High-rise plan for Dublin postponed

And this kind of thing is the reason I left Ireland.

I’m sure when I eventually move back (hopefully not for a long time) I’ll have to move to Athlone or Mullingar simply to find a place I can afford to call my own and commute to and from Dublin everyday.

@bluecube wrote:

And this kind of thing is the reason I left Ireland.

I’m sure when I eventually move back (hopefully not for a long time) I’ll have to move to Athlone or Mullingar simply to find a place I can afford to call my own and commute to and from Dublin everyday.

bluecube: you aren’t here so you probably weren’t sent the memo, but this kind of moaning is now out-of-date and is no longer allowed.

@bluecube wrote:

And this kind of thing is the reason I left Ireland.

I’m sure when I eventually move back (hopefully not for a long time) I’ll have to move to Athlone or Mullingar simply to find a place I can afford to call my own and commute to and from Dublin everyday.

This is becoming a mantra. High rise is not equal to high density.

However assistant city manager Michael Stubbs said because of opposition from councillors at an information meeting, it has now been decided to put the plan back until a new development plan is started next October.

Er, nothing to do with the elections in June then?.

Dublin City Council is one mammoth waste of time and space. Elected mayors are needed asap. We need an elected official with a city-wide mandate that can over-rule the local area committee juntas that seem to dominate planning in certain parts of Dublin.

Skittles. That’s all we spent the boom money on. A tonne of bloody Skittles.

This is all about the election alright. Although having said that – it makes sense for this plan to be brought in under the new development plan rather than an amendment to the old.

Its not like there will be a glut of applications for high rise permissions in the near future.

@reddy wrote:

This is becoming a mantra. High rise is not equal to high density.

Theres a mantra 😉

Councillors baffle me. A system that has allowed the city to develop as it has is obviously flawed. Completely agree with fergal. Our planning system is far too democratic, everyone wants a garden and semi d, they need to be told to shut up. They chose to live in a city, deal with it. The small town mentality many people have is incompatible with sustainablity.

you can add in – – maximum heights proposed for poolbeg is 15 floors, shows what the powers that be have as a high rise vision, and in docklands too! just as well there wont be a large rush of developers.

Chaos At The Crossroads.

I flicked quickly through Frank McDonald and James Nix’s book, Chaos at the Crossroads today. Having read McDonald’s ‘The Builders’ over the xmas, I am curious to work my way back through other volumes by McDonald. I particularly like McDonald’s talent for choosing key diagrams, or images that speak in volumes about development attitudes in Ireland at a specific time. If I was more au fait with Irish politics, I am sure I could relate the kind of development to the type of government, and its changing policy too. McDonald is very good on political history, as well as on urban/suburban/rural environments.

In Balchin, Bull and Kieve’s classic, Urban Land Economics and Public Policy, if you read it, it does have one wonderful section, in which it records the wimbledon-like match, between Labour and the Conservatives. That went on between 1947 to the 1980s and into the present – between the Conservative government dis-mantle-ing Labour’s Land Acts, and Labour then coming back into government, and re-building them, a little bit better than the last time. I think there was 3 main attempts by Labour governments to nationalise development gain. It was reminescent in ways, of squatter settlements in countries such as Turkey, which materialise overnight and are later destroyed the following day by the police. This process continues, day and night, until one side finally gives in.

A term which Dick Gleeson introduced into the vocabulary of Irish planners towards the end of the Celtic tiger, was planning gain. A fairly undefined term, but it did indicate a waning of Fianna Fail, overall policy dominance in 2007/08. While Ireland is nothing like Britain, being described often by John Waters as a one-party-state, there are micro-currents in overall dominance of the Fianna Fail policy, which do affect the confidence of planning officals, to try out something new or not.

I think the current planning tide has much more to do with the issue of ‘planning gain’, than to do with high rise. Someone above quite rightly points out the distinction between high rise and high density. Mike Davis’s book, Planet of Slums, about third world mega-cities has some wonderful passages which describe the most densely inhabited places on the planet. I think one of the really dense places is on the banks of the Nile, a mega-slum outside Cairo I think. Which manages to fit 18,000 people per acre! ! ! ! ! Who live in 10×12 foot timber rooms, stacked one on top of another. Many third world cities now achieve double the density of 19th century New York.

