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@Frank Taylor wrote:
In any case, the political war is over. Now the planning war and then the funding war. I disagree that the building will detract from the area.
I could post many examples of how that type of cladding degrades over time; however I will just leave you with the proposals clear destruction of St George’s, an utterly sublime 18th century church that has been restored to the highest standards. On that image alone the scheme should be refused; if your view of the area is so low, why did you live there?
@Frank Taylor wrote:
Back to parking for a second: From talking to staff at the Mater, there is virtually no staff parking provided on site. Instead, the hospital rents a car park from Dalymount Park in Phibsborough. Staff pay a hefty fee for usage. Obviously this presents a large incentive to staff not to drive to work. There is some visitor parking on Eccles St but not much.
As would terminating the arrangement at Dalymount and letting the market value the demand value of individual car-space offered to all and sundry.
@Frank Taylor wrote:
Anyhow, the new building containing a&e, theatres and wards is due to open early next year and comes with 440 underground spaces and 350 above ground. I don’t know how these spaces are to be divided between staff and patients. The national childrens hospital comes with 972 spaces to be divided 3:1 in favour of visitors/staff.
The new building comprising the Mater Hospital; the proposal to hijack the Maters future development potential as an adult hospital must also be considered; if you fill the site with childrens wards then the Mater can not expand their own campus over time. A very short sighted idea.
@Frank Taylor wrote:
I don’t believe that making it easier for staff to drive to work will improve the area or prevent lardy matron syndrome.
That said, I can imagine that parking provision was a primary driver for staff acceptance of these redevelopments.
I don’t disagree that it is likely that staff peace was bought with parking privilages; medical staff like all others must go to market to get parking unless the hospital is in area that is relatively remote. I believe moving this to the Docklands would see far more sustainable commuting patterns via Luas and or overground into Spencer Dock or the cycle network; a relocation down there would really encourage completion of S2S.
@Frank Taylor wrote:
It will add a sense of place. I used to live on Nelson street. I doubt my quality of life would have been disimproved by having a spaceship hospital at the end of the street vista.
You could argue that any tall structure adds a sense of place; you cannot argue against this disrupting a number of important vistas that have a good sense of balance. The principle of gateway always involves tall slender structures; this is a mid rise whale which was only designed with the intention of cramming a pre-determined floorspace into an unsuitable site; you can’t blame the architects for anything other than advising unrealistic expectations. The Shard or Alta Vetro it isn’t.
@Frank Taylor wrote:
Perhaps the building could be made smaller if they removed some of the 972 parking spaces they have planned.
The income from parking will pay for the operation of all the public open and internal recreational space at the site; parking at this location would conservatively net €2m-€3m a year; it is also required from people travelling from unconnected towns such as say Ballinrobe or Blacklion; you would get lost trying to find this ill conceived proposal from the Ilac or Parnell Centre if it weren’t so out of scale.
@Frank Taylor wrote:
Holles Stret has zero spaces for patients and so does the Rotunda. That seems to work.
Funding is tight and from doubts expressed as to the need for this quantum of floor space by some people one can only conclude a certain element of this hospital will be given over to private operations being carried out on non-national patients that do not have access to top quality procedures in their own domiciles. If that is the case it makes sense, this country has a strong position in healthcare and this could be a great way of subsidising the Irish healthcare system and providing top level employment.
One of the biggest failures of the Late Late Government was to send everyone in the audience to the UK to get procedures done instead of building excess capacity in Ireland. Be a world leader in this field and you win a lot of influential friends; just build the facility somewhere where future growth can be accomodated and does not obliterate the area it surrounds…..
Anywhere in the city would suit me. The recommendations from their two international experts reports (one commissioned by Harney, the other by Reilly) were the same: that the children’s hospital should be built next to a major teaching hospital. Presumably they considered Vincents and James. The IFSC has the o2 experience and the r2d2 centre – not a major teaching hospital. Reilly had opposed the siting of the hospital but couldn’t ignore both reports.
North Docks are 15 mins walk from the back of TCD; and 10-15 minutes drive from either Vincents, Beamount and the Mater; Crumlin is a fair distance from St James’ Hospital. There is as you will accept a real difference between adult medicine and paediatrics which is a family of specialties each in their own right. This is a two question equation, is the site the right one from a logistical viewpoint and can the site accomodate the quantum of floorspace required in compliance with the principles of sustainable development. In any event the Docklands as a location would be served by Luas and have an almost direct connection to the motorway network and port tunnel for Dublin Airport and patients/organs/bloods being transfered by plane; the Mater has a Metro that is 25-50 years away and how many traffic lights this side of Whitehall Church?
