National Children’s Hospital design

To be honest, I don’t see the point in shutting down 3 hospitals for one. Expand Temple Street and that will be that.

Children’s Hospital will ‘proceed as planned’
Updated: 15:54, Saturday, 16 October 2010

Both the Taoiseach and the Minister for Health have said that the new National Childrens’ Hospital in Dublin will proceed as planned.

National Children’s Hospital – Chairman of development board resigned
Brian Cowen – Project is not in doubt Both the Taoiseach and the Minister for Health have said that the new National Childrens’ Hospital in Dublin will proceed as planned.

Their comments come in the wake of the resignation of the chairman of the hospital’s development board last week.

Philip Lynch cited differences with Health Minister Harney on what he called a number of significant and fundamental issues.

Speaking on RTÉ Radio, Ms Harney said that it is ‘a major priority’ of hers to build the National Children’s Hospital, and that she is passionately committed to it.

The Minister told Marian Finuance that she lost confidence in Mr Lynch’s capacity to chair the hospital’s development board.

Ms Harney said it was not in the remit of the former chairman to revisit the Government’s decision on the location.

She said that the mandate of the development board was ‘to build a hospital at that site (at the Mater).’

Ms Harney paid tribute to the fantastic work Mr Lynch did, but she insisted that he had gone outside his mandate by ‘going out reviewing green field sites’ which ‘clearly wasn’t appropriate,’ she said, ‘because the decision was made four years ago.’

She said that there was ‘a lot of innuendo about how the site was chosen,’ and that ‘there was never going to be unanimity about the site.’

Taoiseach Brian Cowen today echoed Ms Harney’s assertion that the project is not in doubt, and will proceed as planned.

It is to be developed on a site adjacent to the Mater Hospital in Dublin at an expected cost of €650m. Mr Lynch has expressed concerns over a funding gap, what he termed the absence of governance proposals, and challenges for the Mater site.

There have been varying reactions from lobby groups to his departure.

The New Children’s Hospital Alliance wants the project to be put on hold immediately, while the New Crumlin Hospital Group warned against delays amid the current controversy.

The Tallaght Hospital Action Group has said it is glad that levels of services for children to be located at the Urgent and Ambulatory Care Centres at Tallaght Hospital is now being raised.

A government in denial; whats new?

@adrian5987 wrote:

that it is for kids and should they really be listening to the constant sirens

There in a hospital.They’ll hear sirens.I dont’ think there’s much that can be done about that, unfortunately.If there is soundproofing to be done, it will stop the sounds of the other services aswell.

ambulences usually only have their sirens on when they need someone to get out of their way, ie at a junction (especially doyles corner-n2/n3), if its not in the city centre, less traffic, less sirens! i live a 2-3hundred meters from an ambulence station in donegal and never hear them. although i do admit it cant be completely eliminated, its the little things that will make a difference when your in hospital for weeks or months

Nope he just wants the hospital at the route leading to the closest junction to motorway network for him.

If Adrian is that DIMBY 150-200 miles away what is he like in a realistic Dimby-sphere?

@johnglas wrote:

Less traffic, fewer sirens. Has grammar and syntax been a victim of the recession as well?

That should be ‘HAVE grammar and syntax been VICTIMS of the recession as well?’. Oh dear!

Seamus: Touche! (Accent omitted) Of course, it’s not about language, but the fad for stream-of-consciousness, never mind what old rope you write down in whatever construct is just an insult to the reader. We all make mistakes (as I (not i) demonstated), but most people do make an effort, and clarity does help the argument.
I’m not sure it is about the hospital; it’s an awful beast on tight site, but is an edge-city location the answer?

PS I can save myself by linking ‘grammar and syntax’ as one concept, but I’m just digging a hole…

Back to hospital discussion – I wonder if that mean rescue for Murray O’Laoire?

http://www.murrayolaoire.com/news_10/Childrens-Hospital-Ireland-10.html

Their first design was extremaly iddyllic:

Pity they finished with dish on the pile of glass boxes…

15/8/2011

So now that the Liveline debate about the proposed city centre location of the new National Children’s Hospital versus the side of a motorway has temporarily subsided, has anybody actually seen what is proposed for the north inner city? Has anybody even cast a sideways glance at the jaw-dropping scale and design of the development? Has so much a word been spoken in public about this impending project outside of medical and parking requirements?