In Ireland, planners do have the luxury of being able to talk about ‘Dis-used Guinness’s marshalling yards beside Heuston Station’. That is a direct quote from a talk Dick Gleeson gave last summer. Planners in Ireland don’t have to worry that such sites will be occupied overnight by opportunistic settlers looking for free land. But it is only by such informal development, that much of the highest density environments on the planet are being created. China being the only country in the world, who managed to absorb 200 million people into its cities, in recent decades, without shanty towns developing to a great extent. To make this staggering achievement possible, China did use high rise, very high rise at that. It sure did result in some awful environments. But it enabled a more ‘planned’ approach to urban growth to occur. While in Dublin, the architect James Pike, boasts of the huge 1 million new arrivals that Dublin will have to accomdate in the coming years. No doubt, those dis-used marshalling yards will get used after all.

In fairness, towards the end of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland was achieving densities comparable to the best urban environments, anywhere in the world. In that respect, Dick Gleeson pointed out, we had made a lot of respectable progress in terms of achieving sustainable densities. Everyone deserves a slap on the back there. The next issue which Gleeson aimed to address was the size of units available on the residential market. Here, I don’t think anyone has – either public or private – met with a solution, and I am skeptical if the apartment sizes stipulated will ever be seen. So basically, the whole density issue, is an entirely different beast to high rise.

The point being, the highest densities are found often in the poorest urban settlements on earth. While the highest rise buildings are found in the most affluent parts. Nowadays, that means mostly in Asia’s new boom towns. Dubai, which only has a population of 1.3 million people inhabiting a place, which looks from a helicopter, like it should contain a lot more. Indeed attracting inhabitants who can afford Dubai’s cost of living, is the major challenge it faces. Dubai is the town for Beckams and so forth. It makes Dublin look cheap, although we should get a discount, for the weather we have to put up with.

One of the points raised in the Tall Building Conference a couple of years ago, by Chris Bakala of Buro Happold, was the idea of transport, and its relationship with high rise. Going back to basic principles of Urban Land Economics, it makes sense to build highrise, where you can get people in and out of an area efficiently. Which brings me back really to Frank McDonald’s book, Chaos at the Crossroads. In which Frank looks at the road/rail transportation network on our island. And he also shows diagrams of the national spatial strategy – hubs and gateways.

What is clearly visible from the NSS map, was the concept of ‘movement’ it embodied. It reminds me of one of those diagrams of the global internet infrastructure. But then you have to remind yourself for a minute, this isn’t a diagram of the global internet – it is a digram of Ireland’s towns and road connections – used to hurtle people around, in tin cans on wheels! ! ! Tom Standage wrote an excellent book called ‘The Victorian Internet’. In which he describes the early telegraph system, and interestingly too, a pneumatic tube system which was employed in 19th London and Paris, as well as several other cities, to send around paper messages in metal capsules.

The time it took these capsules to travel around, turned out to be less than the time it took telegraph personnel to encode and decode messages, with their click-click-click devices. Blockages in the pneumatic tube system, regularly had to be ‘unblocked’ by firing a gun down one end of the tube, and counting the seconds until the bullet stopped. Then the workers would know roughly where to dig. At one stage, it was reported somebody went on holiday, and send a live cat through the tube system to another friend to mind it! Ireland’s National Spatial Strategy has a lot in common with the pneumatic tube system of the Victorians. And I am sure that people in a hundred years time, will look back the NSS with much the same historic interest.

The road-people-car concept of the original NSS, will become replaced in time by the Internet diagram I suggest. The internet system is all about moving around bundles of information along fibre optic cabling. As Scott McNealy observed, it is getting a lot cheaper to moves digital bits, than physical atoms. It turns out, UPS packaging service is much more efficient at routing physical packages, (and therefore green-er) than you are in your car. So McNealy encourages the development of digital technology, so that we can get more of our supplies, through ordering on the internet. Another interesting book reference to note here, is Charles Fishman’s ‘The Walmart Effect’, describing the dispersed network of mega-stores in the US.