A quaint little red brick road. Can you imagine this being proposed in Dublin 6? Haha – the very notion is hilarious. But on the northside, who gives a toss? None of the consultants involved in bringing this behemoth into being live within a five mile radius of it.
Outside St. George’s Church, it can’t even fit in the frame.
All courtesy and copyright Graham HickeyLandsdowne Road is a mix of late Victorian houses i.e. one of the last phases of the Pembroke Estate and mid 20th century commercial buildings of mixed to dubious quality. St Georges Church is a real gem and does not need to have whats left of its context destroyed. It is not credible to argue that this elevated site can accomodate this development in a sustainable manner. Build it 30 floors high in docklands but 16 storeys plus plant at this location is gross over development.
Frank
There are key differences between the Aviva and this.
1. The Aviva could by having one end taken down to a lower height protect all rights of light
2. The Aviva is far more remote from a Georgian Core
3. The Aviva site is far from elevated indeed flood risk was a live consideration.
4. The Aviva was plugged in to an actual live piece of transport infrastructure
5. There were no other sites capable of taking the Aviva at a city centre location; land values were at the time Aviva in Wonderland.Your entire argument is predicated on a premise that because this is inside the canals/M50 that it is acceptable; that you have made this argument surprises and disapoints me; why could this not go into North Wall, maybe some good could after all come out of the Anglo Hulk that gets too much unwanted attention, no shortage of other land down there to link into or if not big enough the Merchants Gate site is certainly more than big enough to accomodate this.
The plant room 16 commercial storeys or equivelent to 20 resdiential storeys up would be a great site for mobile phone transmitters; no doubt there would be great interest. :clap:
Who did those residents think they were buying 2 storey houses in Leo Street and renovating them and calling them home; many of them in negative equity for the next 15 years, lets finish their chances of ever getting their money back by placing the last but biggest monument to the we can do anything anywhere tiger in their back yard and obliterate their natural light, destroy their streetscape and show them that properties like theirs were always meant to be damp flats for recently qualified nurses from Ballydehob.
There are so many sites in Nama that could accomodate the floorspace requirement this scheme brings; some of these sites even have enough extra space for additional floorspace for the major pharmas to lease space for research and development operations that could be transformative for their sector and the country’s leading role in that sector. Why would anyone possibly want to build a flagship project on the wrong site; so wrong that the head of oversight has publicly said so and even considered an edge city site; why was a NAMA site in the docklands not weighed up?
@GrahamH wrote:
Charming Nelson Street, with little more than half the proposed building in view.
A quaint little red brick road. Can you imagine this being proposed in Dublin 6? Haha – the very notion is hilarious. But on the northside, who gives a toss? None of the consultants involved in bringing this behemoth into being live within a five mile radius of it.
Outside St. George’s Church, it can’t even fit in the frame.
Forgive my cynical eye, but the eight-storey block to the immediate left of the existing Mater Private red brick block is supposed to be twice the height of the four-storey block fronting Eccles Street, yet looks nothing like this. Mentally scale up the four-storey block to eight storeys and one gets a much truer sense of the scale of this development.
One can only take these photomontages with a large grain of salt. Firstly, as static images can never truly capture the scale of development when experienced on the ground in the here and now, and secondly as, at the very least selective views are taken, and perspective trickery involved in presenting vistas.This cannot be repeated often enough…………………..
Re-work Nelson Street!!!!
The only rework you could undertake would remove 25% of the floor space and thus not perform its function as a National Childrens Hospital; a project many regard as key to delivery of continued excellence in life sciences. This is just is the wrong site.
If it is this crammed day 1 where do future extensions go?
Where do the ancillary businesses and research institutes go?
Put the lot in the docklands and allow the further development of the countries biggest industry where the key players can participate fully in development of pioneering techniques that make children better.
As for Leo Street it is quaint and is a great example of the Victorians prioritising higher density development where the transport infrastructure existed to serve it….
@PVC King wrote:
@gunter wrote:
There’s not much point in us banging the drum for urbanism and then demand that significant new buildings make no impact.
No-one is saying for second that particular sites are not suited to making statements; buildings like the Guinness Storehouse have made a great contribution. However the location of the statement must be made from an appropriate site; this proposal can only be described as a heckler in the position of its attempted statement.
@gunter wrote:
As distinct from the recently proposed shopping centre on the Carlton site, a new national institution of this importance should make an impact on the cityscape, it should be a landmark.
No argument that it should be permitted to make a statement; however in the context of a significant development land surplus where the government has urban land coming out its eyeballs why would one select a site where at least 4 distinct styles are required to cram the quantum of required space into a site that is just too small.
