O’ Connell Street, Dublin
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Cantrell & Crowley Architects and Interior Designers.
Two other views.
© Cantrell & Crowley
© Cantrell & CrowleyThe overall proposal is an admirable one and extremely ambitious – essentially building an entirely new hotel behind the 1920s facade and foyer areas. It is generally well-conceived, and the lifting of the Cathal Brugha Street elevation by an extra storey in the idiom of the existing buildings particularly subtle and welcome.
However there are serious concerns about the glazed box and its impact on the wider skyline of O’Connell Street, if not quite the views from the street itself, paticularly from the Rotunda. I get the general impression the photomontages aren’t particularly all-encompassing in demonstrating impact in and around the north inner city.
The inclusion of ‘other proposals considered’ in the application is particularly hilarious, including a glowering Centrepoint tower looming behind the hotel – i.e. our mid-rise so-modest-it’s-cowering-in-a-corner proposal has saved the city from such a travesty! The grandiose floating conference room is an exiting concept, but really and truly, at this location? The views from it are of service roofs and air conditioning plant, whatever of the views of it.
love that second image. Sure aren’t tourists always goin on about them cool lights that whizz along the street like some luminous eels at that junction. That’s exactly what the street would look like with the proposal in place.
I can’t see anything, its glass & sure glass is invisible :rolleyes:
the only thing more invisible than glass is a set back and a glass set back is, and I speak with authority as a physicist, invisible squared.
Maybe if you put vaseline over your eyes and squint it would look like that
Graham your comments sound so neutral…I would have thought you’d be appalled by this kind of thing. As far as I can see it has no merit whatever. Its not even design….its just a glass box on top of someone elses building.
To see how these setbacks impact on the streetscape (!) I would suggest taking a look at the apartments on Burgh Quay behind the old Corn Exchange. Sure they are pure crap…all tacky uPVC windows and cement render while this is a shiny glass box, but in my mind it would have the same destructive effect.
@notjim wrote:
the only thing more invisible than glass is a set back and a glass set back is, and I speak with authority as a physicist, invisible squared.
It’s been a while since I studied maths, so apologies for the rustiness, but I seem to recall that squaring invisibility, like multiplying any negative number by itself, results in something all too plainly visible?
Anyone else get the impression that the northside is gearig up for an assault on the southside? Topple the Parnell monument, lash a couple of Luas lines around it like a rocket in a slingshot, and launch it using the Carlton slope. I can’t believe we didn’t see it before! But what’s the target?
The Gresham revamp must be Bertie’s command tower in disguise. “Like a cross between Mao’s balcony and Old Trafford.”
As in by-now time-honoured tradition, a proposal has been withdrawn and resubmitted much-inflated a couple of years later on account of the current climate of ‘maximising site potential’. I think that’s the developer target, whatever of the planning one.
I was exposed to this proposal a while ago, Stephen, hence perhaps the reticence. I’m still somewhat reflective on it insofar as the extended height cannot be seen from nearly all of O’Connell Street, ought not to impact to any great degree on other major vistas, and is barely visible at all from the head-on view of the hotel from across the street, nor is the penthouse storey in front. I just wonder if the asset such a room may give to the city (difficult to determine) just may outweigh the negatives as seen above.
But as mentioned, I suspect this proposal has wider implications in terms of impact that haven’t been demonstrated, and above all the concept is an incongruous one. The notion that the only viable way to significantly extend a traditional terrace of buildings or indeed any urban form is to lump a mammoth glazed box on top and term it starkly contemporary and a challenging intervention is incredibly tiresome, predictable, and typical of what the north inner city is being increasingly faced with of late. The skyline of a city is so important – not in a fairytale spires-n-twirly-bits kind of way, but in terms of massing, form, function and materials. By the time the north inner city is finished with in ten years time, we’ll have little more than a series of cubes and boxes hovering over religated, token sop streetscape retentions, with none of the hierarchies that define the coherence and readability of most cities.
As such, the Gresham proposal conveys a fundamental disconnect, not primarily with the heritage and form of the original buildings, but with the area at large. While small-scale hiding of additional storeys, plant, balconies etc works on a local level, surely the wholescale concealment of an enormous extension to a signature building, which in any event bloatedly reveals itself at various significant points, is dishonest, unambitious. and fundamentaly incompatible with the form that is attempting to host it?
As with the Clarence, and other recent plans, this is a proposal that the city may need or desire, but is being applied to the wrong location.
From today’s Indo
‘Sky Park’ project falls back to earth
By Breda Heffernan
Wednesday June 25 2008
AMBITIOUS plans for the €1.2bn ‘Sky Park’ redevelopment of a cinema-site have been hit by a delay of up to eight months, after the local authority said it needs a raft of additional information.
Dublin City Council have highlighted concerns about traffic management, parking and the movement of fleets of construction trucks, before it can decide whether or not to grant planning permission.
It also sought assurances that facades facing from the Carlton Cinema site onto O’Connell Street are sympathetic and have “classic proportions”.