If the National Spatial Strategy is to have any merit at all – it is simply as a diagram of 21st century digital communications infrastructure. That is, moving around things that are cheap to move around – like information. But as a diagram, for dispersal of jobs and encouraging people to drive around endlessly between the various hubs and gateways it was detrimental to Ireland’s competitive-ness and global advantage. Places like India suffer from a lack of good roads, in Ireland today we suffer from having too many. Which probably won’t get used now, as Dell and other companies are going.

This is very reminescent of what America did following WWII – it flung itself into the practice of writing the rules of globalisation, to suit countries of an industrial capability. Which America was, back in the 1940s. The only problem with the global policy that America carefully forged, was that by the year 2000, America was no longer a large industrial exporter – China was. So in effect, the rewards of all the work America had done, was reaped by China. This is one major factor, which accounts for the boom that China is experiencing today. By the time Ireland had completed its road infrastructure, the game had changed utterly, and we were firmly out of the logistical business of packing boxes – but like the Roman aquaducts, we are still left with the sights.

One thing, which did jump out to me though, from the picture of the National Spatial Strategy, was a zone in the midlands of Ireland, made up of Athlone, Mullingar and Tullamore. There is some enormous advantage I feel to be gained in looking at land uses, and possibly even radical notions, like total national-isation of development gain within that triangle. It could prove an interesting test bed, for public land policy development in this country.

The other thing which jumped out of Frank McDonald’s book, Chaos at the Crossroads, was the rail network diagram, with Limerick Junction as a hub for the entire rail network. This links back in my mind, somehow, to Chris Bakala’s point. That one should allow high rise, where you have an abundance of transport infrastructure. (To clarify, Chris Bakala didn’t identify Limerick Junction on the occasion of the Tall Building Conference. He identified the Customs House region of Dublin, as being the ONLY location in Dublin which satisfied the rule regarding transportation and high rise) What about Limerick Junction as a possible candidate for a government planned New Town? ? ? I feel these are ideas we need to look at now.

What I like about McDonald’s book, was it reminded me of the heady days of the 80s and 90s when Rem Koolhaas returned from the United States and was looking at the changing face of Europe. With its new identity, new institutions and ambitious new politics. Not to mention new super transportation hubs, tunnels under the English channel and so forth. Koolhaas of course, spends much of his time, building in Asia these days.

Brian O’ Hanlon

@garethace wrote:

A term which [was] introduced into the vocabulary of Irish planners towards the end of the Celtic tiger, was planning gain.

What?! ‘Planning gain’ was most definitely not introduced into the vocabulary of Irish planning towards the end of the Celtic Tiger. It’s an old fashioned planning term which is if anything less used in recent years.

@garethace wrote:

end of the Celtic tiger, was planning gain. A fairly undefined term, ….

I would say it has a pretty clear definition: any civic or community benefit arising out of a scheme on top of the developer’s commercial gain (& might contribute to commercial gain anyway) Examples: new street, Italian Quarter; restoration of historic chimney for viewing platform, Smithfield ……… Or a sports hall in the case of the communidthy.

Thanks Devin, was hoping someone would jump in there to correct me or otherwise provide better explanation. Your post seems to make a lot of sense to me. (I welcome as many corrections and comments as are necessary)

Btw,
Stewart Brand had a nice slide of an internet diagram of the globe posted here:
http://media.longnow.org/salt-slides/Brand.html
As a piece of history, Brand orchestrated a campaign following the first moon landing to ask the simple question, why hadn’t we seen a picture of the earth from NASA?
The thing to do in those days was start a ‘button’ campaign.
Later on, the first picture of the earth from outer space became the cover illustration of his Whole Earth Catalogue.
But in his lecture, Brand explains how our understanding of the planet has changed over the years, based on the various diagrams we can produce.
The first photograph of the earth from space, marked a totally new perception, whereby borders and nation states disappeared out of the picture – and what emerged instead was a view of the earth as one whole continuous and complex inter-dependent system. A view which drove the environmental movement, and many others, including Al Gore etc today.
While the communications revolution, produces a diagram more like the one seen below, where all we now see are the connections. (A lot like the National Spatial Strategy diagram) Notice, the absense of borders and territories aswell in the communications diagram. And also the increasing emergence of ‘node’ points as cities indeed become more critical in the late 20th century, than the nations to which they belonged. Emphasising the radically de-centralised form of the new global information economy.

