edinburgh – though it is but 65km) area stretching along the east coast]http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/distances.html?n=78&lat=53.433&long=-6.250[/url]

You make it sound like Dublin is lost in some void. Ireland is small and Dublin takes up quite a bit of it.
It’s part of urbanised Northern Europe – itself part of the highly urbanised EU which is in turn part of the uber-urbanised northern hemisphere.

Also, Dublin may be pending a move up in the influencial Loughborough University table of ‘World Cities’ – to a Gamma Level World city. Your mates, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh aint goin anywhere – the ones that manage to get a mention languish in ‘minimal evidence of world city formation’

Dublin is in ‘relatively strong evidence of world city formation’. It’s not just size. Good oul bruiser punches way abover her dainty, pretty little weight. Its also frikin loaded – absolutley minted compared to many cities.

see: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/citylist.html

(just got back from being away for a good bot and lovin it!) 🙂

@PDLL wrote:

Its all relative – someone from Shanghai might think that London was small and Dublin was tiny! I think what is missing here is a sense of proportion. Dublin is a standalone city of 1,000,000. After you leave Dublin, there is no other town of any reasonable size for at least 180km (this is particularly obvious when you fly over Ireland at night). Compare this with Liverpool – it is part of a much larger urban conurbation which effectively spreads to Manchester and incorporates many large suburban towns. Glasgow is only an hour from Edinburgh which has a population of .5 million in its own right. In short, Dublin is – by international standards – small. I remember going round this block in another thread. It seemed to end up in a Freudian line of thinking there too. There is nothing wrong in simply accepting that Dublin is not a major metropolis by international standards

Ignoring national boundaries – our friends in Belfast are but 164.5Km from us. There is a ‘conurbation’ of sorts (comparable to Glasgow – Edinburgh – though it is but 65km) area stretching along the east coast]http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/distances.html?n=78&lat=53.433&long=-6.250[/url]

You make it sound like Dublin is lost in some void. Ireland is small and Dublin takes up quite a bit of it.
It’s part of urbanised Northern Europe – itself part of the highly urbanised EU which is in turn part of the uber-urbanised northern hemisphere.

Also, Dublin may be pending a move up in the influencial Loughborough University table of ‘World Cities’ – to a Gamma Level World city. Your mates, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh aint goin anywhere – the ones that manage to get a mention languish in ‘minimal evidence of world city formation’

Dublin is in ‘relatively strong evidence of world city formation’. It’s not just size. Good oul bruiser punches way abover her dainty, pretty little weight. Its also frikin loaded – absolutley minted compared to many cities.

see: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/citylist.html

(just got back from being away for a good bit and lovin it!) 🙂

Who judges what the population of Dublin is… and where do they draw the line. From what I’m learning in school, Dublin has a population of about 450,000. Obviously this is only the greater Dublin area and I’m sure if you were to include all of the satellite towns you could count all day. But unfortunetly this isn’t what cities are judged by. You are comparing Dublin (including suburbs and satellite towns) with Glasgow’s greater population, which is wrong… as you are excluding about another million people from Scotlands largest city. It’s like in London… greater London has 8 million people, everyone says that that is the official population, but include the suburbs and commuter belt, and the population of London as a whole turns into something more along the lines of 18 million. It’s too hard to judge and in the end…. nobody ends up right when judging a population.

That very first image of Dublin in the first post makes the city look kinda like Chicago.

……………..Chicago!

Very interesting pic!!!!!

Em…certainly some of the buildings there would have looked far better being taller. Some of them would have looked far better by not being built!

glasgows poplulation is half a million and dublin is alot bigger, and growing at a far faster rate than almost all european cities regardless of size!

It’s extremely difficult to get a sense for the real size of cities when different definitions of boundaries and geographical limits are taken into consideration. However the comparison of Glasgow and Dublin is quite telling:

Dublin City, an area of 115square km has a population of 495,000 according to the 2002 census

Glasgow City, an area of 175square km has a population of 629,000 according to the 2001 census.

