proposed changes to stephen’s green

St Stephens Green West will be open to vehicular traffic from the junction of Cuffe St./Harcourt St./St. Stephen’s Green South as far as York Street and from the top of Grafton Street as far a Glover’s Alley. The stretch of St. Stephen’s Green West from York Street to Glover’s Alley (i.e. in front of the Royal College of Surgeons) will be closed to traffic. A new plaza will be constructed here.

That’s great news.

Actually, it isn’t good news at all, because once you begin, to see cars ‘excluded’ totally from the equation in some areas, you automatically see environments created on the other end of the spectrum, which exclude the pedestrian and even cyclist altogether,… that is not progress,… but going backways in terms of urban design.

Interestingly the new ‘pedestrian plaza’ on Green West consists of an extended pavement in from of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Well if you look at my observations in relation to Dundrum Shopping Centre,

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3703&page=3

you will notice how in Dundrum, the approach of ‘separation’ of cars from pedestrians is taken to an extreme, whereby cars are totally ignored on one aspect of the site, and it is all chinese rock garden kind of aesthetic,… whereas on the other end of the site,… it is all ‘car city’,… and pedestrians and even cyclists have been just shoved out of the whole equation period. This is the polarity that often happens in today’s road engineering I find,… whereas to do design well, I think you have to accept a bit of both worlds,… to accept that these worlds are going to intersect much more than we are currently willing to accept. It is so funny to see the few cars that do venture down towards the college of surgeon’s, getting really ‘aggressive’ with walkers at the moment,… I see cars beeping an awful lot at the walkers, and it is currently unclear as to who ‘owns’ the territory. As if that was the proper way to go about things,… that you have to either ‘own’ the territory as a car driver, or as a pedestrian, but no in between. The drivers around College of Surgeon’s and the LUAS stop now feel as if they need to hoot and honker, huff and puff a whole lot, to re-establish some of their personal space. The article on Hans Monderman linked over here, is about the best article I have read in a long while, on traffic mixed with people,…

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3896&page=2&pp=25&highlight=monderman

As I said, all over the city, the separation between car and pedestrian, is just so exaggerated as to be ridiculous. I tend to subscribe to the notion, that when you speed up the flow of cars, then the whole traffic system in the city as a whole tends to collapse, and everyone is left waiting in jambs. But if you actually slow down the traffic in general and mix up pedestrians and cars more, the system will manage much, much better as a whole. This seems like a paradox, but recent studies are showing it to be the case. In Ireland, in recent years we have been so busy arguing for faster and faster lanes, speed limits and allowance for car speed all over,… and the system as a whole has just buckled completely. Of course, as soon as you create a car speeding friendly zone, you have to take measures to exclude people from the design altogether, and the car just takes over completely,… that is where your drab, and lifeless environments come from. The trouble I see happening in Dublin, is the hell that is Grafton Street ‘pedestrianisation’ is being allowed to spread out too far altogether,… you already have the pedestrianisation down to the Gaeity, and now all over the Green. All that is happenings is the hell that was Grafton Street pedestrianisation,.. and the extreme separation of cars from pedestrians,… is starting to grow, and it is not an improvement but a dis-improvement in my opinion. I think it is patently wrong that pedestrians are seen to need a totally separate environment of their own – it is something driven mainly by big commerce and a culture of litigation in Ireland. The kind of environment produced when you just have all pedestrians on their own, isn’t really a nice environment at all, or a successful urban experience. Even in the planning of new areas of cities, you see the influence of the car, down through the years,…

https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=702

https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=701

The ‘Radburn’ example in the linked images, is the one that Hans Monderman thinks was ‘written into’ most traffic guidelines and codes, and re-produced all over the world,… the extreme separation of car and pedestrian. The ‘Radburn’ philosophy comes about, because cars are treated the same way as water flows in a pipe, and that kind of engineering of car traffic, like how large the pipe diameter needs to be etc. As I have mentioned here on the board previously, for every nice spanking new ‘Henry Street’ that Dublin City Council manages to make,… it also has to create a ‘Parnell Street’ rear service entrance to accomodate all of the ‘shit’ that has to happen to service the said high street. So that, one space becomes ‘car hell’ like Parnell Street, while another street, just becomes pedestrian hell, like Grafton Street or Henry Street,… any day I have experienced those places anyhow.