It is not so much baffling, as thoroughly frightening, the complete lack of public discourse and media coverage there has been about the unprecedented planning impact of one of the largest buildings ever constructed in Ireland being shoe-horned into an already dense urban site. A site, incidentally, that has strategic impact on a district that forms part of the State’s tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, never mind its principally residential environment.

The sheer size of this hospital is mind-blowing. It is nearly impossible to calculate the scale of its impact on the north inner city – a development so audacious, not even Patrick Gallagher in his maddest moments would have proposed it. A number of Georgian and Victorian residential streets will be transformed into scenes from Independence Day.

If you saw this at the end of the street, you’d swerve the car back the way you came.

Charming Nelson Street, with little more than half the proposed building in view.

A quaint little red brick road. Can you imagine this being proposed in Dublin 6? Haha – the very notion is hilarious. But on the northside, who gives a toss? None of the consultants involved in bringing this behemoth into being live within a five mile radius of it.

Outside St. George’s Church, it can’t even fit in the frame.

It is considerably dominant over O’Connell Street – a key chimneyed vista that confirms the scale and character of Dublin as a low-rise city.

Eccles Street itself.

Forgive my cynical eye, but the eight-storey block to the immediate left of the existing Mater Private red brick block is supposed to be twice the height of the four-storey block fronting Eccles Street, yet looks nothing like this. Mentally scale up the four-storey block to eight storeys and one gets a much truer sense of the scale of this development.

One can only take these photomontages with a large grain of salt. Firstly, as static images can never truly capture the scale of development when experienced on the ground in the here and now, and secondly as, at the very least selective views are taken, and perspective trickery involved in presenting vistas.

The only positive part of the design in my view is the handsome facade to Eccles Street, which will be granite if I recall.

But truly, the numbers for this project are staggering – of a scale that a German planner I have heard mentioned has said would never get built on an equivalent site in Germany. The height, the floor areas, the patient throughput, the associated service infrastructure to make it all happen are all of an unprecedented scale.

It is important to state that this hospital should be built on an urban site – just not this one. Never in a million years would a speculative building of this design or scale get permission for here – not even for a low intensity office or residential use, never mind a buzzing hospital. It’s not even sheer height from a traditional roofline aesthetic perspective that matters, but rather the staggering scale relative to its receiving environment. It just wouldn’t happen anywhere else.

I also don’t like the ‘playful’, tongue in cheek design, chosen to be ‘reflective’ of the hospital’s function. The flippant spaceship design is entirely inappropriate for a major civic building, not least in an urban context where there is nothing even remotely comparable by way of scale or massing, thus demanding a much more responsible, contextual design aesthetic. It is the interior and outdoor spaces that count in a child’s world, not the dressing of an anonymous skyscraper in a big city.

The Convention Centre’s slab block hotel got thrown out of planning partly due to its intrusion on the Georgian mile on the southside. Will equivalent consideration be given to its northside colleague? Does anyone actually care?

On must also ask about the need for a wider masterplan for the hospital, rather than dumping it, typically Irish style, detached and in isolation from its context. How is it proposed to integrate it into the surrounding streets? Is a proper medical district proposed? What about ancillary and complimentary services, and earmarked sites for long-term expansion and consolidation? What is the future for the historic houses in the area – their uses, their conservation and upping their dismal presentation to the streets? What of the public realm of Eccles Street? Will the new granite surfaces ‘fall off a cliff’ in the classic Dublin manner into untouched surfaces and street furniture on Nelson Street? Will traffic be largely eliminated, or maintained as a hostile ‘strategic artery’ to the North Circular Road? Where will staff live? Is there a masterplan for a new residential community in the area?

From what I have read of the development and seen in presentation form, there is a bucketload of unanswered, not to mention unanswerable, questions about this hospital – a development that is being shovelled through the planning system almost entirely on medical and political grounds, with scant regard for typical planning norms. It is amazing that medical consultants can be hired from all over the world to advise on a project of this kind, yet the elephant in the room of the local planning context is completely ignored! It’s truly extraordinary. If ever there was a case of nobody batting for Dublin, this is it.

The development is currently before An Bord Pleanála, with public submissions permitted for the next four weeks until mid-September.

Plans can be viewed here.

http://www.newchildrenshospitalplanningapplication.ie/

Not ugly? Personally I think its utterly vile and will destroy the north inner city. A misguided and failed attempt at “iconic” architecture where simplicity, clarity and elegance should have been the primary goals – quite apart from the nightmarish functionality issues. I can’t believe this is sailing through but as Graham says, its the northside so “who cares”?