Elm Park Development
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@gunter wrote:
Can you make a concrete and glass office block environmental by clamping a few lengths of wood onto the facade, or is it more complicated than that?
Which ‘lengths of wood’ are you on about? The lattice-like structure supporting the glazing for the winter garden, or the natural ventilation panels? Either or, they’re doing more than being slapped on the facade.
I’ve been waiting for a discussion about this scheme for a while now, should be interesting if it gets going!
@Briain wrote:
Which ‘lengths of wood’ are you on about? The lattice-like structure supporting the glazing for the winter garden, or the natural ventilation panels? Either or, they’re doing more than being slapped on the facade.
I’ve been waiting for a discussion about this scheme for a while now, should be interesting if it gets going!
Briain, you seem to know a lot more about this development than I do. Maybe you’d expand on your understanding of the environmental aspects of the scheme and how they might mitigate or justify the parallel block design approach that a lot of people sincerely hoped we’d left behind.
On the lengths of timber clamped to the front, I hadn’t noticed that they appear to relate, in some way, to a secondary glazing system. Perhaps you could give the eco-rational presentation on this also, and do not tell me that this is a ‘winter garden’.
Looks pretty good from that image – Obviously the timber elements are part of the solar shading strategy as they tend to be on most of BMcE’s buildings. I’ll have to wander down that way for a proper look… Is the site accessible to the public yet?
@BTH wrote:
Looks pretty good from that image – Obviously the timber elements are part of the solar shading strategy as they tend to be on most of BMcE’s buildings. I’ll have to wander down that way for a proper look… Is the site accessible to the public yet?
I doubt it, they’re still building the slip road into the site, I think the construction of the buildings is finished but the surface works aren’t.
I saw the scheme last May, so forgive me if my memory is clouded but I’ll do my best. The blocks are orientated North-South, and are only 11m wide or so for sufficient sunlight to penetrate through the structure. This determines their long skinny form. As for the lengths of wood, they are part of either the double skin facade, or supporting the glazing for the winter garden. (Yes, there is one, I will tell you it is one). Other than that I presume they form part of a brise soleil or something.
There is no air-conditioning used throughout the building, with natural ventilation used throughout, and also ground pumps have been utilised to generate heat.
The buildings footprints have been minimised to retain the site as a greenfield site as much as possible. A route exists through the site with the buildings raised off the ground to allow for pedestrian movement
Another view of the scan you linked to:
It’s mostly better explained than I can do it on the website, http://www.bmcea.com
Briain: If I might stick in another uninvited comment here.
This is an impressive scheme, that’s not in doubt. I queried the eco qualities of this complex because they seemed to be accepted as a given in all discussions of the project and they looked slightly superficial to me.
You seem well convinced that the eco credentials are sound here, so I’m happy to concede that one, for the moment.
I suppose the bigger issue here is similar to the issue we’ve been discussing on the Ballsbridge thread:
If a new quarter is suddenly parachuted into a existing context, how do you go about setting out it’s parameters. Do you say, ‘This is different, different rules will apply’? do you say slab blocks, carpet bombed across a site didn’t work in the sixties, but that was because of the cheap materials, the wrong social component, or the absence of services, it wasn’t the architecture and they didn’t have winter gardens.
Whatever way you go about creating a justification for this, at the back of the mind is the niggling doubt that we’re only impressed with this now, because it’s shiny and new and soon it will be familiar and it won’t be new and maybe the timber will start to look faded and sad and we’ll forget that it’s cutting edge eco-friendly because eco knowledge will have moved on and we’ll start to associate this scheme with the Tara Towers hotel and the nurses home at St. Vincents and we’ll start to say when are they going to knock this eyesore down and who was minding the door when this strolled in.
In my opinion, when you walk around a city you should be able to read the logic of how it was put together and how it has evolved after it was first put together. If you come to a place that doesn’t quite seem to fit, a place where the logic breaks down, or where the story is no longer legible, you may be able to wander down a new ‘route’ and appreciate the office park scale in isolation from the surrounding context, but are you not left with the feeling that none of this is actually planned, none of the lessons of 20th century planning failures have actually been learned, we just convinced ourselves again that it would be better this time.
gunter:10/10 I saw the 60s urbanism, planned it, hated it, thought it had gone. It’s hard to judge this scheme from the photos- once it’s complete we need a more comprehensive view (and then add 5 years). Bright, shiny, trendy- but…
When viewed in the broader suburban context the development does stand out quite starkly. There is an impressive view of the scale and height of the devlopment looking down from the entrance to Seafield Road from the N11 opposite Belfield. I should try and get a photo.
From a landscape design point of view, the quality of planting seems to be very high and the amount of green space and parkland in the scheme will make a huge difference to how the development will mature over the coming years. If they use the Scots pines illustrated in the elevations and other large parkland trees such as evergreen oak and cedar I think the project will become more anchored into the suburban landscape and establish very well.
