Public Spaces

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.shtml

DARA

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.html

The 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.htm

What 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?

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.

so cars = urban?
Cars are only a hundred years old – whats wrong with removing them completely?

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).]

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.

you have know reason to TRUST me Kefu……just trying to give you an educated answer…..you can choose to believe me or not. I work very closely on many of the projects that are mentioned in this thread….and I know how the process works….landscape design budgets dissapear as building budgets increase…..its a fact of life in Dublins design scene…not to mention that senior architects in the OPW make the final decisions on ALL the public open spaces in your city….I don’t know why an architect is in this position…..You may choose to beleive it or not, but landscape architecture is a very important component in our built environment….and there are many highly trained and professional people trying to get that message accross……at this point many people are too nieve or ignorant to accept that….at the very least I would expect an educated person to at least try and understand that….. I find that it is a real shame that people don’t understand the relationship between the interior and exterior environments…..I am sure that I don’t have to tell you that many of the most successful examples of architecture do not sit alone on barren sites….their is usually a very tight and coherant and exciting relationship between the building and the landscape….so much so that in many cases you probably do not notice it…..which is why I say trust me, because I can see it…and I can see why people talk negatively about public spaces in this city….how can we expect to create succesful public spaces when most people making the decisions on how to design them don’t know what those are?

But thats just my point of view…..

I agree totally. Even the very finest of buildings in this country, both old & new are often offset with the most basic, indeed often non-existant landscaping. Its always dealt with as a mere after-thought and is simply unacceptable. It cannot be overstated the importance of well designed public spaces and well thought-out hard & soft landscaping.

Greenarch, do you know when these works are scheduled to begin? I can’t belive this is being proposed! At last! All railings to the front of Leinster House must be removed in order for the plan to work, and I think the plinth should go as well, although paving following the line of it should be laid in its place. It has always been a national disgrace that those ghastly 60s benches and crappy concrete plant basins have been kept on top of the plinth, leading to the entrance of the national parliament building. A suitable home should also be found for the cut stone sentry boxes and the Victorian railings & piers.

Presumably though, nothing will be completed for Ireland’s hosting of the EU presidency next year, when all state institutions & the capital as a whole should be looking its best.

It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you greenarch. All I wanted to know was what perspective you were coming from.