Brian O’ Hanlon

Taken from Richard Sennett’s image gallery. What I really want to know is why diagrams describing connectivity, became so over dominant in Ireland’s national spatial strategy. I am tempted to believe, catering for certain lobby groups who engineer and build ‘infrastructure’ had something to do with it – using the argument – that infrastructural investment does provide stimulus to the Irish economy.

B.

Taken from Richard Sennett’s image gallery. I understand that a lot of Berlin has been achieved using six storey height residential buildings – probably mixed use too.

B.

On a related note, to the Stewart Brand reference above, some of you might enjoy the Merritt Bucholz podcast here: http://www.architecturefoundation.ie/2008/12/16/podcasts/

B.

the irish architecture foundation huh

whats their game

Well it is trying to open up the stodgy old institutes like the RIAI I guess. Which to be honest has a zero public aspect to it – which was unhealthy, that for years, debate around architecture happened within such a small tiny circle. And still does to quite an appreciable extent. Also, . . . somehow, somewhere, there has to be a meeting place, to somehow link together discussions ongoing in the various campuses of architecture around the country. In the past, the debate on architecture in Ireland was contained somewhat in the Dublin area. (Apologises for that mass over-simplification, but it is only to make a point here) With colleges of architecture in UCD and Bolton St. With Queens in Belfast also. But now you have the strong counterpoints of Waterford and Limerick. As I understand it, Limerick and Waterford would have broken away from the past – and the RIAI. So trying to keep it all together, needs some effort – the RIAI simply isn’t up to the task. Hence the Architecture Foundation. Also, it should be mentioned the AAI’s role in history. The Architecture Foundation borrows heavily from that model, but changes it also. In a recent IAF blog entry, James Pike observed how the AAI brought in international assessors for their competition judging panels, and international architects to give lectures too. IAF does that too, but also does more.

Overlaid on top of the IAF is a new joint venture – the Urban Forum, which has funding from Europe I believe, to support proper PhD level research and such. The Urban Forum being comprised of Landscape Architects, Planning Institute, Architects Institute, Engineers Ireland and Society of Chartered Surveyors. The topic for the upcoming March joint conference is to do with the national spatial strategy. Which is a whole agenda being developed as we speak by another institution – the Futures Academy and the School of Spatial Planning at DIT Bolton St. In other words, all of the ‘land professions’ are now attempting to put forward a unified stance on Ireland’s future development strategy. A point of view, that incorporates the views from many different angles. There is considerable organisation and project management skill needs in this. It is really clever though and badly needed. There are a lot of the competing ‘think tanks’ for environmental policy and urban land strategy. They are numerous, they are varied, and some of them are even extreme. The good thing is now the land professions finally have this ‘joint’ group. Which carries more force at a national level – than if the various institutes stood on their own. The plethora of environmental groups now, will have to deal face-to-face with an ‘Urban Forum’ group, which can present a unified front. But it is no credit to the land professions – this sort of thing should have happened decades ago. They are all relatively small professions, operating in a small city, in a small country.

I should also mention, the Department of the Environment in all of this. Their needs, need to be considered. Mainly, they require a good joint policy creation think tank. Which the Urban Forum does provide in spates. Providing a funnel and a filter for all kinds of ideas – from far and wide – from all of the land professions. The DOE itself now contains itself, very many astute young members who have worked at a level of some sophistication in all of the respective land professions. So the DOE is now more receptive to ideas from the professions than it would have been in the past.

