New building beside City Hall
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Paul – I’d just like to back up your comments re the Irish Times and Frank McDonald. Although I live in London I really look forward to getting the Irish Times on Thursdays (as much for Frank McDonald’s articles as to boggle at the extradordinary poor vlaue and quality of the Irish housing market) and Saturdays. Would be nice to see FMcD’s work collected as a book actually. Provides a marvelous history of the development of modern Dublin – as of course does this web-site. Keep up the good work! Shane
Lots of fair points made in that article, but was there not something similar written about it a few months ago in the Irish Times? Surely there are more questions to be asked about this building rather than just pointing out how unpopular it seems to be? Namely, as originally raised on this site by Devin, why has it ended up being a lot bigger than was originally indicated in sketches?
Incidently, where are those three statues now? anyone have any ideas?
Also, good to see this site being mentioned again.
@phil wrote:
Incidently, where are those three statues now? anyone have any ideas?
On sentry duty, guarding the mountain of historic granite paving prior to its reinstatement outside the Olympia.
Good point re the need for more actual criticism too, phil, rather than the too-easy negativity. There are other procedural and policy questions that I’d love to have answers to. Between this nonsense and the JC Decaux fiasco, the City Council’s reputation as guardians of the city for its citizens has taken a bit of a battering.
Anyone have Max Clifford’s number?
In Dublin I’d use WHPR ahead of any London PR firm on any issue.
I think that these two incidents highlight the pitfalls of commercial contracts being entered into directly by Local Authoritites firstly with the JC Decaeux deal which mutated horribly from its original concept through the naked greed of JC Deceaux; thankfully the planners can refuse these permissions and release the city council from any breach of contract compensation.
This building is a little more difficult to sort out now that it is in situ; I like the design as a stand alone building for a cleared site a lot of design time obviously went into it and from a desk top in Barcelona it probably looked smashing.
But it is clear as both devin and phil have said the images submitted in the application which the planners considered bear little relation to the scale of the finished product. In this you can’t blame the planning department but you must blame both the designers for getting it wrong. In relation to the dome and hanging gantry these should be stripped immediately; a corporate occupier doesn’t care about such features they just want new offices in the centre of town that have essentials like raised access floors and air-conditioning,
Aside from some odd material choices, the height really is the main issue & todays irish times photo shows it up well …
The building clearly challenges & detracts from city hall, what a location for DCC to get it wrong, if they’re not embarrassed about it, they should be. Had they stuck with the height originally proposed, it could have done its job … this business of it not being viable at two stories is nonsense, packing in square metres was not its purpose.
was hoping you’d do a job on it Morlan! had a go myself but not really good enough to post 😮
agreed about the dome, looks better without that gantry thing too.@PVC King wrote:
In Dublin I’d use WHPR ahead of any London PR firm on any issue.
I wouldn’t, in my experience they’re rubbish. Anyhow, as for Frank’s article, why write what was already written before in your own newspaper. He pulled his punches as well, saying it’s “almost” unforgivable.
@ctesiphon wrote:
And manifesta gets quoted again! 🙂 Ever thought about writing headlines for the Irish Times? They seem to like your style.
Twice in two articles!
Perhaps you would be so kind, ctesiphon, as to direct the editors of the Irish Times to my influential text, Will Somebody Please Call Christo?: Manifesta’s Compendium of Irish Snarkitecture? It’s chock-a-block with bits of snark and wisdom collected over my career and can be liberally quoted from royalty free. It works especially well embedded in otherwise perfectly reasonable, erudite articles such as Frank McDonald’s essays and/or dissertations in need of that extra je ne sais quoi.
Good to read McDonald’s perspective on this building. Yes, this beast has been picked on in a previous article in the same newspaper, but I don’t think the opinion is in any way cannibalized or redundant, unlike some of the identikit Press Release Journalism (TM) that’s been coming out on the JCD free bikes/ad scheme. In terms of content, it doesn’t focus on the problem of scale, as phil rightly pointed out, though I did learn some facts about the building beyond how ugly it is. The misguided underground ‘Window to Bloomsday’ room, for example, is a great example of planning gone wrong– especially poignant since that fellow in the RTE clip seemed to point to that underground feature as one of this building’s (few) redeeming as-yet-to-be-realized qualities.
