Andrew Duffy
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You should visit this site:
Skyscrapers aren’t that great in dense European cities, unless they’re in planned areas like La Defense or Canary Wharf. Of course, our docklands is a planned area, but the likes of Sinn Fein’s Daithi Doolan ensure that the docks will remain a few hundred acres with the same amount of office space as a single building in London.
Who originally made up that “fact”, I wonder? The Jefferson Davis monument in Kentucky is the second tallest in the USA, and is much taller, at 351 feet, than the Wellington monument. I’m sure there are other tall obelisks around the world as well, since they are related to the obsession with pyramids and illuminati various wealthy people have subscribed to over the ages (have a look at a dollar bill if you get the chance).
…or the About the House one:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2073
It must be the weather for televised conversion projects.
You might want to check out the Grand Designs thread:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2052
I wouldn’t compare the Blackhall Place bridge with the Boyne bridge either. But the proposed Macken Street bridge is an example of a “different-looking” cable-stayed bridge. It’s about the same scale (80m) as the LUAS bridge at Taney aswell.
You can’t really do much with the appearance of a cable-stayed bridge. The three in Ireland all look very similar…
… however, the plan for the Macken Street cable-stayed bridge is very nice, so don’t feck Calatrava just yet (whatever fecking somebody involves – I’m not sure I want to know).
Incidentally, the third cable-stayed bridge is the footbridge over the M50 at knocklyon:
They’ve even stolen the javascript errors IE6 generates when you move the mouse over the left-hand menu…
Ah now. Come on.
If there is any problem publishing in advance, just delete this thread. Anyway, Here’s another:
http://www.mongelli2000.com/nicola/html2/u21.html
Not sure about that one.
The height line can be broken well though, so long as the building is high quality. The Clarence hotel opposite it is much higher than the buildings either side (and probably second only to the Central Bank in that area) but it looks well.
Still, I get a feeling that the proposed building won’t be high quality.
Here’s the Calatrave web pages to the bridges in Dublin and Murcia:
The page about the bridge in Murcia is confusing, since the first few pictures are of the Macken St. Bridge in Dublin. Scroll down and you see the Blackhall place bridge in Dublin… oh wait; no you don’t. The first pictures are in there by mistake but the second pictures are there correctly. The “triple bridge” bit is because the two pedestrian walkways are suspended either side of the road bridge.
However, the company is not that unethical. Here’s a photo of the Hospital Bridge in Murcia:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Galaxy/2208/hospital.html
Since Geocities is so bad, I’ve attached the picture as well.
So it looks like the bridge was designed for Murcia, lost the competition and was adapted for Dublin.
“the Irish way of building” – years late, millions over budget, dirty, badly executed and in breach of planning laws?
This is fun!
I’m pretty sure the most expensive total investment in a building in Ireland is Intel’s Fab 24 in Leixlip. From http://www.intel.com/community/ireland/aboutsite.htm:
“Work is underway on Irelands new semi-conductor wafer production facility, Fab 24. The $2 billion (€1.85 billion) investment programme will see the creation of more than 1,000 new jobs at the Leixlip site.”
I’m still guessing Citicorp is the most expensive normal building, but that if the cost of building the stately homes like Castletown House were known (rather than the cost of buying the building itself) some of them would be more expensive in today’s terms.
Oops – I made a mistake, it was 20% of budget, not GDP, so it would be equivalent to a project costing about €7-€8bn today. Of course, the government budget has increased at a faster rate than inflation since 1922. In terms of today’s purchasing power, £5.5m in 1922 is equivalent to about €250m today.
However, Moneypoint power station kicks the arse of all the buildings mentioned:
http://www.esb.ie/main/about_esb/power_stations.jsp
“It was constructed at a cost of more than £700m, in one of the largest capital projects in the history of the Irish State.”
This is useful:
http://www.eh.net/ehresources/howmuch/poundq.php
It would imply that Busaras cost about equivalent to £15-£20 million today.
The Citicorp building cost €100 million (according to the builders Pierse), making it a good candidate for Ireland’s most expensive.
@Paul – It was the total cost of the project. To put it in perspective, Ardnacrusha cost one-fifth of the state’s budget in 1925, equivalent to a project costing €20-€25 billion today.
Ardnacrusha electrical generating station was completed in 1929 at a cost of £5.5m. I’m not sure if it counts as a building, though.