You can think of the Architecture Foundation, as being part of this higher level Urban Forum initiative. A crucial link on that supply chain for urban policy action. The Architecture Foundation, gears up the stodgy old RIAI in a way, to move into a more public role. You will notice though, the utter lack of representation from ‘developers’ in all of this. There is no Institute for developers yet – and a funny ‘gathering of members’ it would look like. Yet these conference debates, like those of the Urban Forum spend for ever and ever, pontificating about what developers want, and how developers think. If you ever listen to a podcast, transcript or attend an event yourself, you will never see a real life developer, in-the-flesh. Which is a perceptive comment on how these land professions actually have to work. Normally, in the shere darkness. The usual proceedure at a conference, is that a well seasoned and well respected member of one of the professions – a consultant or civil servant by trade – will stand up and ‘act’ as a surrogate developer. Indeed, attempting to speak on behalf of the developers who aren’t present, and claim some sort of ‘priveleged insight’ into the workings of their minds. In the same way as young boys with unbroken voices were used to play females on the Shakespearean stage. Or the mystical societies in the 19th century would sit around a wigi board, and try to summon up the voices of souls departed from this earth. It is always highly entertaining to watch.

Brian O’ Hanlon

@garethace wrote:

Brand orchestrated a campaign following the first moon landing to ask the simple question, why hadn’t we seen a picture of the earth from NASA?

The answer to which is simply: They didn’t land on the moon.

@Devin wrote:

I would say it has a pretty clear definition: any civic or community benefit arising out of a scheme on top of the developer’s commercial gain (& might contribute to commercial gain anyway) Examples: new street, Italian Quarter; restoration of historic chimney for viewing platform, Smithfield ……… Or a sports hall in the case of the communidthy.

There is a worry though that planning authorities use the concept of ‘Planning Gain’ to excuse bad development, usually over-development. In Ballsbridge it was suggested that the new permiability through the site, constituted ‘Planning Gain’ and that this constituted part of the reasoning that somehow made this ”gross over-development of the site” [ref: Bord Pleanála decision], acceptable.

It should be possible to distinguish between genuine ‘Planning Gain’, like a new community facility, a new pedestrian route through a tight existing urban block, or the retention and restoration of unprotected structures on site, and normal, common sense, measures which should happen anyway if you’re redeveloping half a city block.

On Brian’s point about the stodgy old RIAI (they won’t like that) it’s probably unrealistic to expect an ‘institute’ to be anything other that institutional, but, on the other hand, I’ve never been totally convinced that the AAI is somehow the young rebellious hip wing of the profession.

Undoubtedly, flying in one outside assessor for two days a year did introduce the occassional loose cannon into the awards proceedure, but, in my opinion, there is nowhere near enough public soul searching, open debate and genuine constructve criticism of architecture here, and there’s still a huge disconnect between the people shaping the urban environment (still largely architects and planners) and everyone else.

If you go to one of the occassional public debates on urban issues, everyone there is either an architect of a planner. Probably, if it wasn’t for Frank McDonald, there’d be no ‘public’ aspect to the airing of urban or architectural issues at all in this country, and even he’s gone too polite!

A case in point would be the total disdain architects and planners now have for everything built in recent years that isn’t perceived to be ‘brave’.

I don’t get the sense that, within the architectural and planning professions, there is any debate at all going on about the value of any of the late 20th century attempts at urban mending. The submissions on the ‘Opera Centre’ in Limerick, the recent Hatch Street, proposal in Dublin etc. suggest that earlier attempts at ‘urban mending’ are now officially regarded with utter contempt.

I don’t believe in ‘pastiche’. People like Prof. David Watkin, who do believe in pastiche, are heading down an architectural cul-de-sac in my opinion (admitedly, a very elegant cul-de-sac), but we should be debating it, asking questions about the sometimes competing values of individual architectural expression, and of coherence in the streetscape. Instead, as a profession, we seem to be more than content to just keep searching out every low-key 20th century in-fill and trumpeting how we can replace it by something ‘bold’ and ‘contemporary’ and twice as jarring.

I don’t know if this is the right thread to be getting into all of this.