More interesting however is that the “Greater Glasgow Settlement Area” (as defined in the 2001 census) with an area of 368square km (or an approx radius of 11km from the centre of Glasgow) has a total population of 1,168,270 (2001 Census)

Greater Dublin, an area widely considered to include all of counties Dublin, Meath, Kildare and Wicklow has a total area of 6971square km and a total population of 1,535,446 (2002 Census) It’s a ridiculously huge expanse to be considering as being part of Dublin’s metropolitain area.
More realistically, County Dublin, including Dublin City, Fingal, South Co. Dublin And DunLaogaire Rathdown has a total area of 912square km and a population of 1,122,040 (2002 Census)

Therefore Greater Glasgow would appear have a similar population to Co. Dublin accommodated in approximately 40% of the geographical area. In my book this makes Glasgow a “bigger” city in that it is more densely populated.

Also within a geographical area roughly similar to that of the 6971square km of Greater Dublin a group of districts immediately surrounding Glasgow (East Ayrshire, East Dunbartonshire, East Renfrewshire, City Of Glasgow, Inverclyde, North Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, South Ayrshire, South Lanarkshire, West Dunbartonshire) with a total area of 6715square km has a total population of 2,096,685. Therefore “Greater Dublin” would appear to have approx. 73% of the population of Greater Glasgow and immediate environs.

I got all this information through wikipedia and I have to say I’m quite surprised at the result of the calculations. I always thought that Dublin was a considerably bigger place than Glasgow but the facts tell a different story. Of course bigger doesn’t mean better by any means! Dublin at the moment seems to have a lot more going for it than Glasgow from an economic point of view plus the population is set to rise dramatically in the next 20 years or so whereas Glasgow’s growth is relatively static.

Much of the ‘Greater Glasgow settlement Area’ includes those awful 1960s towers, though, which must surely increase the density quite considerably, whereas in Dublin the suburbs start as soon as you cross the canals. Dublin City, according to those figures, is actually more dense than Glasgow, which I find surprising (c.4300/sq.km vs c.3500/sq.km), but which further illustrates just how dispersed Dublin’s suburbs are. (I’m not trying to restart the whole pro- vs anti-height debate- just making an observation.)

I’ve always found Edinburgh to be more of a city than Dublin despite its smaller size (haven’t checked areas or population- I’m talking about my perception)- more fully urbanised in the centre and with a more concentrated and defined footprint. I could walk from work in Morningside to home in the east end of the New Town in about 35 minutes- that’s about 2/3 of the whole city footprint. And the city edge really felt like the city edge- forests and mountains were just beyond the notional ‘boundary’. Any journey to the end of a bus line would show the fairly abrupt transition.
Edinburgh seems like a city in miniature, while Dublin seems like a very big town. (Don’t get me wrong – I like Dublin – like I said I’m talking about perception.)

Anytime I’ve been to Glasgow I always felt it to be a bigger city than Dublin, with a higher density of population in the areas surrounding the central business district (which feels a lot bigger than Dublin’s). Particularly notable I think is the number of tenements that are fully occupied. A lot of ‘over the shop’ accomodation that would be occupied in Glasgow is still vacant in Dublin. I think the city council has some action plan to address that but I culd be mistaken.

The thrice-launched Living Over The Shop (LOTS) scheme? Worthy, but owners remain to be convinced.

Tenement buildings are one of the main reasons why I love Edinburgh (and Glasgow) so much, and one of the main reasons why they feel like cities. My guess is that the reason we don’t really have them is that they were just arriving as a type around the time of the Act of Union.
And the apartments we’re building now are not the same thing at all. Entirely the other end of the spectrum. Embarrassingly so.

Are these tenement buildings you speak of ctesiphon what they call ‘mansion blocks’ over there? (in London at least).
What class of people would have lived in these in the 19th and early 20th centuries when they were built?
I suspect even then a house with front and back garden was still more desirable, even if these blocks were built to a very high standard.

@Graham Hickey wrote:

Are these tenement buildings you speak of ctesiphon what they call ‘mansion blocks’ over there? (in London at least).
What class of people would have lived in these in the 19th and early 20th centuries when they were built?
I suspect even then a house with front and back garden was still more desirable, even if these blocks were built to a very high standard.

