libeskind / Manuel Aires Mateus on the docks
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Me too. It looks terrible. Cheap and nasty. What going in here? A Hilton or a Travelodge.
Was this what went through planning. Can enforcement be brought in?Went down there today for a look, yes it is as bad in the flesh. It looks so dated – this 80s revival thing has gone too far!
On a brighter note they’re fairly motoring away on the theatre building – hope this isn’t bastardised like the hotel
Going on the pictures this is surely going down as one of the most scandalously bleak new developments in the docklands area. It makes the other stuff look good. :confused:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/2060590014/
The square itself only seems to look good at night. http://www.flickr.com/photos/73039906@N00/1955136083/ During the day its starting to look worn and inappropriate ahead of the inevitable vandalism.
How much control did McCauley Daye O’Connell have in this project? Could they have led to poor final state of the building?
From looking at Aires Mateus’s website, and at the handful of buldings completed by him, I see high build quality. Can’t really say the same for MDO’C. They seem to do a lot of bland stuff. Like that church in South Dublin on their webpage. Looks like a leisure centre.
@PTB wrote:
How much control did McCauley Daye O’Connell have in this project? Could they have led to poor final state of the building?
Which leads me to wonder about the potential gulf between the graphics of the Abbey Street scheme and the final artefact. 😮
im not sure what all the fuss is about as the near-finished article albeit without the top fringe and deep window reveal looks as BAD as the original renders and graphics suggested it would look.
Hands up all those who couldnt see that this was a monstrosity in the making.
Your probably the same people who think that Madonna really does look that good at 50 in her current cover shot on this months Vogue…
This is hilarious , reading all the old posts of everyone wetting themselves at the thought of a starchitect gracing our shores with his latest creation. No matter what stone was going to be used it was always always going to look modular, dated and bland. Take a bus around the periherique in Paris and you will see a hundred of these same structures, low cost housing, The best is yet to come, Im actually looking forward to the total completion of the whole development including Libeskinds shoe box , just to see how really bad something of this scale and with this much potential can actually come to realisation, having being backed to the hilt by the architectural establishment …this is very very funny stuff.BostonorBerlin: glad to hear some sense – it is crap and was always going to be crap. I’m thinking of bowing out of making any posts (awwwww!) because the extent of architectural establishment wishful thinking, lack of any concept of context (spatial or temporal), and just plain mutually-congratulatory masturbation on these threads is truly breathtaking.
Add to that a worship of starchitects and it just makes any comments from someone not part of the club superfluous.Johnglas and BostonorBerlin – glad you’re able to have a laugh at the rest of us. No-one expects that the renders will be 100% accurate, there is however a real sense of disappointment at the way this building has turned out as it is miles from the intended design. Starchitect or not the original design was exciting (and if you did have a preminition on how it would turn out why didn’t you say so before now – isn’t hindsite wonderful) and the finished product is dire – there’s no need to piss in everyone else’s cornflakes
@johnglas wrote:
it is crap and was always going to be crap. I’m thinking of bowing out of making any posts (awwwww!) because the extent of architectural establishment wishful thinking
Daft is a nicer word than crap. I don’t thing crap is really the right word here anyway. I would save ‘crap’ for the buildings that they just didn’t bother making any attempt to do anything with. I think this is a diferent situation. This one looks more like the product of a lack of self criticism. One of those ‘big idea’ buildings (‘it will be as if hewn from a seven storey block’) handed out by the master to a ‘B’ team of atelier believers, where nobody has the confidence, or the critical faculty, to put their hand up and say, ‘Manuel, is this not going to be a bit stupid?’
I’m sorry I don’t share the common belief (RoryW and others) that this would have been fine, if it was just chunkier, as per the original renders.
On the architectural establishment point, I think I alluded earlier to an interesting piece in the March RIAI journal, where Sean O’Laoire, did come out with a pretty blunt rebuke Mr. Libeskind, which mightn’t be any big deal coming from ordinary Joes like us, but, is a bit of a departure for the guys at the top, given that they’re likely to have to share an awards podium or two during the term of his presidency.