@gunter wrote:
I agree with Graham and PVC that there are aspects of the design that do not looked resolved and the podium blocks are a pretty muddled montage of familiar fare, seemingly including a swatch of Dublin-Airport-1970, and I don’t think the balance between the base and the curvy upper block is right, but apart from that and the indecision about the facade treatment, I’d be broadly in favour of the way the scheme is shaping up, and totally in favour of the location.
To come back to Rumple’s comparison with Stephenson’s Central Bank conceived in the early 1970’s; firstly Stephensons design was based on a strong single style, it was based on a single fashion, it was slender (not as slender after its height reduction), involved a very low site coverage percentage, provided a lot of public open space.
This proposal in contrast has been selected purely on the basis that the land was there and despite Nama drowning in Liam Carrolls extensive holdings it seems to have been selected based on its proximity to the axed Metro North project.
Break this proposal back to first principles of planning, i.e. appropriate development of any site and you could not select a more inappropriate design for such a constrained site.
Graham Hickey wrote:Charming Nelson Street, with little more than half the proposed building in view.A quaint little red brick road. Can you imagine this being proposed in Dublin 6? Haha – the very notion is hilarious. But on the northside, who gives a toss? None of the consultants involved in bringing this behemoth into being live within a five mile radius of it.
Outside St. George’s Church, it can’t even fit in the frame.
Gunther your comments on the above 3 images on planning grounds is awaited.
@gunter wrote:
There’s not much point in us banging the drum for urbanism and then demand that significant new buildings make no impact.
No-one is saying for second that particular sites are not suited to making statements; buildings like the Guinness Storehouse have made a great contribution. However the location of the statement must be made from an appropriate site; this proposal can only be described as a heckler in the position of its attempted statement.
@gunter wrote:
As distinct from the recently proposed shopping centre on the Carlton site, a new national institution of this importance should make an impact on the cityscape, it should be a landmark.
No argument that it should be permitted to make a statement; however in the context of a significant development land surplus where the government has urban land coming out its eyeballs why would one select a site where at least 4 distinct styles are required to cram the quantum of required space into a site that is just too small.
@gunter wrote:
I agree with Graham and PVC that there are aspects of the design that do not looked resolved and the podium blocks are a pretty muddled montage of familiar fare, seemingly including a swatch of Dublin-Airport-1970, and I don’t think the balance between the base and the curvy upper block is right, but apart from that and the indecision about the facade treatment, I’d be broadly in favour of the way the scheme is shaping up, and totally in favour of the location.
To come back to Rumple’s comparison with Stephenson’s Central Bank conceived in the early 1970’s; firstly Stephensons design was based on a strong single style, it was based on a single fashion, it was slender (not as slender after its height reduction), involved a very low site coverage percentage, provided a lot of public open space.
This proposal in contrast has been selected purely on the basis that the land was there and despite Nama drowning in Liam Carrolls extensive holdings it seems to have been selected based on its proximity to the axed Metro North project.
Break this proposal back to first principles of planning, i.e. appropriate development of any site and you could not select a more inappropriate design for such a constrained site.
Inappropriate and at times jumbled; taking the view up Eccles Street the four storey section with set back is not bad and with the stucco section at the end of the image this would not look out of place in Victoria. I do however share Graham’s concerns that the image most certainly does not convey the bulk and massing of an 8 storey structure; let alone one that goes to mid teens next to a residential street.
You are right however that in trying to cram as much as is possible into the site it is completely inappropriate that it does use far more styles than are optimum.
The style of the lower level is very much back into fashion of late; there a real good late 1960’s example of this style just off Rue de Rennes in Paris with superb detailing; this style is popping up all over the place in urban infill over the last couple of years, if the finishes are good it is one of the few designs that looks better out of the ground than in fantasy montage. The upper section is I concede a little gimmicky. The real point here is that this building is designed in a manner that has no respect for its context and simply seeks to cram as much floor space as is possible into a site that is severly constrained.
I don’t agree with BTW that it is ugly but you do have to ask the question how can cliffs of corporate style glass in a predominently residential area be considered in any way appropriate? A project on this scale needs to go where the sites are; docklands; every piece of office development land taken out of the pipeline increases the value of the rest….
There is a big difference between ugly and inappropriate; this proposal is clearly inappropriate to its context but in the right setting it is not ugly; it is a large scale urban hospital that is not dissimilar to a lot of office projects getting built in functional office markets.
