One Berkley court -132m Tower

A good week for archiseek.com publicity-wise! Quotes in the Post:

Sunday Business Post 2 Sept
http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=IRELAND-qqqm=news-qqqid=26312-qqqx=1.asp

Bland or ballsy?
02 September 2007 By Ian Kehoe
Sean Dunne’s planned 37storey tower in Ballsbridge has received mixed reviews.

Some users of Archiseek.com, a popular architecture website, described it as bland, and suggested it resembled a building that would have served as a typical corporate headquarters in the United States in the 1980s.

‘‘This is too high for the site; buildings of this size should be confined solely to the docklands,” wrote one user.

Others were more positive. ‘‘The angles are interesting without being fiddly, the scale is impressive, and the location seems ideal for a large tower, standing by those big wide streets at the corner of a huge site, near the city, by the business district, rising up out a streetscape of handsome terraces,” said one contributor.

‘‘Fair play to Dunne,” said another. ‘‘It’s a ballsy move.

‘‘It’s a very well-thought-out venture that puts the ball firmly in DCC’s [Dublin City Council] court.”

Thanks for posting the video Morlan. The part about permeability interested me the most. In reality though is this actually going to be public space or is it going to be another docklands style quasi-private space masquerading as public space?

Also, does anyone know what percentage is to be given over as social and affordable housing? This is a genuine question, not trying to make any assumptions, but would actually like to know.

Anything that is being presented as better because it is high density, should also include benefits for the community. There should be a better use of public spaces, there should be an improvement in public services, eg shopping, parking, creches, etc.
Otherwise what is the point of high density?
I understand that loads of services of this kind will be provided with the development (although nothing has been mentioned about parking, Could it do something to help parking around matches at Landsdowne rd?). Anyway, if these are quality services, I don´t care if it looks like diamond, or a rugby ball o a milk carton. If it threads into the existing city and improves it, I like it!

@Frodo wrote:

where is a designated area for tall buildings in Dublin???

There isn’t really any designated area.

There are random developments in Dublin that have been permitted to build a one-off “landmark” tower, namely: U2 Tower (32), Point Tower (32), Hueston Gate (32). Sandyford Tower (24).

anne collins and her ilk would have simultaneous heart failure.

He’s promised to provide the s&a housing within the electoral ward and bought a site in the docklands in recent weeks, I presume for it.
He says he’ll spend a further e31 million on other community initiatives in the area, as well as the s&a housing he’ll have to provide. Included in that is subsidised creche spaces (e1 an hour) for low income families within the Jurys Berkeley Court site
http://www.thepost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=IRELAND-qqqm=news-qqqid=26313-qqqx=1.asp

As a general reply to some of the posters asking about public access to the site, there’ll have to be full access to most of it because there’ll be a shopping centre. They’ll need full public access in order to get the footfall to justify the rents. Some of the site however, as stated in Mountbrook’s video, will not be publicly accessible meaning the apartment blocks and the offices I assume.

@ctesiphon wrote:

I wonder what would happen if DCC said ‘You can have your tower, but the 20% must be on site’? 🙂

That won’t happen because eligible purchasers wouldn’t be able to afford them. Hopefully they’ll get more than the frankly disgraceful e500,000 they accepted in lieu of s&a housing at the eventual Chester Beatty library redevelopment on Shrewsbury Rd.

I just thought i’d reproduce the Kevin Myers article that Dunne mentions in his letter,
because he is spot on with this …………….plus i think he was reading my mind:D
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/the-dublin-of-ulysses-is-dead-up-with-brave-dunnes-high-rise-772874.html

The Dublin of Ulysses is dead: up with brave Dunne’s high rise

IRISH INDEPENDENT
By Kevin Myers
Tuesday June 26 2007

WHAT is the great, unspoken hope that fills so many Dublin hearts? What ambition unites lefties, vegans, city councillors, bankers, accountants, surgeons, barristers, street sweepers, GAA officials and left-handed lesbians?

It is that Sean Dunne, the property developer who paid three hundred zillion Kruger Rand for Jury’s Hotel in Ballsbridge and who wants to build a complex of high towers there, fails totally. Well, I hope he succeeds.

