Public Spaces
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Current edition of The Architectural Review (April 2001) features new public spaces in London
One of them is a simple relaying of cobbles in the courtyard of Somerset House with inset fountains. From the picture the quality of the work far surpasses the quality of any of the ‘new’ Dublin spaces like Temple Bar Square or Smithfield Civic Plaza (I use the phrase Civic Plaza loosely)
Another which could have been better presented with more photos is Royal Victoria Square in the London Docklands – it has canpies and structures with help contain the space unlike the aforementioned Dublin spaces.
There is also a feature on squares and spaces in Hengelo in Holland.
I just feel looking at these (and as some people here will know, I am not a particular fan of the Smithfield Plaza due to its very poor workmanship, and the windswept design that everyone skirts around rather than walks across) that we in Dublin and elsewhere in ireland are getting poor designs and reinterpretations of public spaces.
I know from at home in Monaghan, the response to a square (of which the town has four) is to cobble or cover it in concrete setts, no attempt to add new elements. Or as at Smithfield, when there is an amazing cobbled surface with an intricate herringbone pattern, it is removed and relaid destroying the original plane opf the space. When local authorities in Ireland do introduce new elements they’re usually quite poorly executed. Does anyone know how the space in Kilkenny is coming along?
We’re just missing a huge opportunity to reinterpret these spaces now (when we have the finance, otherwise we’re going to be stuck with poor quality public spaces for the next 20-30 years before the time to redevelop them comes around again.
It will be interesting to see if the new park at Jervis Street is an improvement on previous attempts of recent years to design a public space. I have actually photographed the Smithfield Plaza to show all the poor workmanship of it and intend posting it up to archeire.com is the coming few weeks.
Incidentally I hope that when Leinster lawn is reintroduced they give us back access from teh Natural History Museum to the National Gallery across it.
The Somerset House courtyard project is all the more important, given that for as long as anyone could remember it had been a Tarmacked car park for civil servants. Getting rid of the cars was even more of a coup than the relaively subtle reinstatement of the surface – which is now invisibly serviced not only with the fountain mechanisms but with power etc for open-air performances.
Last winter they put a temporary ice rink there, too. Amazing to think that until very recently this was a completely forgotten urban set piece.
There seemed to be lots of nice squares and public open spaces in The Netherlands when I visited it recently.
All of them heavily used by pedestrians, shoppers, people sitting outside cafes and bars eating and drinking, and even small amounts of car traffic were allowed around one or more edges of the squares.I was very interested to see the effort made to pave the squares (and many streets e.g. Delft) with bricks and stone in different settings e.g. Herringbone and lots of other styles i’ve never seen before! Note, the type of brick I commonly saw used in street paving and older buildings was narrower and possibly longer than the type you usually find in Ireland and Britain.
Even the average street in some of their town and city centres were enjoyable open space with little or no car traffic.
Click onto the links below (from the International Lighting Review) to see some depressingly nice photos of European squares lit up at night –
http://www.eur.lighting.philips.com/ilr/ilr982/return.shtml
http://www.eur.lighting.philips.com/ilr/ilr982/public.shtml
http://www.eur.lighting.philips.com/ilr/ilr982/tool.shtml
http://www.eur.lighting.philips.com/ilr/ilr982/square.shtmlDARA
ALL LINKS above and below are WORTH LOOKING AT!
More links to pictures of urban spaces (during the day) around the world. The first one below is of Parc Andre Citroen in Paris, it shows that in many ways the French don’t do things to their built environment in half measures!
http://www2.rudi.net/cs/paris/parc.htm#Picture
http://www2.rudi.net/cs/barcelona/barim06.htm
http://www2.rudi.net/cs/sydney/syd_mapl.htm#pics
http://www2.rudi.net/cs/bmingham/bham_pic.htmlThe last link I’ve thrown in here has a rake of pictures of the Guggenheim Museum and a couple of pics of works in Bilbao by Foster (Metro entrance) and Santiago Calatrava (a bridge).
http://www2.rudi.net/cs/bilbao/bilbao01.htmWhat are peoples opinions of above? Worth emulating? Will O’Connell Street for example, compare in a few years?
The Parc Andre Citroen is all very impressive but somehow doesnt seem urban – more like a heavily landscaped Phoenix Park. The Birmingham projects all seem heavily retro with their street furniture. Barcelona is Barcelona, real style and pizzazz, maybe its the sunshine that makes public spaces look better and work better. Bilbao looks well too, is it the taller building enclosing the space? Does low rise sprawl engender public spaces or does it make everything feel like a wide roadway?
I just saw photographs of Place des Terreaux in Lyon which seems like an interesting way to resurface a square with parking underneath, although I wasn’t overly struck on the materials. This is what we need to do to College Green in Dublin. Whilst down there today for the Patricks Festival, you realise what a decent space it is without cars and surrounded by imposing banks, buildings and Trinity College. It should be a priority of the Corporation to funnel traffic underground through the area.
Does anybody agree that the lack of “camperile” building in the Smithfield complex is going to make the place seem more like a bleak wide road, rather than a public space?