And the rest of you are touchy beyond belief (being translated: ‘the emperor has no clothes’). I’ve only been on the thread since December and it’s not hindsight (sic). The square is overdesigned and just hectic (what are the squinty poles about?), the theatre belongs to the dimension of Mr Mxyzptlk, and the scooped-out entrance to the hotel lacks any coherence (if you’ve lost the profiling of the cladding as well, there’s not much left). The only decent building is the office block which is both discreet and well-mannered (but not ‘iconic’). There is a real crisis in architecture and design and townscape-making is a lost art.
gunter: I will accept your criticism and ‘crap’ was a singularly ill-chosen word; you do have a knowledge of where we’re coming from and I believe that does make a real difference. We are not slaves to the past, but the paradox is that if we are to design a historic city we cannot ignore it and indeed we should draw inspiration from it (not copy it). There are plenty of historical precedents for designing near water and my main critique of this design is that, apart from the orthogonal discipline of the square itself, there is not a shred of evidence that anybody has bothered to discuss the relationship of one building to another or indeed of any of them to the square. How ‘professional’ is that?
PS Good point about Sean O’Laoire; my experience of academic discussions is that they can be quite visceral, but we need a much wider discussion of what civic architecture is about. We need to understand that criticism is not ‘ad personam’ and that just because someone is not ‘on message’ doesn’t mean they’re wrong.@johnglas wrote:
and that just because someone is not ‘on message’ doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
@johnglas wrote:
… just plain mutually-congratulatory masturbation on these threads is truly breathtaking.
slight difference in approach there John, if you were just stating your opinion on the building and or well known architects, i doubt there would be an issue. I had my doubts about this one from the start and given the chasm between original render & final product, its reasonable enough for contributors to be surprised, at quite how far this particular project has fallen, from concept to reality.
@johnglas wrote:
‘the emperor has no clothes’.
The square is overdesigned. What are the squinty poles about?
There is a real crisis in architecture and design and townscape-making is a lost art.I love this quote function.
‘The emperior has no clothes,’ that’s the phrase I was looking for. The black and white squares was a sixties thing, wasn’t it? They’ve probably knocked down all the office blocks and council flats that used this patterning, but I know I’ve seen pictures somewhere.
I don’t know what the slanty red poles cost, but I bet is was more than half a dozen decent trees would have cost!
Is there a crisis in architecture and design? is townscape making a lost art? It’s certainly starting to feel like it, to me. I was more encouraged a few years ago than I am now. There was an awakening in Dublin with the emergence of Group 91 and the rescue of Temple Bar, and it did seem like we had turned the corner and we had learned that good urbanism often involves, not going all out for the big impact, but in making small scale interventions and assembling the bits to make a greater whole. Now it just seems that we’re back in a sixties mentality, and we’ve forgotten all the lessons that we were just beginning to learn and suddenly no idea is too brash again, everything has to be attention grabbing, not just the arts centre, or the opera house, but every apartment scheme, every hotel and every office block.
I took a load of pictures a few weeks ago, of what they’ve done with Paternoster Square in London, beside St Paul’s Cathedral, to reverse out of the sixties. I was aware that PC had had an impact on the Paternoster debate and I knew that some awful stage-set schemes had been proposed, but they’ve just completed the redevelopment now and it’s worth looking at.
There might still be some pretty dodgy stuff here, if we take the wrong lessons from it, but there’s some thought provoking stuff as well. I’ll see if I can find a general ‘Quality of contemporary urban space’ thread to stick them on over the weekend. One of the themes, in Paternoster, could be characterised as Michael Graves meets Mussollini, so you better get out the drool bucket johnglas!
gunter: you know me too well! Not only did M make the trains run on time, he ‘encouraged’ some interesting bits of architecture (cf. the gloriously fascist avenue leading to the station in Turin). On the other hand, he drove a road straight through the Forum Romanum, destroying its integrity, so I’m hardly an uncritical admirer (and we’re only talking architecture here!).
PeterF: OK, hands up, but I think you know what I mean.gunter: I’ve lost where you did the original post, but re the SAS Radisson hotel in Argyle St, it was designed by Gordon Murray and Alan Dunlop and there was a discussion about it (and a contribution by AD himself) on the thread: ‘What is “good architecture”?’ on 19 Mar 2003.
I have to fess up and say that I’m now seeing it as part of the streetscape; I don’t like it, but life’s too short and it’s there. And it’s not sandstone. (PS The Ta Paell-ya ‘Spanish’ restaurant in the hotel does brilliant tapas.)Might not be the right thread, but does anyone have any images of the new theatre they’re building at Grand Canal Dock and what it will look like?
@SunnyDub wrote:
Might not be the right thread, but does anyone have any images of the new theatre they’re building at Grand Canal Dock and what it will look like?
Heres a few images sunnydub. http://www.grandcanalsquare.ie http://www.daniel-libeskind.com
is the new theatre starting to take shape? does anyone have construction pics? pictures from google earth and microsoft earth appear to be months if not years old.
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