I don’t know the fine detail of his plans and so won’t comment on them, but I do know that Dublin has run out of room. The city cannot continue to expand west until it reaches the Shannon. Commuters notionally living on the outskirts of the city are already having to travel up to two hours to work each way. This is neither sustainable nor civilised.

But most of all, there is absolutely no reason why the ludicrously inflated property prices of Dublin 4 and 6 should continue to be sustained by the artificial shortages created by state limitations on vertical development.

On the other hand, no one likes property developers. They simply buy some land and then sell it on for five times the price they paid for it. We could all do that, couldn’t we? Well, we could if we could: and the “if” there is about the same size as the same word in the sentence: “If Chad put a hippopotamus on the moon.”

The truth is that most of us can’t think like property developers. Most men, it is said, cannot multitask, but I’d guess property developers do. Because there are so many dimensions to developing land: financial, legal, political, engineering, artistic, architectural, and perhaps most of all, temporal.

For property developers have to possess an acute sense of time: they must imagine what is possible over what period, and what other, simultaneous events might affect the value of their investment. Most of all, property developers either have to have bottomless reserves of courage, or simply be unacquainted with the meaning of fear. I do not know Sean Dunne, so I do not know whether he is either brave or fearless, but the outcome is the same. Almost alone, he is taking on the most powerful and influential lobby in Ireland: L’Arrondisement Pont de Balle.

In doing this, he is confronting a central truth: the Dublin of Ulysses is dead. That cosy city of the Bloomsday peregrination exists only in the memory of the Joycean pilgrims: the customers in the pubs they so reverentially visit speak Ukrainian and have never heard of Joyce.

Dublin is no longer a city with a single ethos, sustained by a homogenous group memory, populated by universally known names: Maureen Potter, Brendan Grace, Noel Purcell, Brendan Behan et alia. Those days are gone for ever. The authentic Cockney is just about extinct and the true Dub is similarly destined.

It is a difficult concept to swallow, but swallow it we must. We cannot bottle the new Dublin in the geography of the old Dublin. It is not possible, and it is certainly not moral. For by attempting to do that, we are creating intolerable commuting problems for the people who, though staffing the city centre’s economy, have to live in some hideous, characterless Bantustan, two counties away.

The only solution is to build up, which is where Sean Dunne wants to hoist Dublin 4. There is nowhere else to go.

Now, he is a brave man to joust with the vested interests of Dublin 4, which, when known as Pembroke Ward, was a privileged, self-governing entity, whose servants – rather obligingly – lived elsewhere, in tenement townships.

Those instincts of lordly Pembrokian autonomy still linger on in the region’s atoms, and have been bestirred into a molecular frenzy by Sean Dunne’s development proposals for the Jury’s site. And though this campaign is entirely self-serving, it has of course, donned the mantle of environmentalist concern.

Yet bizarrely, Ballsbridge’s campaign to protect its insane property values has won allies across the city.

Why? There are, I suspect, two main reasons.

The first is a nostalgia for a fictional Dublin, one that subsists, largely on life-support, in city councillor imaginations. The second is perhaps the last surviving relic of that old Dublin, namely small-minded begrudgery.

A lot of people bitterly resent a property developer who has daring, courage, vision and enterprise. So, put those latter qualities together in the begrudgeryblender, and out comes the word “greed”, the morally satisfying denunciation which trips with equal ease from the lips of both the sleek Ballsbridgian barrister protecting the value of his house, and the gaunt, socialist pamphleteer with his gluepot, spouting Marxist gibberish.

Sean Dunne has shown the way to the future. Dublin, including Ballsbridge, will go up. That is certain. The only question is when. Sorry, that is not the only question.

The other one is this: when will the IRFU abandon its utterly sentimental and financially insane attachment to Lansdowne Road? Because when those acres are liberated for useful, year-round economic activity, Dublin 4 will finally expand upwards.

I just hope that happens before Sean Dunne goes bust.