I agree that College Green is an impressive public space wasted to traffic, but I amn’t sure bury the road is a good idea. My understanding of the Macken road Calatrava bridge and of the dto’s general plan, is that it is intended to drastically reduce the traffic coming around Trinity and up O’Connell Street, so, in the future there will be much less traffic through College Green, allowing it to be developed as a public space. Sometimes getting rid of traffic altogether is a bad idea, it makes the enviroment less urban.
To my mind Shop Street in Galway, for example, might be better if there was still one lane of traffic down it, perhaps with Cross Street pedestrianized instead.
Cars might be only a century old, but vehicle traffic is rather older. Accounts of traffic congestion, noise and pollution in European cities go back centuries.
Which might be an argument in favour of not pedestrianising totally. I’m inclined to agree that some traffic movement brings life to a city. It also makes certain areas safer from street crime.
But to come back to the start of this topic -there’s no doubt that there are areas, such as the Somerset House courtyard in London, which are not thoroughfares but which had just become littered with parked cars. To remove the cars from such urban set pieces and return them to convivial pedestrian use seems to me to be utterly sensible.
And of course if there are fewer places to park, then – at least in theory – traffic volumes through cities might reduce to more tolerable levels anyway. But perhaps this is an over-pious hope.
Sure, my remark only applied to College Green, or, say O’Connell Street, where it is hoped to reduce traffic drastically, enough to make the street pedestrian dominated, without pedestrianizing it completely. A surface car park in a city is a waste and some public spaces are better without cars at all.
Are’nt all the images supplied by DaraH of public spaces,(plaza, campus, piazza etc….) quite attractive. The use of public sculpture, street furniture, lighting, water features and the planting of vegetation to soften the hard landscaping all adds greatly as well as having some fine buildings as a backdrop. We here should take a leaf from the book of examples worldwide!
Maybe that’s what Smithfield needs.[This message has been edited by GregF (edited 24 May 2001).]
The Good Place Guide
Urban Design in Britain and IrelandMay be of interest to people
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&postid=10888#post10888
Trust me on this one, the problem with urban open spaces and parks in this country is not due to the lack of trying on the part of several very good landscape architecture firms here in your country. It is due to the lack of funding given over to the exterior environment portion of all projects that occur here, and the lack of understanding on the parts of city officials and in many cases architects who cannot look past the building architecture to see what is being offered to them.
Why should we trust you Greenarch? Just curious to know what experiences you’ve had on this – I don’t doubt that what you say is true.
Also, Paul, higher up on this thread, which is many moons ago, you said you were going to put together a package of photos of Smithfield to show the bad workmanship.
Did you ever do that? Will be down there tonight and have seen small problems myself before. Just wondering what you think the worst elements of it are.
I think the reason, however, that people hug the outskirts rather than walk across Smithfield is because it is incomplete on the West Side. I find it hard to reach a final judgement on the plaza until the old Duffy’s scrapyard is actually completed. They seem to be working fast there BTW. A lot of foundation work already complete.What do you mean about ‘reintroducing’ Leinster Lawn Paul? Is the car park to be removed? Please say yes.
The other side of Leinster House shold also be dealt with, the railings removed from outside, and the whole plaza area originally intended opened back up again. The sweeping colonnades of the Ntl Library & Museum are spectacular, but utterly lost behind all those ghastly railings to the sides, and the nicer (but nonetheless intrusive) Victorian railings to the front. It should be given back to the people, and some creative job done on the ‘landscaping’.
The Leinster Lawn carpark was supposed to be temporary – hence its professional finish. The plan is for an underground carpark. The Lawn will then be reinstated and I believe the same applies to the concourse at the ‘city’ side.
As it is part of the same project which incollves renovating Kildare House on K St we should see some action soon.Oh really? How exciting! Any more info?
I doubt the railings & ‘sentry boxes’ will be moved though, considering their ‘Victorianess’, and the railings that go down the sides have only just been installed.leinster lawn…..as mentioned earlier, it is proposed to have a 3 story underground carpark on the south side of the main building with the ‘reinstatement’ of the historic lawns to be completed afterwards…however, since we are talking about a roof deck, and considering the government has decided that they will not spend excessive amounts of money to upgrade the structure of the carpark so that it can withstand heavy loading, we will be left with a ‘GREAT’ lawn, when we could have had something quite nice….do expect some of the mature trees to come down as well….which is also a pity…..as it stands, the expectation is that the lawn will be given back to the people as full access is supposed to be the plan…..however, a new gate will be created closer to the house. On the city side the 15 foot high metal fences/barriers are supposed to come out…?????? that is still being discussed….the cars will definitely be removed, as well as the raised ‘plinth’ area that currently sits in the middle of that space..I feel that is unfortunate and I know that the new design tried to spare it, the plinth, not the cars…I think it is an intergral piece in that area, with a fair bit of history (albeit short) but it does help contain views to the front of the house and although it does not relate directly to the other buildings, it could have been a nice center piece for the new plaza space…..as far as I know, the security huts are meant to be removed and access to the public allowed in….that is still being decided…..hopefully in the end the politicians will stick to their guns and we will see some attractive spaces framing some of our most important and visited buildings.
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