On Brian’s point about the stodgy old RIAI (they won’t like that) it’s probably unrealistic to expect an ‘institute’ to be anything other that institutional,

Even though the work they do is un-exciting, and lacks a flashy, political, kind of PR dimension is no reason to knock it. They provide an important link in the chain, regarding legal contracts etc, in how development happens here on a day to day basis. It makes total sense to have an Archcitectural Forum I think, because it allows so much wider scope and mandate, to look at the public relations side. A side that was in much need of renovation, regarding architecture in the past decades. To be blunt, it needs a marketing approach. It isn’t only architecture that needed to break into that territory either. It is a lot of job today, for sure. To try and confuse, or even disrupt, the original clear and simple, day-to-day machinery of the RIAI that worked fine for so long – with the new edgy PR side, might be very counter productive. We now see people from the profession, who have talents in public presentation and command a certain presence, getting a platform they deserve.

on the other hand, I’ve never been totally convinced that the AAI is somehow the young rebellious hip wing of the profession.

It is too small a profession still, to have that many wings. Like the Department of Health, and the Health Service Executive. You find a lot of associated organisations nowadays, which have more or less freedom in certain dimensions. The AAI is no different in its voluntary structure and committment by a tight group of followers and sponsors, from many of the wild life and heritage type of trusts or organisations out there. Except the AAI aims to foster awareness about new ideas and new thinking – as opposed to holding onto something from the past. I guess, at certain stages in history, there is a danger of regressing back to where, you are unable to accept any new ideas at all. That may not have been intentional, as in the case of the RIAI, where its mission was simple. To uphold a certain bureaucracy, which dealt with day to day provision of contracts within the construction industry. Contracts, which are used by all kinds of participants in that industry. I guess there was a huge saving to be made, to society too, by having good standard contracts. It meant that every little job didn’t require its own bespoke creation in terms of laws, agreements etc.

A case in point would be the total disdain architects and planners now have for everything built in recent years that isn’t perceived to be ‘brave’.

Instead, as a profession, we seem to be more than content to just keep searching out every low-key 20th century in-fill and trumpeting how we can replace it by something ‘bold’ and ‘contemporary’ and twice as jarring.

Check out Bull, Balchin and Kieve, Urban Land Economics and Public Policy – there is a specific chapter on investment appraisal, and a nice couple of pages about ‘Optimal Development’. Basically, for ever unit of capital spent, there is a positive relationship with gross development value. But you reach a certain point, where the additional units of capital add less and less to GDV. At that point you have to compare the added benefit to the cost of additional units of capital. In the Celtic Tiger years, that just went clean out the window. Not to mention the fact that a lot of development was already purely of a speculative nature. That is, developers had no idea who might rent, buy or other acquire the property upon its construction. The erratic spike of land values termporarily appeared to negate all other logical considerations.

A lot of stuff got ‘added on’, which subtracted rather than added to GDV. That is why so many architects from abroad flocked to Ireland in those years. It wasn’t because there was ‘no work’ anywhere else – but the word was clearly out there – budgets in Ireland don’t mean squat. Planners as well as Architects got giddy. For instance, the stone facade of Grafton Architects office building for the OPW near St. Stephens Green. The stone cladding could only be installed at 1/4 of the normal speed by which stone is erected. Now, given stone cladding is already one of the slowest elements in any building program, one can only imagine the knock-on, to program, of proceeding at 1/4 normal speed. Dublin Bus alone charged the builder thousands in charges for disruption to bus lanes near the site. Which would seem to indicate a quicker solution should have been found, rather than a very slow one. This sort of analysis though, and criticism doesn’t find its way into any publication or discussion space anywhere in on this island.

While sitting in the audience at the Irish Architecture Foundation’s recent Open House debate in Liberty Hall auditorium, I became aware of a kind of ‘moral hazard’ there is within design. Something I wasn’t aware of before. I am borrowing the idea partly from the financial world, but the principle is essentially the same. During the Open House public debate, the subject of ‘cost’ for Grafton Architect’s OPW offices was breached several times. In fact, Grafton Architects have received so much free publicity during the IAF public debate, that their ‘brave’ stance on design had nearly paid for itself. With the OPW office building, one wonders really, about the relationship between ‘brave’ design, and a consultants necessity to eek out publicity.

