Devin

No one’s saying Cork should remain in a time capsule. But those who want to see development happen quickly should maybe take it easy – look what happened in Dublin in the 1990s when there was a rush of inner city redevelopment ( 🙁 ). You can already see the strains of a boom in Cork with some poor quality (and some good) development.

I don’t really find any of Cork depressing or derilect. Actually I get the impression that it utilizes its older building stock very well and that the city connects with its people in a way that other places don’t. It would be a shame if these qualities were lost or diminished in a rush for redevelopment.

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Are the buildings in your first image not on South Mall? Like the Grand Parade building, it’s sad what can happen to beautiful historic buildings.

Thanks Phil. I don’t know St. Augustine’s but I will check it out next time I’m there – it’s unusal.
And on French Church St., you’re walking along the narrow street with shops and suddenly the back of a huge church appears….the place has a more continental feel than other cities in Ireland.

I saw that Hicks shopfront when I was in DL a while ago – good to see it’s still there.

Was in Cork last week – good buzz around the place. Some pics:

I like this group of Georgians on Bachelors Quay 🙂 (left). Cork Georgian is completely different to Dublin. Charming staggered building line (right), with sash windows in the sides…except for the few PVCs that have got in 🙁

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Cork has an extraordinary architectural heritage, unlike anywhere else in the country – it never ceases to amaze me that it is not discussed on the Cork threads…
This building on Grand Parade is described in the An Taisce Buildings at Risk list as “one of the most sophisticated urban terraced elevations in Ireland” – http://www.antaisce.org/yourarea/bar2.html?id=563 – but look at it now…a gaunt windowless shell acting as a car park entrance….says a lot about our attitude to our built heritage…

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I like these.….the green ‘50s shopfronts, that is 🙂 – there’s 2 left on Oliver Plunkett Street; this and another one at the Prince’s Street junction.

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The new bridge – it’s nice.
It’s one of those bridges that, now that it’s there, you wonder how there was never a bridge here. It’s in the right place.

But 2 negative points:
1. It’s got this silly green glass screen at the edge of the pavement on the south side, so that when you approach from Cornmarket, you think there’s a green gauze across the mouth of it and work is still going on…
2. It doesn’t emerge from the stone quay wall as seamlessly as it ought.

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In Cork you still get that sense of a clean break between the city and its surrounding countryside, which has been hopelessly lost in Dublin. But the amount of traffic roaring around the city centre – it’s almost as bad as Dublin – lets you know that there must be bad sprawl and one-off housing, and huge numbers commuting in and out of the city by car.

There was a lot of scare mongering at the time the Protected Structure legislation came in that if you so much as painted your living room a different colour you’d be up in court.
As I understand it, the painting of “previously unpainted elements” in a Prot. Struc. requires planning permission, so no, painting of doors in the Georgian squares wouldn’t require pl. permission – though I have heard of appropriate colour schemes being agreed with planning authorities..

I’m not against high rise – it’s the way so many developments now are sneakily going for 2 or 3 more stories than the established street scale.
Some inner city parts can take a tower – like Smithfield west side – but mostly tall buildings should be in the one place (docklands)

@jimg wrote:

It seems current fashion is that we should have “landmark” tall buildings dotted seemingly at random around the city – at least this is the impression I get. This is a model of development that London has belatedly realised causes damage to existing historic skyline. I’ve always felt we should concentrate ALL tall buildings in one part of Dublin, protecting existing skyline as well as ensuring that any individual tall building only becomes a “landmark” if it deserves it architecturally and not simply because it dwarfs all surrounding buildings.

I absolutely agree. As well as landmarks, developers are now automatically presuming they can go for 7, 8 or 9 stories in a 4 to 5 storey area. And they’re often granted by DCC, even though there’s any number of objectives and policies in the Development Plan that protect the historic scale of the inner city.

And they’re granting towers in historic areas as well in breach of their own Development Plan – a 32 storey tower in a very sensitive area at Heuston (currently with ABP), and an 11 storey tower beside the landmark church on Thomas Street (refused by ABP).

The developers redeveloping that group of ‘60s office blocks at the southeast corner of Stephen’s Gn. were all going for heights like 9 stories – and probably would have been granted by DCC only for objections by An T and others.

You’d wanna see what is currently being sought for the vacant site on Upper Ormond Quay very close to the Four Courts – a 7 storey building 😮 , seriously damaging the famous image of the Four Courts dome rising above the Georgian-scale terraces on the quays. It’s on further information at the moment.

Agree also about the lack of ‘wow’ for the stuff we are to be getting. That Libeskind hotel is uninspiring.

All of the land-use and transportation trends in Ireland show an American pattern of development, with increasing car dependency and journey generation between places of residence, work, shopping and recreation……The dual-carriageway and motorway programme between the main urban centres is being justified on the basis of reducing travel times and achieving good regional distribution of goods and services. But the main effect will be to increase the commuter and urban sprawl belts, without any parallel strategy to increase the modal share of public transport as required by Ireland’s National Cilmate Change Strategy (2000).

Most of the individual elements of the National Development Plan’s inter-urban motorways and dual-carriageways have been approved through oral hearings. Each EIS has been produced and each oral hearing conducted as though it concerned an isolated development – without considering the downstream impact of filtering more traffic into urban centres or generating more car-based sprawl across a wider catchment area….

There is an almost uniform prejudicial assumption that road vehicle numbers must be catered for without any consideration of the knock-on effect of increased emission of greenhouse gases and particle pollutants, congestion generation, and consumption of land and resources; or consideration of more efficient rail and other public transport based strategies….

– from An Taisce Annual Report 2005

@phil wrote:

Were there any architects involved in its ‘design’?

Firm: Brendan Williams & Associates Architects [no professional qualifications shown], Market Place, Maine Street, Tralee

Client: Ned & James O’Shea, Business Centre, Rock Street, Tralee

They lost a lot of credential in Michael Collins by messing around with the places so much, esp. putting the GPO at the end of a street :rolleyes: . That would even strike people as wrong who don’t really look at the city.

I imagine the 1903 post used in the film is a real one & not a replica.

‘nother view