They’re pretty much the same thing, afaik, though I get the impression that the flats in the mansions might be smaller- maybe just the ones I know. Our flat (such a term doesn’t really do it justice) had four bedrooms, two reception rooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen, and a great view of Calton Hill. It was in a four storey over basement block in which the ground floor and basement were actually more like terraced houses with back gardens. Very few of the tenements are as spectacular as the one in Morlan’s pic (which is Old Town rather than New Town).
If you really haven’t been to Edinburgh, may I suggest you drop what you’re doing right now and get on the next flight out of town? I’ll give you a week before I start oiling my gun.:) If you can’t make it, rent ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ (or Trainspotting, for that matter, but TPOMJB is a far better film) to see what we mean.

The city imposed strict controls on its feuars . Although internally the houses were built to individual tastes and requirements, externally they had to conform in a uniform manner to the general plan as to both height and site. While uniformity was the prime requisite,* variations were allowed in decoration and in the design of doors and windows.

Tempted?:)

EDIT: Broken URL removed. See message below for replacement.

Great picture of Edinburgh. It reminds me of a trip there many years ago. I’m trying to remember was it the Scottish National Gallery or National Museum where the main entrance is on the ninth floor (though I think there is another entrance on another street below the one where the main entrance is).

The pictures of Chicago are also very good. What interests me is how much sun seems to get in through all those tall buildings. In the picture on the left, most areas on the left hand side are bathed in sunshine. I wonder, with our location on the planet (about 10 degrees north of Chicago), would we be able to ensure the same thing if we built up tall buildings in the city centre. It is, for example, possible to sit in sunshine up to about 3 O’Clock on Christmas Eve on the boardwalk, even though there is shade extending at least half way across the Liffey. If taller buildings were built along, say, Burgh Quay, as the picture in the opening post illustrates, this would not be possible. I’m not against building tall, but we would also need to be very careful to make the best use of our fairly limited sunlight.

(maybe if we actually introduced that bend in the river?:) )

In which case we could probably move the sun too if we wanted 🙂

That’s a great building in your picture Morlan, a nine storey Georgian building – imagine dropping that into conversation at an IGS dinner – the scandal! It really makes you laugh aloud when you think of the five storey IFSC Phase II in this context.

Just in Ireland for good or bad, ‘tenement’ has negative connotations, even they are of high quality – mass-built housing built to rid parts of the city of slums: Iveagh Buildings etc. By contrast ‘mansion blocks’ in London at least seem to have been built by developers for the middle classes c1900 as alternatives to the conventional house, somewhat similar to how families lived in continental cities:

ctesiphon nil do link ag obair…though yes I’ve seen Trainspotting (who hasn’t?), not the other though.
Never been to Edinburgh (oh the shame), but I’ve visited her classier collegue twice, which hopefully makes up for it 🙂

@Graham Hickey wrote:

ctesiphon nil do link ag obair…though yes I’ve seen Trainspotting (who hasn’t?), not the other though.
Never been to Edinburgh (oh the shame), but I’ve visited her classier collegue twice, which hopefully makes up for it 🙂

This should work (sorry)- http://www.abercrombyhouse.com/history1.html
I can’t think of anywhere classier than Edinburgh, at least in Scotland. (Except maybe Oban.:) ) Where do you mean?
Lastly, I think it’s only in Ireland that ‘tenement’ has such negative connotations. In Scotland, it simply means a multiple-occupancy building in which the floors are all the same height (unlike our old Georgain friends with the piano nobile and diminishing heights moving upwards).

Bath would be my guess.

Correct and right Seamus.

Gasp! ctesiphon doesn’t know a Bath streetscape when he sees one?!? And there was me thinking the Royal Crescent would be too obvious for him….

😀

Thanks for the link – which led me on to this 😮

http://www.picturesofedinburgh.com/pictures/oldtown/oldtown-viewfromscott1.jpg

Skyscapers even by today’s standards.

😮

Though in my defence (ahem), I didn’t realise there was any connection between the ‘classier colleague’ and the picture below the words- I just thought it was another London picture, though not one I recognised.
(In hindsight, I should have just checked the image properties- Bath is in the title of your file!)

There’s another great view of Edinburgh that would be the next picture to the right of the one you linked, showing the back of the Bank of Scotland and other Baronial-tinged ‘skyscrapers’ directly behind the two galleries that sit above Princes Street Gardens, but I fear we’ve gone too far off topic.

I’m off to lick my wounds…:)