This project was part of a wider agenda to make Metro North stack up by siting every available project along its catchment; now that Metro North has been shelved this project lacks the transport infrastructure to service the staffing levels. I suggest the project be moved to Upper Sherriff Street which is on a Luas Line and where Nama have extensive holdings and as Luas has a one interchange position with both major National Rail lines and the soon to be joined up Luas Green line.
It is not an ugly design; it just doesn’t fit onto the site and the site is simply too elevated for a number of key vistas, take the view from the Spire; roughly 1/3 of its bulk is visable, why has the bulk nt been shifted aroung the site to protect that vista?
Taking the view from St George’s even shifting the bulk around it is going to have significant impacts; it is further noted that none of the suspended access equipment is displayed on the montages; are the windows going to be cleaned by abseilers?
The country needs a childrens hospital; why isn’t one of the significant NAMA sites in the North Docklands being used; Liam Carroll might after all have left the country something of value in public infrastructure terms. This design would actually look good on a sea level flat brownland site, if they showed it in true detail.
End of line for Metro as €25m of property rented out
Saturday August 06 2011
PROPERTIES bought as part of a €150m spending spree in preparation for Metro North are being rented out instead of demolished in a clear indication the project is doomed.
Rail chiefs spent €25m buying up properties on the ill-fated rail route, an Irish Independent investigation has found.
But most of the houses are being rented out in a clear sign the project will be scrapped.
The Railway Procurement Agency (RPA) spent €200,000 on refurbishing and maintaining the houses in the strongest indication yet that the Metro North project will be shelved.
The Government is expected to announce this decision in the autumn, due to the estimated final cost of the project which has been put at €2.5bn.
Documents obtained by the Irish Independent reveal the RPA’s multi-million euro expenditure on Metro North, with most of the costs relating to the disastrous property purchases and large payments to consultancy companies.
Eleven houses near Croke Park, close to the city centre, were bought two years ago, along with the Catholic Institute for the Deaf.
All the properties are in Drumcondra, the political heartland of former Fianna Fail Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, and were to be demolished to make way for the construction of a new Metro station.
Premium prices were paid even though the property market had crashed.
Predictions
The purchases went ahead a full year before planning permission for the Metro project was granted by An Bord Pleanala in October 2010.
The project had been pushed hard by former Transport Minister Noel Dempsey, who at the time refuted predictions that the project would be shelved.
An RPA spokesman defended the purchase of the properties in advance of planning permission for the Metro.
He said the RPA had been sensitive to the needs of the owners in acquiring new accommodation.
Some of these properties are now worth less than half what was paid for them and the RPA has been forced to rent out many of then in a bid to recoup some cash from the purchases.
Four terraced houses on St Alphonsus Avenue were bought for between €623,000 and €661,000.
A similar house on the road is on the market with an asking price of €270,000.
Eight of the the properties are now being let by the RPA while two others are on the rental market. But so far the agency has only taken in rent of €62,000 — after spending €200,000 on refurbishment.
Transport Minister Leo Varadkar last night lashed out at the ” shortsighted and reckless policy ” of the last government in spending massive amounts of money on planning such projects “without being sure that the money would be in place to construct them”.
Almost €200m has already been spent on planning and preparatory work for Metro North, the DART underground, and the link-up of the two disconnected Luas lines in the city centre.
The RPA has now been ordered to “rein in” spending on planning and preparatory works for major public transport projects.
“The last government decided to spend huge amounts of money planning road and rail projects without being sure that the money would be in place to construct them.”
The Fianna Fail-Green coalition was aware of and signed off on the €150m planning expenditure on the Metro and the purchase of the property portfolio, according to the Department of Transport.
The Drumcondra properties were all purchased by mutual agreement, and the compulsory purchase system was not employed.
“The cottages will have to be demolished, but not just yet,” the RPA spokesman insisted.
But he added that even if the Metro project did not proceed in the near future the houses were in a “much sought after area of Drumcondra”.
The new tenants are aware that the houses will be demolished if Metro North is ever built.
– Treacy Hogan
Your timing is perfect; MN will be formally shelved within weeks. The RPA should be culled; doing off market CPO work without planning consent is suicidal behaviour in my book. But as always with the RPA its only taxpayers money……
@Paul cuddy wrote:
I cannot see any halifax shopfront in the picture, so maybe you could dig it out and post it and even if there was one there, why would I want to comment as it was not the topic, the topic was the MCD shopfront, you are hell bent on talking about everything else other than the topic.
Look at the image again; the bus stop sign is standard Helifax; where goes bus stop goes so goes larger version facia. The Navy used by this dysfunctional bank is darker than that of the thoroughly sensitive olive green with gold inserts.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
I will be in galway this week and I will take a picture of a few for you, then maybe you might have a bite to eat there.
