Manor Park’s Digital Hub Plan

@Thomond Park wrote:

You do higher densities no favours with your one size fits all approach…

Huh?

@Thomond Park wrote:

…and a lot of the distances you have quoted relate to images that do not even display the buildings/structures you are trying to relate to.

Again, huh?

@Andrew Duffy wrote:

How about next time any of the An Taisce types is in Paris, he opens his eyes?

Here’s a photo of the large cluster of highrises a few hundred metres South-West of the Eiffel Tower:
http://www.atkielski.com/inlink.php?/PhotoGallery/Paris/General/FrontDeSeineLarge.html
edit: here’s some more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_de_Seine

How about an aerial photo showing the highrise buildings beside Tour Maine Montparnasse?
http://jlhuss.blog.lemonde.fr/jlhuss/images/12150035_1.JPG

… the other very big one is Le Meridien Montparnasse, a hotel:
http://www.starwoodhotels.com/lemeridien/search/hotel_detail.html?propertyID=1920&language=fr_FR

How about another hotel, Hotel Concorde Lafayette near Porte Maillot:
http://www.concorde-lafayette.com/index2.htm

edit: I forgot possibly the biggest highrise cluster in Paris, the apartment towers in the 13th:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Paris-13eme-panorama-annote.jpg

… and all of these are in a city that has one highrise building outside of La Défense. How odd.

Well I’m not a member of AT! but I’ll take it as a compliment. 🙂

The buildings you’ve listed barely have an impact on the density in Paris and are notable for their scarcity. My point was that the Tour Montparnasse is the one tall building that stands out from the rest of the Paris skyline as seen from the centre city – Kilometre Zero. Yeah it has a few squat mudrisers as someone else once said.

Here’s another photo this time from the angle of the steps of the Sacre Coeur to the North, looking down to the centre and on to the South on a smoggy evening.
http://kapp.intrasun.tcnj.edu/Europe99/paris/par_skyline.jpg. Which building stands out?

The Porte Maillot hotel building is right by the peripherique. I don’t mind tall buildings being used for hotels because people in hotels are transient and have no chance of partaking in any community. They may as well be in a tower or a basement. They don’t have children to supervise while they do the dishes or friends to wave at in the street below. I’ve never been to the 13th, though I lived in Paris for years. looks like HongKong in that shot. These buildings diminish the chances of community and yes plenty of other building arrangements are also not conducive to community. I worked near the Eiffel tower for years and I never noticed the Front de Seine buildings so they can’t be that intrusive.

@a boyle wrote:

Inside is not that great either . My friends there all live in shoe boxes.

You can buy new shoe box apartments in Paris for around 90K for 15m2. I guess it’s illegal to build something that small in Dublin but on a per square metre basis I think the price is roughly equivalent to here. If you want to shell out 400K for a 70m2 apartment in Paris you can do that too. Your friends have that choice which they wouldn’t have in Dublin.

@a boyle wrote:

you see you have gone nuclear ! If this could be done i would wholeheartdly support you , but what would you do with the people who didn’t want to sell.

(this was in answer to me suggesting that city centre housing estates be rezoned up to 8 floors.) I would just rezone some poxy housing estate and watch greed work its magic. No CPO needed. Being realistic this is unlikely to happen except on green field sites and industrial areas and 100% council owned housing. First off will be the sites around the new metro stations.

As for the Guinness site. I work there fairly often and I’ll try to get a photo from the top of one of the buildings. It’s a really interesting arrangement of buildings from different eras including some mad brick windmill (minus sails). There is a massive white building lit up with green lights at night. It’s very tall and will likely make the precedent for the rest of the site. The site is about 1 hectare and could easily manage 20 X 8 storey terraced buildings enclosing about 5000sq m of overlooked green space. This would give around 30,000sq m of floor space.

Whatever happens to the site,I hope it has public access unlike the other gated apartment developments in the neighbourhood.

Couldn’t agree more

Yep, you’re right altuistic – its going to be dissapointing if it turns out to be a good quality design for a tower – perhaps at last – only for it to get dismissed due to its inappropriate location.

Still, that end of town does need some quite drastic work in places.

@Frank Taylor wrote:

while architecture is art, at least a poor painting can be left in the basement while some poor bastard has to live in Bachelors Walk.

lol :D. This must the new Archiseek catchline, to be placed on the page title bar of every webpage 😀

Dublin’s comparisons with Paris are very much so valid. From a skyline perspective they are very similar places: developed, western European cities with a fundamentally low-rise historic character relative to other international conurbations, that both face modern-day planning challenges.

Paris has by and large faced up to this very well. If anything, the convention of building eight storeys as standard seems to have stimied the need for taller buildings anyway, or more pointedly has prevented developers from using low density as an excuse for building tall – they simply don’t have that card to play with, unlike in Dublin. Not that this should still be an excuse in Dublin either – frankly I cannot believe the density issue is still raising its head in 2006 when everyone with half a brain in their head knows damn well that even a conservative six storeys, let alone eight, can deliver most what Dublin needs within the existing city core.