Parts of the 5.5 acre site, bound by O’Connell Street, Parnell Street, Moore Street and Henry Street, have been lying empty for almost three decades, while the cinema closed 14 years ago.
The plans include 110 retail units, including an anchor retailer on O’Connell Street, 108 apartments, office space, three new public squares and a roof-top restaurant quarter.
The development also includes a centrepiece “Park in the Sky”, which will stand 50m above the city streets.
Planning officials have requested further details on this part of the project.
The council has allowed the developer up to six months to provide the extra information. It could then take planning officials anything up to two months to plough through the details.
The next six months are going to give them some headaches I imagine;
Getting this ‘spaceship’ into any kind of ‘classical form’ means a totally redesign. (not at all unwelcome in my book)
The recession could give them pause as to the scale of it; re OPW tower, Manor Park at Crane street. The lack of potential tenants in a retail downturn could leave them with a white elephant.
The Maximising document DCC put out on height got an absolute drubbing at public consultation, this, plus the fact that a 16 storey got refused around the corner should (by reasonable expectations) mean the ski-slope HAS to be removed to get through planning/ABP
The traffic management as proposed is crap, and they are going to have big problems sorting out getting cars in and out of this scheme.
The heritage aspect is also suspect, with the retention of just four houses of the Moore St terrace, this isolated out of context treatment massively diminishes the Monument, which is in this plan, further weakened by a treatment that poses it opposite a cinema entrance. It deserves a more sympathetic and restorative approach.
I was exposed to this proposal a while ago, Stephen, hence perhaps the reticence. I’m still somewhat reflective on it insofar as the extended height cannot be seen from nearly all of O’Connell Street, ought not to impact to any great degree on other major vistas, and is barely visible at all from the head-on view of the hotel from across the street, nor is the penthouse storey in front. I just wonder if the asset such a room may give to the city (difficult to determine) just may outweigh the negatives as seen above.
I’d point out that the vistas selected for the montages were precisely ‘selected’ and the impact of the ski-slope is mammoth when viewed from the classical standpoints of cross streets. The aspect to Parnell Square is also awful.
“love that second image. Sure aren’t tourists always goin on about them cool lights that whizz along the street like some luminous eels at that junction. That’s exactly what the street would look like with the proposal in place.”Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! So true. The portrayal of those eel lights is very realistic. They enhance our dull streets and make even unattractive proposals look amazing. Thank God for our collective visual disturbances and migraine auras. PHEW!
The only way that mammoth lunchbox atop the Gresham would fit in would be if the site was bought by Tupperware International.
Ooooh!! It so pretty when it glow at nite… look at the pretty light, moth-people. In the generally washed out, cloudy Dublin daylight, it’s likely to be less dazzling.🙂
Just a quick update on Ulster Bank. The Brutalist units are being slotted out while the upper facade is supported with steel sections. Douglas Wallace are the architects – as with the 1920s neoclassical mothership further up the street.
Trusty breeze blocks always come in handy.
The big CAD drawing on the hoarding is more than just a little flattering in the number of properties it encompasses 😉
It’s also backwards.
It’s a shame institutions like this don’t make a bit more effort in informing the public what they’re up to with regard to bells and whistles schemes such as these. A simple board with basic history and mock-up of what’s being proposed would be as much an effective PR move as it would be a civic-minded gesture. And perfectly located for the ranks queuing at the adjacent ATMs.
GrahamH: spot-on; it should really be a condition of planning permission that all non-domestic permissions should have a requirement that a perspective drawing or mock-up of the scheme should appear on a billboard on the site, together with all the basic details. It would do a lot to dispel rumour and perhaps lessen any perceived hostility to the scheme.
As well as keeping anoraks like us informed, of course.@GrahamH wrote:
🙂 Just a quick update on Ulster Bank….The big CAD drawing on the hoarding is more than just a little flattering in the number of properties it encompasses It’s also backwards.
Lol – Trust Graham to notice the tiny, but essential detail 😀
Any bets that some subversive put it up that way just to see if anyone would notice?
This has been bugging me for weeks; in times long past engravings of famous paintings were always backwards because of printing and I was wondering if this was supposed to be a homage to that.
:p
Clearly it was chucked off to the printers in an e-mail, who just churned it out. The skirting along the bottom evidently wasn’t anticipated either 🙂
Another massive CAD, also on blue, is being used to advertise the big Victorian being restored opposite the Provost’s House, to elegant effect.
How the facade of this fine old building (the Ulster Bank) was ever butchered by the botchers in the first place is truly incredible.
Oh that Gresham proposal looks all nice and fancy but that seamless heavenly glass box would be butchered by curtains on windows etc…Its not a good idea. It will with the plans across the street make O Connell Street into some form of architectural U Valley with high modern buildings drooping down to the older buildings and then to the street itself. Added the fact that this new modern backing on both sides are all of different height and size it destroys the uniformity of height on the street.
Why can’t developers not respect the natural height of the street and be a bit more imaginative in their designs is beyond me.
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