@gunter wrote:
Briain: If I might stick in another uninvited comment here.
This is an impressive scheme, that’s not in doubt. I queried the eco qualities of this complex because they seemed to be accepted as a given in all discussions of the project and they looked slightly superficial to me.
You seem well convinced that the eco credentials are sound here, so I’m happy to concede that one, for the moment.
I suppose the bigger issue here is similar to the issue we’ve been discussing on the Ballsbridge thread:
If a new quarter is suddenly parachuted into a existing context, how do you go about setting out it’s parameters. Do you say, ‘This is different, different rules will apply’? do you say slab blocks, carpet bombed across a site didn’t work in the sixties, but that was because of the cheap materials, the wrong social component, or the absence of services, it wasn’t the architecture and they didn’t have winter gardens.
Whatever way you go about creating a justification for this, at the back of the mind is the niggling doubt that we’re only impressed with this now, because it’s shiny and new and soon it will be familiar and it won’t be new and maybe the timber will start to look faded and sad and we’ll forget that it’s cutting edge eco-friendly because eco knowledge will have moved on and we’ll start to associate this scheme with the Tara Towers hotel and the nurses home at St. Vincents and we’ll start to say when are they going to knock this eyesore down and who was minding the door when this strolled in.
In my opinion, when you walk around a city you should be able to read the logic of how it was put together and how it has evolved after it was first put together. If you come to a place that doesn’t quite seem to fit, a place where the logic breaks down, or where the story is no longer legible, you may be able to wander down a new ‘route’ and appreciate the office park scale in isolation from the surrounding context, but are you not left with the feeling that none of this is actually planned, none of the lessons of 20th century planning failures have actually been learned, we just convinced ourselves again that it would be better this time.
Well, in my mind there isn’t the worry of the buildings ageing or the wood fading. That’s a natural process and I don’t think it detracts from the aesthetics of a building. That’s my opinion anyway, I know it’s not the consensus however.
So far I haven’t been judging the scheme in relation to it’s urban context, or how it will be evaluated in years to come. For me, what has impressed me is the eco-friendly approach to the scheme, how the scheme shows that high density can work alongside a human scale and doesn’t just result in faceless slabs squeezed onto a site.
How I think of it is that this project was going to happen. There was a certain amount that could be done to reprogram the brief, but the project could have just been blocks thrown onto the site, with none of the approaches seen in here evident; no reduced energy usage, no sensitivity to the surface of the site. This project negotiates a complex, dense program without losing (for the most part) the importance of the pedestrian experience.
Now, the planning of the site in relation to the surrounding urban fabric is another discussion. I don’t fully see the problems you have with how the site attaches itself to the ‘logic’ of Dublin. I don’t see what was there to work with in the first place! (in a local scale) It’s an interesting point however, now let me ask you something; could you give me a suggestion as to how the site could have been more successfully planned in relation to the layout of Dublin?
@Briain wrote:
. . . the scheme shows that high density can work alongside a human scale and doesn’t just result in faceless slabs squeezed onto a site.
. . . the project could have just been blocks thrown onto the site, with none of the approaches seen in here evident; no reduced energy usage, no sensitivity to the surface of the site.
Now, the planning of the site in relation to the surrounding urban fabric is another discussion. . . now let me ask you something; could you give me a suggestion as to how the site could have been more successfully planned in relation to the layout of Dublin?
I’ve just picked out a couple of phrases from your post, just to focus on, I’m not necessarily conceding the other points.
Let’s get one thing straight from the start, this was (literally) a green field site. It’s not about how else you could get one million sq. feet (or whatever it is) of development floor area on the site, it’s about whether you’re entitled to pitch for that scale of development in the first place.
My scepticism about this scheme starts from the point that it was reported that the developers pitched the job out to a number of firms with a brief of ‘which of you can get the most past the planners’, or words to that effect.
It’s not that we didn’t know that developers thought this way, it’s just that it’s still a little shocking to hear the winning practice appear to boast about it so openly (IT 14 Feb.)
My second reason for scepticism is that the scheme is being flogged repeatedly as the ‘Low energy, high density’ blueprint for the future, and I’m looking at the pictures and thinking, I’ve seen all of this before!
Is the western block based on the notorious Berlaymont building (c. 1968), EU headquarters in Brussels? The blank end gable treatment has been given a bit of the perpendicular timber treatment, an example surely of the ‘Dead-end decoration’ identified by Bruce Allsopp in ‘Towards a Humane Architecture’ as long ago as 1974!
The lean-to framework ‘support’ for some of the ‘winter garden’ secondary glazing has an ancestor in Stephenson’s Bord na Mona building on Baggot Street. C. 1985?)