Restrict any examples to the upper end of Shop Street as rental values will have fallen off a cliff 100m down.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
@PVC wrote:
Retail pods in industrial estates don’t do Class A office cladding; stop digging.
e- galzing windows have outstripped all other glazing in both the commercial and domestic sector, that info is direct from the source, one of Irelands biggest glazing manufacturers. And again we are not on about industrial estates, we were discussing streets with significant architecture. You should start digging in the right direction.
Paul cuddy wrote:
“Mc donalds and all fast food outlets belong in industrial estates accessed off major roundabouts, they are not for the high street. Any building that uses its shop front as an ever evolving advertising portal does not belong in an area of architectural significance. “Advertising is not the issue at that location; A metro pole scale advert is worth €30k at that location; they are paying c £200k -£250k rent; I’ve not doubt it makes money for them or they would not be there.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
@PVC wrote:
No I drew that fact from years of experience dealing with prime retailers and refusing consent for inapproriate signage.
I am sorry, but with the greatest of respect, that does not make you an authority on global planning departments
Second guessing planning departments from a risk averse position like MCD has obviously saved them abortive fees in Bath; the way you are talking you would think they got turned over. You can have the last word on this – why don’t you have a go at Bath for allowing MCD to assist their retail mix with a food offer that increases dwell time and spend and as a result retail vibrancy.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
You cannot argue that every colour has the same impact, obviously the lighter colours will impact less with a light building. That shop front is solely about visual impact.
The Helifax shopfront next door is darker yet you have no comment on that one; you need to stop digging.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
There are individually owned businesses across the country on prime streets providing food. Your info does not stack up with the facts.
Not at those rental levels; name one food business at ground floor on Grafton St, Henry St or Patrick St in Cork other than MCD, Burger King or Starbucks that is not owner occupied. The small local businesses you refer to can’t pay the rent; it might work in Ballaghadreen or Trowbridge but it doesn’t in Bath.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
e-glazing – trombe walls – concrete floors, great for heat generation and retention.
Retail pods in industrial estates don’t do Class A office cladding; stop digging.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
“One of the most protective planning departments globally” did you draw that fact from the same website that told you about the less than 10 food outlets. :thumbup:
No I drew that fact from years of experience dealing with prime retailers and refusing consent for inapproriate signage.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
PVC “Real demand being mixed in terms of price point is obviously beyond you; not all units can be filled by Brown Thomas.”
Make the point, leave out the arrogance. To suggest that MCDS or other fast food outlets are the only companies that can offer a price mix, is just not true. There are countless small businesses who can offer cheap healthy food from an urban sensitive shop and do so in prime locations.The location has an ITZA of about £250 – £350 a square foot; there are less than 10 food offers that can make money at that level; other than Nero none of them have a more sensitive shopfront. No other operator in this quality of environment comes close to MCD on price.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
“This is their urban branding; how anyone can attack those colours is beyond me; so to the shopfronts thread if you want a justified whinge; Ronald is now a bunch of fund managers who want sales growth, sales growth is only maximised by their playing the planning game which they and Starbucks are the only International food retailers who get planning as a formality.”
Colours themselves do not make a shop front sensitive, you cannot just pick olive and gold and decide, job well done. It is all about how they integrate into the existing building. The colours are in stark contrast to the existing building, which is good for visual impact and branding but not for the streetscape. The olive is dark and coarse which aggressively interrupts the gentle light colours of the existing building. This takes all the emphasis off the beautiful architecture and places it on the commercial outlet. I feel you are just looking at a sharp neat shop front and are not considering it in context.
As for the rest of the argument, I cannot really see the relevance, you go on about the business model a lot, but that is not really what this is about.It is completely about the strengths of their business model and the uniqueness of them being able to trade locations that are almost exclusively reserved for comparison retail such as clothing or mobile phone shops. Any colour will have some level of impact a material as plain as Portland stone; look at the Helifax sign for the adjoining unit; that equally contrasts as it is Compare this signage to that of Burger King on OCS which as ground floor to another mono-tone stone upper and this shopfront is light years ahead.
@Paul cuddy wrote:
As for the glass, not entirely true about the higher energy requirements but anyway I was being hypothetical to help express a point.
U-vales of glass are inferior to almost any other cladding material; unlike the shopfront which has secured consent from one of the most protective planning departments globally. That they saw fit to grant consent on their main retail pitches is as clear a validation of the design quality of this shopfront which is used in numerous locations.