Agreed with Shane on the praise of both Archeire and FMcD– McD’s work is consistently enlightening and deserves to be more readily accessible to the public. I’ve been hoping to see Destruction of Dublin come back in print as well. By the by, if anyone can help me track down a copy, I will gladly throw in the Compendium free of charge…
Sorry to have to pour more petrol on the fire here, but yet another addition currently being made to this building has made its impact all the worse in this sensitive area. The Irish Times’ photograph is evidently very recent, as it depicts this addition, namely a hideously crude, galvanised steel conduit, over two feet wide, running down the entire eastern elevation of the building where it adjoins the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers townhouse.
The breathtaking ugliness of it really has to be seen in the flesh to be believed – it beggars belief that something like this has been permitted adjoining an historic townhouse right next to the entrance to the Castle. It’s so bad, in any other circumstance one would think it to be temporary, but given the rest of what we’ve seen here, I can only imagine that it’s staying. Even in the context of the monstrous ‘matching’ steel furniture elsewhere on the building, this yoke still doesn’t work as there isn’t a scrap of steel or other metal elements on this side of the structure; it makes no sense whatsoever within Palace Street.
I can only hope this is some temporary fixture yet to be covered over…Jesus there’s a lot of whingers on this site. The building is flawed, certainly -almost all architecture is (I would say, particularly here in the very strange phenomenon of the contemporary Irish construction industry)- but it is in no way the monster that Mr. McDonald and others would have your average reader believe.
If you can forgive DCC’s approval of the garish nighttime lighting, this building clearly attempts to be respectful to its context in a way that very little new city centre “architecture†does and moreover adds reasonably good quality public space to Dame St.; public space that is in such preposterously short supply that most often when people go out for lunch they have the pleasure of deciding between a) fighting with tourists for a small patch of the Green (for a few weeks of the year when weather permits), or b) paying at 20pc net mark-up for the privilege of eating in.
Perhaps this is why Dubliners find the space so alien; they don’t know what to make of their newfound civic freedom. Perhaps like previous posters, they would rather sub-let it to the homeless and disenfranchised and then complain about its use!
If Frank McDonald wants to have a chat about detested additions to Dublin I can give him a very long and much more worthy list.
Public space makes a city better, period.
I think there’s less ill-feeling about the public space than there is about the building. Of course public space makes a city better, but this isn’t new public space, it’s just different public space. As for ‘…newfound civic freedom’? I’ve never felt as watched in a public space as I did the time I sat in this square. But perhaps that’s the modern day version of freedom you mean? The security of being observed?
It’s interesting that you note the 20% mark up for eating-in in Dublin. It got me thinking. Perhaps that’s the reason why this building is 20% bigger all round? Y’know, like some sort of ironic comment on the cost of living in this city, but instead of paying our 20% in cash, it is extracted from us as a mark up on our new buildings? Perhaps not, but how then to explain the overnight growth spurt?
And respectful of its context? You can put a yarmulke on Nick Griffin, but it doesn’t make him Jewish.
@deliriousbeat_0 wrote:
Public space makes a city better, period.
It was a public space beforehand, and a hell of a lot more inviting! It baffles me how they could offer that back to the city as a public space… it makes me sicker every time i pass it.
Graham,
Do you mean to say that the steel girder that ran up the party wall between S&I and the new yoke has been covered over? I passed today but didn’t spot it, though that was probably more to do with the van reversing into my path. I must look again.
@manifesta wrote:
Perhaps you would be so kind, ctesiphon, as to direct the editors of the Irish Times to my influential text, Will Somebody Please Call Christo?: Manifesta’s Compendium of Irish Snarkitecture? It’s chock-a-block with bits of snark and wisdom collected over my career and can be liberally quoted from royalty free. It works especially well embedded in otherwise perfectly reasonable, erudite articles such as Frank McDonald’s essays and/or dissertations in need of that extra je ne sais quoi.
