OPW – Architectural Works
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this effort will make a balls of an important corner site, paying full attention to bride street only, and judging by the render, it needn’t have bothered.
Thanks for the pic Devin.
Yes, thanks again Devin for the picture, I hope you didn’t have to do anything too unpleasant to get it.
A couple of quick thoughts on the building:
It very much office park aethetic rather than civic building
The atrium feature is reminiscent of the McCullough Trinity Library, rising a storey higher than the higher of the two blocks. If the atrium runs the full length of the building, as it appears to do, it’s joing to be very prominant from the west (the St.Swpulchre’s Palace side).
To me, the long curved range looks curiously top heavy and the non apparent support at ground level, combined with the heavy banded design, looks a bit Corb without the pilotis. The new office block on the corner of Lower Mount St. and the Canal does the same thing. I think this might work better if the ground floor was double height, or if the support was expressed. I could be wrong.
That brief moment when it looked like contemporary architecture was going to engage with a historical context in a contrasting but sensitive way, I take it that moment has passed.
Just looked up that stone building on the Rocque maps, and it does actually seem to be there in 1757, or a predecessor of the same size and shape!
Maybe GrahamH was right there, with the evidence of the blocked-up windows etc. The building was a single room wide so obviously the other side (west elevation) was the front and the larger blocked up window (with stone reveals), between the two chimney stacks, was a stairwell landing window? I’d love to see a pic of the west elevation, or an aerial view, if anyone has come across one.
The justification for demolition is not increasing!
No, indeed! Any chance it was a domestic building of some sort for the palace – a stables or grainstore or slavequarters (I jest) or something similar? There might be an estate plan in St Patrick’s archives, wherever they are.
I got a couple of aerial shots on Google, but they’re not distinct enough to tell what the west facade looked like. We are making a bit of an assumption that this was the main facade of the building, just based on the east elevation appearing to be the back.
Was it a stores or a stables, with living quarters over? I don’t know. I know of a, bang up to date, four storey house in the Kilmainham area dating to c. 1725, which had a similar nearly blank back wall and chimney arrangement that was totally stone built in an era that was dominated by brick usage, so that type of structure did exist in Dublin. It may have been a house for someone associated with the cathedral, that was converted in the 19th century to something else with a new roof and chimneys.
There’s an estate map by Kendrick from about 1750, but the only versions of it that I’ve seen are copies of a map by Drew in 1890 that is supposed to be based on the Kendrick map. It seems clear from the Rocque map that this building (or it’s predecessor) was part of the palace complex, was entered through the complex and probably was designed to address the complex, it certainly wasn’t some random building on an adjacent site, which is kind of what it looked like in more recent times. The fact that the building in question makes no impact on the Drew map may not mean that it wasn’t significant in Kendrick’s time, just that the significance may have been lost by 1890.
This copy of the Drew map and a view of St. Sepulchre’s Palace come from ‘The Liberties of Dublin‘ ed Elgy Gillespie 1973
I don’t want to labour the point, but if the stone building merited the closer examination that it apparently got in the last few days, with the render being knocked off (presumably for the purposes of making a record of the structure prior to demolition), why wasn’t that process of examination carried out last year, before any final decision was made to demolish the structure, a contract to the develop the site signed, and the hoarding put up?
@gunter wrote:
I don’t want to labour the point, but if the stone building merited the closer examination that it apparently got in the last few days, with the render being knocked off (presumably for the purposes of making a record of the structure prior to demolition), why wasn’t that process of examination carried out last year, before any final decision was made to demolish the structure, a contract to the develop the site signed, and the hoarding put up?
Well, it’s a rhetorical question; the Gardai were gettin their new station at Kevin Street, medieval archbishop’s palace or not!
@gunter wrote:
The west facade.Some terrible sloppy, self-contradictory information in the planning application documentation. Holes can easily be picked in the Executive Summary on page 2 of the OPW Planning Report (signed by a very senior OPW architect). For example:
“One existing building and two adjacent stores are proposed for demolition … These buildings were not part of the original Archbishop’s Palace but were incorporated or built onto the complex when the Dublin Metropolitan Police took over the Palace in 1806.”
So why is the main building that was demolished depicted in black along with the rest of the palace complex on Rocque’s map of 1756 (while small buildings fronting the surrounding streets in the area are just lightly shaded)? This surely indicates clearly that the building was part and parcel of the palace complex prior to 1806?
Then, having mentioned that buildings on Bride Street were demolished for road widening some 30-40 years ago, it says:
“[The building for demolition] appears on the Rocque map of 1756 parallel to a similar shaped building facing onto Bride Street. One of the buildings was subsequently demolished by road widening work.”
Well if you’d taken a quick look at the 1847 OS map included in the Gowen report in your own planning application OPW, you’d have seen that the east of the two long buildings shown on Rocque is already gone by this stage, long before our esteemed ’60s Corpo road engineers could get their hands on it. Tsk!
“The assessment of the building fabric and features dates most of the extant building to the early 19th century…”
Eh? I thought you just said it can be seen on Rocque’s map of 1756.
That wonderful phrase “preserve by record” also comes up more than once :rolleyes:
These are some of Graham’s pictures again:
Combined with Devin’s picture of the front and the evidence from the maps, would you say that this was an early 19th century barracks building, or an early 18th century building remodelled in the early 19th century to be a barracks building?
The evidence from the back elevation seems to indicate that one window (the centre window at landing height) with it’s masonry reveals was original to the construction, whereas the other opes (with brick reveals) are probably insertions. The width of the stone ope, at about 1,300mm, looks to be on the big side for an early window!
In Graham’s first picture it’s reasonably clear that the stone work continues around the gables onto the front elevation, but presumably the reveals to the nine bay front were all brick and the absence of a door surround doesn’t leave us much to hang an early date on.
I suppose, in advance of seeing the survey photographs, you have to go along with the early 19th century thesis, but, it was still a very decent building and they’re not getting away with telling us that it wasn’t really part of the complex.
All that bad karma we laid down on the OPW, back in the spring, seems to have paid off.
The poor bastards appear to have got themselves bogged down in a nice bit of archaeology.
They started out poking around in the foundations of the DMP building, the one that they shouldn’t have knocked down in the first place, and now they appear to have uncovered some nice stone-lined pits towards the corner part of the site.
It would be nice if there was justice after all.You didn’t happen to catch the midnight radio headlines did you, gunter?
I didn’t no, what?
Just a brief discussion of the ‘significant archaeological finds’ and a few words from the Senior Archaeologist (?) on the Kevin Street job. Sufficiently important to make the national news, it would appear.
(Unless it was widely known already and I missed it…)
It also featured on last nights 9 O’Clock news – they’ve found quite a lot of stuff !
Watch it here :
Scroll down & click on last item.
……..The walls by which it was formerly surrounded, and the fortifications for its defense, have nearly all vanished. Neither is Dublin rich in remains of antiquity; one of the few that appertain to its ancient history is a picturesque gateway, but not of a very remote date, called Marsh’s Gate. It stands in Kevin Street, near the cathedral of St. Patrick, and is the entrance to a large court, now occupied by the horse police; at one end of which is the Barrack, formerly, we believe, the Deanery, and Marsh’s library.. ……
“The Irish Sketch Book.” W M THACKERAY
This site was occupied up until the 1970’s by rag pickers and feather cleaners. A few years ago the site was used to park trucks and diggers for some local owrks, at that stage they dug out the first few feet and put down hard core. In any event it was well known that the site had major importance in a medieval context. The whole ensembel should be treated as one. I cannot locate it but I recall that Annegret Simms of UCD produced information about that area. Strange that the OPW should not be aware it.
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