The collage theme of the overall scheme, where bits and pieces of the modern movement appear to have been taken, almost at random, and assembled on the site, is brought to an extreme in this particular block which appears to host at least four different architectural approaches in a single building. There’s the pilotis (not nice sculptural Corb pilotis, but angular, Marcel Breuer, pilotis; the square cut-away framed atrium corner; the Louis Khan timber panels between concrete bands; and a curved corner version of lansdowne House, all slapped there on one block like a Rubix cube that hasn’t been solved yet.It’s great if this thing runs on woodchips, and it great that what’s left of the landscape is allowed to flow underneath, or whatever the phrase is, but this is no Glen Murcut shack in the outback, ‘touching the earth lightly’ on three poles and a rock, this is six serious, eight storey, parallel concrete blocks, and there’s nothing particularly light about any of them.
I don’t know anyone in the architectural community who isn’t in favour of progressing the ecological agenda, but, more than ever, we have to watch out for extravagant claims, false trails and green agendas that come piggy-backed on an old-fashioned ‘let’s get the most development on the site we can get away with’ agendas.
I ‘d have a lot more tolerance for the ‘eco’ credentials of this scheme, if they weren’t so obviously welded to the rest of the height/bulk/planning package. It’s like they made some bewildered planner sit there while they explained to him that the naturally ventilated secondary glazed, winter-garden extraction/purification system only worked if the building was eight storey, if it was seven storeys, toxic air would pour into the creche!
This is a huge scheme and obviosly it’s easy to pick holes in anything of this scale, but my biggest concern about the whole thing is the way that it blatantly follows a development model (parallel blocks marching across a landscale) that we found out years ago to be ultimately inhuman, wind swept, and worst of all, destined to be repeated with ever decreasing skill once it has been re-established, re-branded and re-packaged as the eco-friendly future.
As far as alternatives are concerned, a couple of new street might have been nice.
@johnglas wrote:
gunter: I disturbingly have to agree with you.
gunter has some stuff from his recent trip to Blighty that you’re not going to agree with.
i’d give this union a day, two days at the most!
Nice critque of the scheme, gunter. And parts of it actually look MORE like the Berlaymont now than in your ’60s photo, since its noughties makeover (above). All wonderful energy and ergonomic credentials, but a little dissapointing from a ’60s heritage view. For the real thing, there’s a fantastic ‘downtown reprise’ of the Berlaymont in the shopping area called the Centre de la Monnaie. Hasn’t had a thing done to it since being built in 1971.
On Elm Park generally; When I pass out this way, I think: ‘How did Merritt Bucholz get away with building a series of modernist blocks here? Were the Booterstown/Sandymount/Merrion Village-Green-Preservation-Socs. not horrified? : ‘They dont fit in!’ ‘They’re opressive!’ ‘They’re depressing!’ etc. etc.
Merritt Bucholz gave a pretty spirited defense of the Elm Park scheme at the ‘Only way is Up’ discussion in Bolton St. this evening! From the slides, it’s pretty clear that they created enough stick models of this thing, during the design process, to make a village in Bangladesh.
I hate having to back pedal, but there’s no question that they put an enormous amount of work into this scheme and you do have to respect that. I had it in my head that this was a big superficial gimmicky con job based on an failed, modern movement, planning model. Personally, I was put off by the seemingly extravagant claims and the implication (possibly not actually stated) that this was all new, you’ve not seen this before!
It would have been easier to understand this scheme if they had just come out and said that they were going to take Corb, re-work him with some green principles, and give him another go. If you look at it that way, they haven’t done a bad job.
For people like me, who love Corb and hated the fact that his urban legacy seemed to be such a complete failure, the Elm Park scheme is going to be an interesting experiment to observe over the next few years. Will the landscape flourish? will the pedestrian zones be people friendly? Will the trailing vines stop the wind from whistling through the pilotis?
It has everything going for it. It’s in a posh neighbourhood, it’s sandwiched between a golf course and the sea, I don’t imagine there’s going to be too many broken lifts. As with Corb himself, the biggest danger, in going down this road again, lies with all the badly thought out, cheap, imitations that this scheme is liable to spawn.
Just for the record, Bucholz never mentioned the phrase ‘winter garden’ once.
Legionnaires’ disease found at Dublin office
http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0708/legionnaires.htmlanyone for air tight houses with poorly maintained heat recovery units. multiply this by 100 in ten years…..
I really like it too. It has a quirkyness that I love. It is at least different in style than a lot of the large scale developments in Dublin and you get the impression that they actually thought about the development and not just saw it as a solely money making scheme like a lot of developments are in Dublin.
I drove past this site this morning and noticed that a new texaco filling station has sprung up on the site where the old shell garage used to be -this must mean that the apartment blocked planned for this site is no more. A sign of things to come.
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