Is that the one illustrated by El_Architino? I’ve only ever heard rumours of its existence- thanks for the confirmation. Ebay here I come!
I’ll put it on the shelf beside A Guide to the Discreet Use of Emoticons by hutton, Ellipsis Mon Amour by Alek Smart and Learning How to Count to 10, which I authored myself. Now all I need is to track down phil’s Internet Acronyms For Today – BTW, ROFL and Beyond and I’ll have the set!
@deliriousbeat_0 wrote:
Public space makes a city better, period.
The relatively simple task of re-locating one of the ‘fridges’ off the Grattan Bridge would probably have had a more positive impact on the existing public space than what has been done.
If you can forgive DCC’s approval of the garish nighttime lighting, this building clearly attempts to be respectful to its context in a way that very little new city centre “architecture†does and moreover adds reasonably good quality public space to Dame St
I always enjoy hearing a contrarian view but I don’t find your argument convincing. First of all this development took away public space – the previous small park was bigger. Secondly the garish lighting isn’t its only obvious flaw. The galvanised stairwells along the side and the gantry are hardly respectful, the scale (about 70% taller than the Sick&Indigents) is not respectful, the way it ignores the line of the street is not repsectful and the bunker like ground floor could hardly be less inviting.
The bunker part is particularly offensive – the whole building essentially barricades itself up from the city with this defensive ground floor.
(a while ago)Of course it could be argued that the neighbouring Victorian bank or even City Hall with its cold stone street frontage does precisely the same, but this building in the centre of the square is so obviously suited to public use. Yet the suspicious narrow, tinted glazing and swipecard-operated front door so blatently attempt to ‘protect’ a private occupier from the great unwashed; its a genuinely unpleasant sensation walking alongside the ground floor with it’s sinister strip windows. And in any event, the aforementioned buildings are civic-minded in their wider outlook: this building by contrast hides behind narrow glazing, galvanised doors and a giant sheet of glass blankly reflecting the sky.
So the girder yoke has been there a while I take it ctesiphon? The last time I saw it it hadn’t yet been erected. So does this mean it’s staying?!
It’s just unbelievable.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s not finished…
Magnificent cylinder glass intact from 1855 in the S&IR. Exceptionally rare in the inner city.
Also the windswept public plaza as things currently stand, with the gloriously exposed 1980s apartment box shovelled in behind Burgh’s Treasury Block.
It’s more the stumpy little annex that’s offensive, it’s such a disastrous mess in there. The Cuffe Street washing lines x20, only right beside City Hall.
And the lightwell mentioned earlier.
Granted, there’s some lovely texture in the granite public seating,..
…but these so desperately needed to be in a different colour stone. The whole place feels so totally washed out beside the great white elevation of City Hall. This is one of the reasons so few people want to sit there – you stand out so much in the bright context.
@ctesiphon wrote:
I’ll put it on the shelf beside A Guide to the Discreet Use of Emoticons by hutton
😮
😀
Count yourself lucky you have a copy of that – ’tis a collectors edition now 😉 :p
By the looks of things, a Revised Edition will soon be required!
🙂 😉 😀
😉 😀 😮
😀 😮 🙂Edit: Ha! I went to bamboozle you with 20-odd smilies, and got this:
You have included 16 images in your message. You are limited to using 10 images so please go back and correct the problem and then continue again.
Images include use of smilies, the vB code [img]tag and HTML
tags. The use of these is all subject to them being enabled by the administrator.
Looks like the Mods are on to you, hutton!
@ctesiphon wrote:
Edit: Ha! I went to bamboozle you with 20-odd smilies, and got this:
Ha ha – amateur 😀 Sure dont ye know that the archiseek grand wizards is wise to the idea of taking multiple simultaneous applications – unlike a certain LA we wont name :p
BTW the revised edition will cost big books 😮
*quits after failing fast in the attempt-at-humour stakes*
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