My major concern would be that this turning circle would end up being a buspark, where the drivers had their ten-minute break before heading out of town again.
It would be entirely inappropriate for double-deckers to be parking around here and it would be probably worse than the old arrangement where at least the traffic was moving (albeit slowly).

The big question that is raised here, is why do all of the bus routes in Dublin city appear to need to ‘stop’ in the City Centre? Why can you not have a terminus stop, someplace removed far away from the city centre,… and also reduce the amount of space needed in general for buses stopping in the city centre? It seems to me as if most of the great spaces in Dublin city centre are entirely ruled by rows of double deckers,… and yeah, the drivers eating kit-kats. The strongly hierarchial nature of urban city council’s just doesn’t seem to be capable of maximising on what our cities have to offer,…

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4159

An often quoted architectural text from the seventies, Complexity and Contradiction, by Robert Venturi, expresses the point about hierarchies, and such in the following way.

Cleanth Brooks refers to Donne’s art as ‘having it both ways’ but, he says, ‘most of us in this latter day, cannot. We are disciplined in the tradition either-or, and lack the mental agility – to say nothing of the maturity of attitude – which would allow us to indulge in the finer distinctions and the more subtle reservations permitted by the tradition of both-and.’

The tradition ‘either-or’ has characterised orthodox modern architecture: a sun screen is probably nothing else; a support is seldom an enclosure; a wall is not violated by window penetrations but is totally interrupted by glass; program functions are exaggeratedly articulated into wings or segregated separate pavilions. Even ‘flowing space’ has implied being outside when inside, and inside when outside, rather than both at the same time. Such manifestations of articulation and clarity are foreign to an architecture of complexity and contradiction, which tends to include ‘both-and’ rather than exclude ‘either-or.’

Complexity and Contradiction, is actually a nice book to study in the context of urban design in Dublin nowadays. I had almost forgotten totally about that text, but I must say, I have ‘re-visited’ it recently and find it useful, in constructing my ‘thinking’ about urban design.

The real question is what is of higher value another civic space entirely free of traffic or the efficient operation of the 14/14A 15/ 15A 15B 44 48A and only public transport disturbing pedestrians.

‘Either-or’ philosophy? Hmmm,… We need to stop thinking in terms of ‘either-or’ and start learning to think in terms of a ‘both-and’ mind-set. Just my humble opinion. 🙂

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Unfortunately you don’t have to travel to any rural villages to see exactly the same kind of mishaps. You only have to look at the current state of things around the Stillorgan shopping centre – I don’t know the exact sequence of development, that Stillorgan village took down over the years, but from my understanding of it – the village of Stillorgan did experience several sequential road building and road alteration projects. As time went on, problems that should have been addressed from the beginning, just kept going ‘un-resolved’, leading to the current state of confusion. What you have left now is a pure obstacle course of different plans, different ideas and nothing really gels. Stillorgan is actually a crazy kind of environment, because you have a tiny village scale in parts, the first Shopping Centre in Ireland, a GAA field and associated properties, a few major car and bus routes, speculative development and residential all knitted together in some kind of weird fashion. You have a lot of open space out there and a lot of opportunities exist to solve the problem well. But I fear, the way that people are going to use these opportunities, is in the typical short-sighted, and ‘my-little-site-on-it’s-own’-kind-of-way. Herman Hertzberger is one of the very few Architects I know, you has seriously faced up to the problem of designing ‘the in-between’ space, as opposed to just designing ‘the object’.