I would submit, that in the case of their OPW office project, the later was an overriding consideration, in the buildings design. That is, brave design is merely a front for an attempt to self-publicize. That is why I call it a moral hazard. Because as other architectural practices, observing the positive relationship between ‘brave’ design of the AAI group architects, and free publicity – are forced into a position, where they have to be twice as brave, in order to get ‘X’ equivalent publicity. I have observed the cycle continue over a period of 15 or so years now. With design getting braver, and braver as time went on. The Stephens Green OPW office, being perhaps the bravest design I have ever witnessed in Ireland.

I hate to pick on Grafton Architects here, because it is an extraordinary building in its own right, and indeed very nice inside it too. But Grafton Architects do play this game better than most, and should take it as a constructive criticism. At some stage, and that stage has been reached I argue, it all gets out of hand. Like the moral hazard and finance, with the FED having bailed out so many times now, there is simply no disincentive to design braver and braver architecture, with budgets that spiral more and more out of control. Or to turn that on its head, architects are getting further and further away from the realities of project management.

Pushing the geometry of building materials, into places it doesn’t want to go. In that sense, building really is different from digital media. But because of the increase in young practioners working with digital media, this sense has been lost. Many architects now, fail to even visit the sites they build upon. Indeed, the rate at which a large architectural practice needs to generate fees to support itself, positively forbids any time for investigation or observation of the real article. And yet, many posters on Archiseek argue architects should produce more digital impressions of their designs, rather than less.

And in the case of Grafton Architects, is was publicity disproportional to the size of its project portfolio. There was hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space built during the Celtic tiger, but publicity focussed upon this particular miserable few square feet. From a property economist’s point of view, X square foot of office space, is roughly equivalent to Y square foot of office space. Within the same approximate locations of course. All that really matters, in the marginal cost of production of X and Y office space. I have built roughly equivalent amount of office space to Grafton Architects, but will possibly never get a mention. Just like those stone masons who built Chartres.

The planners are the poor smucks caught in the middle though – because they merely think they are gaining some free publicity too, on the coat tails of the brave architecture. There was a similar relationship between Apple computers CEO Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle database company. Larry was a fairly dull character, but would mimick Steve Jobs, in other to gain a reputation in the press as being ‘swashbuckling, adventurous and entrepreneurial’. Of course, Larry would sell Steve, 10 times over. But that wasn’t the point – Larry still craved for that ‘star quality’ that Steve had almost monopolised within the Silicon Valley CEO culture. Richard Sennett of course, being an excellent reference here. Questioning the relevance of public bodies using as their model, that of a ‘start-up’ company.

All I can say, is I recall a story I heard growing up as a kid. Of a Christmas party in the local village, where the bank manager tried to look drunk, and the parish priest tried to look sober. You could almost translate that story directly into the property context. Where a planner tries to appear to know something, and a developer tries to appear slow or stupid. Indeed, the symbiotic relationship between the engineering culture in this country, politics and items, intended to plan the spending of resources of this country – documents, like the national spatial strategy – is something we have to look at. If you listen to this brilliant engineer Bob Kahn, Inventer of TCP/IP here:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/

You will realise that the vocabulary of ‘gateways’ and ‘hubs’ borrows heavily from the engineering culture. A concept of a world wide network – excellent for pushing bits around, but a disaster for pushing people. Engineers is my favourite design culture of all, but they are often a liability too when it comes to design. Grabbing one brilliant concept, which was appropriate in one context, and forcing it into another. History has demonstrated that tendency by engineers. But it was that tendency also, which enabled them to come up Newton’s Law of Force, and the current disipline of mechanics. Without the generalisations of which, we couldn’t build anything we build today.

We are indebted to Frank McDonald for the work he has done in highlighted deficiencies within NSS. Frank is critical of the relationship between Engineers, infrastructure and politics. But I am very suspicious of the relationship that has grown between poor old Frank McDonald and the same publicity-seeking architects down through the years. I feel that McDonald’s journalistic integrity has been somewhat compromised by them. They have made active efforts to accomodate him on all sorts of juries and panels down through the years. In return he has repaid in full, by dishing out an endless flood of PR-type positive feeling, about architects in general. With very little, by way of common sense, to counter balance it.