8-9 is a nice height to rise up to though in the centre of developments, with the outer fringes coming down to respect the height of surrounding streets. This whole south-western corner of the city is one that has been bypassed by the boom years, and is likely to see a lot of investment in the near future, obviously encompassing the SOHO plan too. If the scale of this project is a sign of what’s to come, then we’re in for a rocky ride.

I have to laugh in a way at this project, as it matches exactly what I expected would happen the second Heuston Gate and was passed. Just like PVC windows, the second an element of height is introduced to virgin territory, it catches on like wildfire and soon everyone’s clambering on ship. That’s all you need – that single spark of leniency, or perhaps even appeasement, in permitting height in an area, and off the train goes on its merry way.

I’d like to read the height survey commissioned by the CC – is it included in the city dev plan, or is it a separate entity? In spite of it, there still doesn’t seem to be a clearly defined vision for the skyline of Dublin. The goalposts keep changing.

@Graham Hickey wrote:

Dublin’s comparisons with Paris are very much so valid. From a skyline perspective they are very similar places: developed, western European cities with a fundamentally low-rise historic character relative to other international conurbations,

Just no . Paris is by a large uniformaly 6 to eight storeys. It is enormous. It was built with and sustains level of wealth that are simply not comparable .

Brussels, Strasbourg, Chester. There is in fact no need to look so far afield Cork is doing by and large a lot better than dublin.

What is the obsession with paris ? (not just you graham , but many on the forum) Is it that none of us have been anywhere else because ryanair don’t fly there ? has anyone gone to the suburbs of paris ? they are horrid. You cannot judge the city purely by it’s core.

San francisco to me might have a lot of things we could learn. Due to various reasons they have mostly uniformly low rise buildings. and a large suburban sprawl issue. But by and large it is a very very nice place to live. How have they got it right ? (at least better than we have.). Since Dublin has sprawled we need to think of improving it . Reversing the sprawl seems to me to be a pipe dream.

Grrr!!!! no more comparisons to cities that don’t have at least a similar population, or similar problems. 😀

@Graham Hickey wrote:

I have to laugh in a way at this project, as it matches exactly what I expected would happen the second Heuston Gate and was passed. Just like PVC windows, the second an element of height is introduced to virgin territory, it catches on like wildfire and soon everyone’s clambering on ship. That’s all you need – that single spark of leniency, or perhaps even appeasement, in permitting height in an area, and off the train goes on its merry way.

True. In fairness though, An Bord Pleanala did make it clear in its decision to permit the Heuston Gate 32-storey that the approval should not be regarded as a precedent in relation to any other proposal for a high building in the city.

See decision here: http://www.pleanala.ie/DCT/210/S210196.DOC

@lexington wrote:

What I find appealing is the developer’s ambition to develop a cluster, defined by 1 or 2 particularly striking towers, rather than another one-off “landmark” tower, this type of provision is too casually mooted about and often fail to exemplify an effective landmark structure … I think de Blacam Meagher have done well on the design front – the location is clearly going to be the subject of debate.

If this reference to deBlacam & Meagher above arises from a sense that they are being &#8216]Have you actually been to Montparnasse? There are tall modern buildings all around the 59 storey tower. Paris is always used as an example of a low-rise city with one mistake, when in fact it has buildings that are taller than anything in Ireland all over it – there is a huge cluster of 30 storey-plus buildings right beside the Eiffel Tower.[/QUOTE]Yes I have, and have plenty of pictures of the Paris townscape to prove it. Though they are slides and I can’t upload them here at the moment (though I may be able to soon). Most views across the city show that the Montparnasse tower (59 storeys) is ONLY high-rise building in Paris proper. And at 51 storeys, the Thomas Street proposal is certainly comparable to it in height – that’s why I mentioned it in my post.

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I was down at that exibition in the Guinness Hopstore today, where the model of the Thomas Street proposal is on view. There’s a lot of other plans on show for the area (some completed, some imaginary). And Jaysus there’s some ludicrous stuff in the pipeline! All I can say is there’s gonna be some big battles ahead. The exhibition runs ’til Friday.

Paul, maybe you should rename this thread. ‘Manor Park’s Digital Hub Plan’ is about as interesting as Maynooth Shopping Centre. It’s going to be a very hot thread.

Except that the image is heavily compressed through a powerful telephoto lens, making high buildings several miles from the centre appear close 😉 .

BTW the current Development Plan provisions for high buildings are contained here (scroll down to Secion 15.6.0 – ‘Building Heights’) : http://www.dublincity.ie/shaping_the_city/future_planning/development_plan/15.pdf

Thanks for the links Frank and Devin – will read with interest.

a boyle Dublin and Paris are very much so comparable – as I said on a skyline basis. That is, both cities still have pretty much the same skylines as they did before the modern movement, and indeed since the 1880s with the development of the skyscaper.
Each to their own, they both face the same modern-day pressures, arguably Paris even more so as a major world city.
Yet Paris has managed to contain high-rise, while Dublin persistently refuses to do so, even as a small capital of a tiny peripheral nation of 4.2 million people.
It could be done if the will was there.