Devin
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Since it was unveiled I’ve felt that that new Ilac facade does not combine very well with Roches Stores, especially as you are approaching from Mary Street. I think the problem is that the canopy bit was carried along too far towards Roches.
I don’t know if there were any consistent terraces around there; it seems to mostly just a higgledy-piggledy variety of heights, widths and shapes – a bit like the Quays (were).
There’s an old stone underpass archway between No. 80 and No. 81, which you can see in the 1950s picture below. It’s obscured now by a big used car sales fascia. You can still see the uprights of the arch (see below) – it’s in the ‘Gibbsian’ style. If the buildings are to kept, this sign should be redesigned to show the arch.
.Or it could be because under-street services are located at the edge of the road, and the cobbles allow access to them without disrupting the tarmac.
Yes that extension is too much. It should in no way have come out flush with the house’s facade. That’s really quite shocking … the impact on the integrity of the house is huge …
I don’t recall this going through planning. Was it a Part X application?Yeah I suppose they wouldn’t have been quite so smooth when first laid 100 or more years ago, but, like anything of intrinsic quality, it gets better with age!
But that’s no excuse for awful cobbling in Temple Bar. The main problem seems to be that the setts are not laid closely enough together – the old ones are always tightly laid. It’s really an embarrassment given the 1000s that visit every day.The lifting and re-laying of Smithfield’s setts a few years ago, and the public space scheme in general, has been the subject of some criticism – see here for one: https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4352 – but the resulting sett surface (below) was an improvement over the shockingly bad Temple Bar surfaces (wouldn’t be difficult I suppose).
.I wouldn’t be too cynical about this development. While I would be critical of some aspects of it – namely the sheer scale of it and the scorched earth policy in regard to any remaining historic buildings on site (by contrast the development on the opposite side of the square retained and incorporated a plethora of historic buildings and other structures) – I would give it a chance. If Fresh’s fish is not selling yet it’s probably because people don’t know about it yet – It only opened the other week after all. Smithfield has been ‘about to happen’ for so long now that I am dying to see if it actually will happen, if this new development will provide the critical mass to create a vibrant area.
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Good picture of the fire in No. 80 King Street in that linked thread, Paul. I suppose there’s not much left inside it now!
The ‘accidental’ fire in a historic building – such a tiresome stunt. Another happened recently on the top two floors of an Aungier Street house, the one that used to be the hat shop, Coyle’s.This picture is from 2000, at the time the two small ones were being demolished behind the facades:
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Regarding the terrace of four in disrepair, it’s difficult to know what to do because they are quite bad – the two in the middle are just a front wall! Still (if restored) they would be a reminder of what so much of Dublin was once like. The one on the left supposedly still retains some features of note internally. All four are protected structures. If you wanted to demolish them you would probably have to go through the process of having them removed from the RPS first. It would probably be permitted in the case of the middle two, but not necessarily the other two.
There was a nice ambience of old Dublin at the top of Smithfield. When this pub (top picture) was demolished in 2003, I think it damaged that ambience. The pub – Bo Derrol’s – (a non-PS) was originally to have been retained within the big west side development, but they snuck in a demolition application at the last minute, with a report written by a “Conservation Architect” (who specialises in writing off old buildings – some of you will know him) saying the building wasn’t worth keeping and the Council went for it.
It was quite a good quality 19th century building, normally the type of building you would retain and repair. And it could have been easily kept within the huge site – it was just greediness that they wanted to get rid of it.
In some of the side streets off Smithfield you can still see the beautiful quality of setting/cobbling that Smithfield had before its setts were taken up and relaid circa 2000, like Haymarket, or Red Cow Lane (below).
Foot Locker were back open today after being looted. Schuh weren’t though.
There was a surprisingly ‘normal’ atmosphere on the street today all things considered.@Paul Clerkin wrote:
well that’s not the developer’s fault. that’s McGarry NiEanaigh’s who positioned the masts very far over to that edge of the square.
I don’t think they anticipated how big the west side scheme was going to be. It’s interesting to remember that when lamp brazier scheme was first proposed, the images of it circulated were of a b&w 1950s picture of the square with the new scheme superimposed over it, showing mostly 3 storey buildings in the background on the west side. But the HKR scheme is now about 3 times bigger than those buildings.
@phil wrote:
Devin, would you be of the same view if the houses were Georgian and of a similar scale to these?
If they were as out of place as these Council houses are, then yes. But it depends on a number of things. The thing about Smithfield is that the first big redevelopment on the east side (Chief O’Neill’s) still respected the existing scale of the square – any 3 storey buildings did not seem dwarfed. But then the west side (Smithfield Market) went so much bigger that it made everything else look ridiculous. But it has to be said that the architectural quality of those houses is fairly poor by today’s standards anyway, regardless of their scale. I’m not scoffing at them; I’m just saying that they badly don’t fit.
I think the problem is that the quality of relaid sett surfaces is so bloody awful compared to the quality of the few genuine old ones that survive around the city (apparently ‘setts’ is the correct name for the rectangular stones and ‘cobbles’ refers to the smaller roundy ones like in Trinty’s front square).
Here is a comparison of a delicious, smooth old sett surface on John’s Lane, off Thomas Street (the whole city was like this once!), with a dire early-1990s relaid sett surface in Temple Bar. The John’s Lane one is a pleasure to walk on. The Temple Bar one, as we know, would drive you back to the pavement!
In that case it does look like it’s been relaid alright (for what reason I don’t know … a bit of municipal frilly-ing up of the road maybe!), but you do right enough see plenty of examples of old setts/cobbles at the edge of a road that have never been tarmaced over so as they can carry away rainwater.
It’s interesting to think that almost every street in the city has setts under the tarmac – the setts were never taken up but used as a bed like the way you lay a rough mix before concreting (there’s a name for it I can’t think of).