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3933

But getting back to your point on the pavements – Stillorgan – coming from its ancient history as a country village – still manages to sport this very large kind of ‘hump in the road’,… it is a kind of topological feature that really dominates and defines the experience of walking or driving through Stillorgan. And just like the photograph you have shown, most of the architecture flanking this ‘hump in the road’ has adapted to this hump in the road. For the life of me, I just cannot understand, with all of the major road building projects going on all over the country – how that ‘hump in the road’ right in the middle of Stillorgan has managed to go un-noticed for all of these years. The road is far too wide there anyhow, and the parking on either side of the road is a pure mess. It is one of the few places in Dublin, where a pedestrian is not ‘safe’ to cross when a green man lights up. But as I have said, for every nice ‘all-pedestrian’ environment one creates, at the other end of the scale, Dublin City manages to get away with an environment which is exclusively car oriented. The siting of the Ormonde Cinema in Stillorgan is very funny too, as most mothers will park their car in the summertime in the Shopping Centre park, and then the half-dozen or so kids have to ‘run’ across about 5 lanes of car traffic going in two directions, with the added difficulty of this ‘hump in the road’ topography, which makes visibility of oncoming vehicles especially hard to judge. It is so funny, right at this point you have a veritable ‘intersection’ of mums with kiddies running across a road (sweets and fizzy drinks in hand) with practically an ‘Auto-bahn’ running right by. You see, unless, you can manage to view spatial design problems in four dimensions, you just don’t notice things like that. My fear, is that most spatial design students, looking at their projects manage to see their solutions in three dimensions, and that is as far as they get to take it.

The real trouble with everything that has happened to Stillorgan, including the most recent scheme to extend the old 1960s Shopping Centre. Every presentation, perspective view, plan, elevation and representation of the new scheme was very carefully doctored to draw your attention away from this current nasty traffic/pedestrian mess, that exists right along side the proposed new development. No one has ever been commissioned to just model the entire base – the reality of what is actually there – irrespective of property lines, of point of view or special interest. This I feel, is where you do need a government to step in and take the initiative. But as I have already said here, the government aren’t in the business of spatial planning and design – just a few individuals in a very little known profession called architecture, are actually able to wrap their heads around such complex design tasks – and I don’t know to what extent they seem to be able to get into anything at all. I as a kind of person, who knows his way around a spatial design problem or two, I do know perfectly well, that to trully represent many designs, it is not enough just to model and present the proposed ‘Object’ you have to build,… because in fairness, you have to represent the entire picture – the context, into which this development is going to land. The trouble, is that your developer consortium doesn’t want you looking beyong the immediate boundaries. And with the advent of computer graphics visualisation nowadays, which ‘appear’ to present the reality of what will get built – alas – that elusive ‘Fourth’ dimension doesn’t translate through these CG renderings at all. Which is all the more reason CG renders are so popular amongst the developers I fear. I think, the Stillorgan centre renders presented only, what the developers want you to see – when it is plain as a pike-staff out there on the ground, what the real problems are. The same faith fell to Moore Street, which lost it’s chance to gain a suitable entrance space, at the corner with Parnell Street. If you really look at it, you see a pattern emerging all over the city. The planners obviously aren’t able to grasp the spatial subtleties of the various sites either – and something tells me, that developer consortiums have twigged onto this, and have exploited that.

The extent of the definition of spatial design problems, in planning applications is seldom large enough – especially for crucial sites, where doing the right thing has impact on the whole surrounding area. The problem with villages like Stillorgan is repeated all over Dublin City as far as I can see. The only problem is that our spatial planning and design tradition in this country has just been too weak over the years to contribute anything to the debate now. The profession seemingly run by too many old folks, who would rather a quiet evening in their back garden talking to their plants, rather than exert themselves to deal with the actual issues. In relation to Grafton Street, which excludes the automobile altogether, this idea of having armies of pedestrians marching up and down to their own drum beat, supposedly in the name of high street commerce. Dublin City Council seem to be unable any longer, to put that idea back into it’s box – it has escaped – and is totally out of control. It has just gathered it’s own momentum down through the years, as if some ‘bottom-up’ intelligence, in the form of pedestrians were somehow getting back at the automobile for all of the years of suppression. I really think DCC needs to put the lid back on this box, and put a pile of bricks firmly on the lid. The pedestrianisation of Grafton St., was a pretty mess they created, except they are unable to admit that now. I challenge anyone to fairly say, they can ‘walk’ up through Grafton Street on any busy shopping day – and enjoy that experience – I challenge anyone. Total separation of car and pedestrian just tries to solve the issue, by separating the two things altogether – in other words, you avoid dealing with it. In terms of a ‘solution’, total separation is just the lowest common denominator, the lowest rung on the ladder. But heh, we have a long history in the spatial design tradition here of doing just precisely that. As warped and chaotic as they may seem, I actually ‘like’ places like Stillorgan village and even streets like Dame Street here in Dublin. They still represent to me, a problem waiting to be tackled properly and given the attention and care it really does deserve.

Brian O’ Hanlon.