My point above about ‘Optimal Development’ is a clear case in point, which McDonald has missed out completely. Or worse, failed to mention. The first time I became aware of it myself, I must is admit, when talking to a developer who asked me, if my extra money for concrete planter boxes, would encourage the punter more to buy the product he was selling. There is a certain logic there I feel, from a basic economic point of view, which got lost in all the middle of the Celtic Tiger. Indeed, I have spoken to several developers who got out of business completely during the Celtic Tiger. Preferring to work in times, when it is more ‘realistic’. That ‘intelligent’ money is all waiting to get back into the game. There was a lot of not-so-smart money involved in the Celtic Tiger. Something else, you will not read in the press.

I don’t know if this is the right thread to be getting into all of this.

It is actually more much more relevant to the point, than you think. One of the points raised at the Tall Building Conference, arranged by Plan and Irish Construction magazine was – the land professions are awaiting proper signals from the government about what to do. It is of no use, planners, architects and developers together getting into the work of doing schemes, without any idea where high rise would be suitable within the country.

Indeed, in my rush to explain the functioning of the urban Forum and the Architecture Foundation above, I forgot to mention, that machinery of of course, like any conduit or pipework system, does work in reverse. Enabling the Department of the Environment now, to realise more priveleged information and documents to the joint group of land professions. To enable the members furthermore, in their individual working capacities as consultants and civil servants to distribute the signals to the marketplace itself. That is, the developer community out there at large. And indeed to turn such information services into a revenue stream, as developers will rightly pay a premium for useful guidance obtained through proper channels. The likes of which, was flowing along clogged up, un-reliable, ineffective and downright dirty sewer channels in the past. Re: Planning tribunals and so forth.

As a final comment, I guess I shouldn’t leave out the Irish ‘navy’ in all of this. Another silent and absent presence in all of the above. It was a pity really, that in the tribunals, old Murphy wasn’t put on recording. I think it was Vincent Browne, recently commented in passing, that old Murphy during his testimonial talked at length, in relation to history. He did so in a language now gone. Being specific to the community of poor emigrants who left the west of Ireland and lived their lives, in places like Cricklewood and Camden Town. The Kings of the Kilburn High Road.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kings_of_the_Kilburn_High_Road

Brian O’ Hanlon

Maybe a new thread should be started: Brian O’Hanlon, A Thought For The Day.

Garethace, did you ever get that blog someone recommended you get a few years ago?

I appreciate the time and effort it takes you to write these posts, but they are blog style. You need your own site. Blogs were invented for you!

Thanks, I’ll look it to it.

B.

so they sit around saying our architecture great or we the stuff we’d like to do is, its the planners fault, where and when will the developers and the rest talk?

doesn’t say much about its link to the riai, and it has treasury holdings a patron

who are the private planning professionals

could install a blog mod here and here your posts and grahamh photos reviews in blog form to push out to the internet

could install a blog mod here and here your posts and grahamh photos reviews in blog form to push out to the internet

Lost in translation?

Good piece by Liam Fay maybe (?) about the Ballsbridge fiasco in today’s Sunday Times. The locals are bloody snobs. One of ABP’s reasons for turning down the proposal was great, though. It would have been “obtrusive”, apparently. Who knew?? :rolleyes:

@fergalr wrote:

The locals are bloody snobs.

Yeah, those snobs. Fancy reading the Development Plan and knowing what ‘zoning objective’ means. :rolleyes:

@fergalr wrote:

Good piece by Liam Fay maybe (?) about the Ballsbridge fiasco in today’s Sunday Times. The locals are bloody snobs. One of ABP’s reasons for turning down the proposal was great, though. It would have been “obtrusive”, apparently. Who knew?? :rolleyes:

There already is a specific thread on Dunnes Ballsbridge scheme, and so I am posting the article by Brenda Power there – it’s pure uninformed guff btw.