If we are to debate this then what we require is at least some honesty about the real matter at stake. Don’t be fooled by those who take the high moral design ground supporting this development, speaking of its being a signature 21st century project putting Dublin on the international architecture map and freeing us from the shackles of Buck Mulligan even if they are some journeyed washed up hack like Kevin Myers. This is ALL ABOUT THE MONEY .
Sean Dunne paid 54million per acre, 275 million for Jurys and 100+ for the Berkley topping out around 370million, so even if he had 20million cash, they rest came in the form of a loan, last time I checked loans had interest attached, so say 350 million in a loan, at 5% since 2005 , he is now in hock for closer to 385 million, then factor in the 1billion building costs, so we are looking at close on 1.4 billion project costs, Celtic Tiger or not that’s a lot of apples. His own project manager has more or less come out and stated this , the building needs to be 37 storey with inordinately high density for the developer to see a return on the ridiculous price paid for the land. Its Paddy and Patricia publics fault he owes so much cos we made him pay so much. I heard her talking on the news last week and she almost made me feel so bad about it I was going to have a whip around and start a special Sean Dunne STD fund, Save The Developer.
Course at this point its not really his problem, it becomes his financier’s problem, they have now become as keen to get this pushed through as the developer himself , I wonder which Irish bank is sweating over this. Then you have to consider some other planning applications either in the process or already refused by uber-developers and Irish business magnates in the Ballsbridge area who looked to demolish or significantly extend properties they purchased for exhorbitant prices. Even a multi-millionaire feels the pinch some times. So Im sure the machinations of Irish cronyism will come into play, probably not in the public eye, I predict the Backik tribunal in 2014 will reveal all.
So while Archiseek Ireland is obfused by the smoke screen that is the visual of this development and we all have a warm cosy feeling becasue we talk about the glass, angles, facades and some plonker even spoke of it in terms of vital,exciting living architecture, its got sweet f.a to do with that, its about 1.4 billion in wants to get 1.4 billion plus out ! …

@mickletterfrack wrote:

If we are to debate this then what we require is at least some honesty about the real matter at stake. Don’t be fooled by those who take the high moral design ground supporting this development, speaking of its being a signature 21st century project putting Dublin on the international architecture map and freeing us from the shackles of Buck Mulligan even if they are some journeyed washed up hack like Kevin Myers. This is ALL ABOUT THE MONEY .
Sean Dunne paid 54million per acre, 275 million for Jurys and 100+ for the Berkley topping out around 370million, so even if he had 20million cash, they rest came in the form of a loan, last time I checked loans had interest attached, so say 350 million in a loan, at 5% since 2005 , he is now in hock for closer to 385 million, then factor in the 1billion building costs, so we are looking at close on 1.4 billion project costs, Celtic Tiger or not that’s a lot of apples. His own project manager has more or less come out and stated this , the building needs to be 37 storey with inordinately high density for the developer to see a return on the ridiculous price paid for the land. Its Paddy and Patricia publics fault he owes so much cos we made him pay so much. I heard her talking on the news last week and she almost made me feel so bad about it I was going to have a whip around and start a special Sean Dunne STD fund, Save The Developer.
Course at this point its not really his problem, it becomes his financier’s problem, they have now become as keen to get this pushed through as the developer himself , I wonder which Irish bank is sweating over this. Then you have to consider some other planning applications either in the process or already refused by uber-developers and Irish business magnates in the Ballsbridge area who looked to demolish or significantly extend properties they purchased for exhorbitant prices. Even a multi-millionaire feels the pinch some times. So Im sure the machinations of Irish cronyism will come into play, probably not in the public eye, I predict the Backik tribunal in 2014 will reveal all.
So while Archiseek Ireland is obfused by the smoke screen that is the visual of this development and we all have a warm cosy feeling becasue we talk about the glass, angles, facades and some plonker even spoke of it in terms of vital,exciting living architecture, its got sweet f.a to do with that, its about 1.4 billion in wants to get 1.4 billion plus out ! …

I don’t see how Sean Dunne’s finances are at all relevant. The scheme should be judged on its merits alone, and how it fits in with whether or not we want a high density future for Dublin.