@Maskhadov wrote:
I think Smithfield looks great. I just wish that the buildings on the right and the very end could be knocked down and built in line with the new development.
Yes Maskhadov, they should be demolished, but you can’t say that because it’s not PC! You’re meant to say something like ‘the retention of the existing community in Smithfield is a vital element in the ongoing evolution and rebirth of the square blah-de-blah …’ !
Oh what to do! The houses so clearly don’t fit but it’s not like you can say they were a mistake on social grounds and should be redeveloped … Obviously the community should stay, but the houses definitely need to be redeveloped. Anyone any ideas how this might happen??
A nice rainy view 🙂 :
God!! 🙁 That’s like refacing Hawkins House – you just get a new building in the shape of what was a ’60s timepiece – the blandest outcome of all!
I thought the impact of the building (pre-painting) on the Georgian Mile was surprisingly low for all the fuss there was at the time about how wrong it was to demolish the original buildings & put a modern building there.
It may not be too late though – you can get proprietary paint solvents that remove paint without damaging finishes. If this was done & the cluttered roofscape improved I’d be happy.BTW anto, yeah it would be good to get something in the media about it – you could go chasing up some journalist, but you know it’s easier to just blog it up here.
(However did manage to get a piece in the paper last year about the Dublin Port Authority having stupidly poured cement between the granite blocks of the Poolbeg wall – a ‘dry stone’ construction – causing it to crack.)Yes, the repopulation of the area is of course welcome. The problem is the building is overscaled on a strategic site on probably thee most important Georgian street in the city.
As said, the building is ‘in the style of’ deBlacam & Meagher (soft dark brick & lime mortar pointing, timber panelling, undercut at the front), but has none of the sensitivity of their work. It is a greedy monolithic building. A building here so obviously needed to follow the scale of Bolton Street and so maintain the scale hierarchy between Bolton Street and Henrietta Street.
The passage of the building through the planning process was highly suspect. As you might expect, there had been objections to it from residents of Henrietta Street and other groups, but there was a series of planning applications lodged for it (some invalid), and in the confusion one of them received no objections and was granted by Dublin City Council, so that was that; there could be no appeal.
The sickening thing is DCC knew there had been earlier objections to it so there was a much greater onus on them to get it right (given that there were no objections in on this one & could be no appeal). It shows you that they will grant permission for almost anything … scared shitless to remove a storey. The city is stuck with this wrong building now forever, because of some stupid planner. I think that after this construction boom, questions are going to be asked about DCC decision making. You just have to look at this building and what’s happening in somewhere like Cork Street ….
On many levels, this is a very good ‘regeneration’ development, one of the best Dublin has yet received – as was acknowledged by a UK urban design expert in the paper last week. It fulfils many objectives of good urbanism: it’s permeable; provides quality public space; the materials and finishing are good; it creates new vistas; the tower is a landmark in itself but is still subordinate to the main landmark of Smithfield (the chimney); the apartments appear to be well-designed and spacious. But it must be said that it is an extremely bulky development, and it probably should not have been quite so bulky.
It is at least one third bigger (and heading for twice as big in places) than the development on the east side of the square (‘Chief O’Neill’s’). How did it end up so much bigger? There was only about 4 year’s difference between the planning of the two …
The scale of this development begs the question: In order to obtain a development of this quality, a development that compares favourably with the urban qualities of earlier Dublin (which I think it does), is it a given that we have to accept a significant increase in scale in the central area? Can a large site like this not be developed within the general scale of the area? Is it unviable? How come it was done on the east side only a short time earlier?
Granted an area like Smithfield was less ‘intact’ as a historic district and so less sensitive scale-wise than most of the rest of the central area, but still there is a sense of the scale of the area being totally overwhelmed.
There are a couple of hanger-on Georgian houses on the west side of Queen Street; the one on the left (probably originally 4 stories but now cut down to 2 – may be reconstructed to full height eventually) and the two white ones beyond that (all 3 being protected structures). You could not say that the new development is respectful of scale of these houses.
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Just looking at Smithfield generally, its architectural coherence as an urban square is frankly a mess. While the two main developments on the east and west sides are individually of high urban design quality, they are considerably out of scale with one another. Then most of the rest of the square is made up of a knackery mix of leftover bits and pieces and bad ‘80s & ‘90s stuff.
At the top end (above) there’s one nicely-restored Georgian house on the extreme left. Then a potentially-charming but appallingly-dilapidated terrace of typical Dublin buildings in the middle. Then on the right is what I think is one of the worst buildings in Dublin; a 1990s red brick apartment block which is not only architecturally dismal in itself but commits the heinous crime of pushing a rounded corner into a square defined by right angle corners (a la Lavitt’s Quay in Cork). Then there’s the poor oul ‘80s Corpo housing along the side which doesn’t seem to quite know what to be doing with itself within the ‘brave new’ Smithfield …
The street furniture in the foreground is not holding up too well – many of the stainless steel bollards are bent and kinked.
The containment of the south end of the square is similarly messy. There’s this non-descript office block on the east side (more suited to Amiens Street or Grand Canal Street I think). The row of trees on the left fills in the line of the square where the Irish Distillers building is set way back (is this area going to be built on at some stage?).
Across the bottom is the back of the poxy Georgian-pastiche development on Arran Quay.
Near the bottom on the west side is this dreary 4-storey ‘80s building which had 2 floors added on top recently (why?! – shouldn’t it just have been demolished?).
I hope the architectural coherence of Smithfield can be improved from hereon in.
Smithfield was the subject of a lot of discussion on the forum in the past, but not much lately (a quick ‘Smithfield’ search throws up many old threads). It would be good to get it back on the agenda!
