Devin
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Well done for all the photos.
The photo of the plaza from Clery’s illustrates very well the function of the curved edges of the pavements: to visually blend the higher surface into the lower surface and reduce the cluttering effect of pavement / road / pavement / road / pavement – make it look more like a unified plaza.
This trick reminds me of the ‘ha-ha’ at the end of the lawn at the back of Castletown House; a wall and ditch that prevented animals from coming right up to the back of the house, but looking from the house all you saw was the lawn blending into the parkland beyond.
Graham, I have to say I think it would be crap if the two blocks coming out to the streetline were the same size. It’s their slight variation in height and width that saves them, makes them complement the Georgian streetscape. The main block is at a slight angle to the street, so even if the smaller blocks were the same size the whole thing wouldn’t be completely symmetrical.
They must engage in debate the same way as everyone else: bullet points, bullet points, bullet points – and defend vigourously.
The political parties have all had expensive media training by Carr Communications. An Taisce is a charity so it can’t afford that. But if you’re controversial like An Taisce, you’re going to be asked onto things like Q & A. You can’t just keep saying no cos you haven’t had media training. You have to make the best of it.
Forgive me if I’m being a bit obsessive about the Stag’s Head mosaic, but I noticed something else daft about it’s new position and facing direction today:
It only ‘works’ as you are leaving the laneway (going away from the stag’s head), pointing you back from whence you came!
Try it and see.
Yes it’s good to see it it back, but the welcoming doorstep effect, as you say Zap, has been ruined by putting it in the middle of the pavement and the wrong way around! god!!!!!!!!! why do they always have to mess up these things??
It’s also been ‘tarted up’ with a white granite surround (which has turned dull grey after only a couple of weeks, leading to the edge of the alley. That wasn’t necessary. They should have just bloody-well put the mosaic back where it was; at the edge of the alley.
There’s some fine hand-crafted antique granite in the alley. The join of the new white granite to this old granite is poor.
I notice this all the time walking around town: While the quality of major public space remaking is generally very high – e.g. O’Connell St or Grattan Bridge (not including the kiosks) – the treatment of smaller street furniture details and historic paving is mostly abysmally poor and marked by a lack of finesse.
Witness the cement ribbon pointing of listed antique paving ouside St Ann’s Church, Dawson St and to each side of City Hall, the widespread use of imitation-traditional lamp standard columns to mount CCTV cameras, or the old city ward boundary stones on the quays, almost all of which are missing their cast iron nameplates.
Did you see the drawings of it today in the Irish Independent? – mock-Georgian rubbish! – like most new-build out there.
It’s only logical – for social and sustainable land-use and transport reasons – that a national conference centre should be built in the city centre.
I know for a fact that there are up to thirty or forty cases every week around the country where a county manager has overruled a professional planner’s advice and granted permission for a one-off house, because of lobbying by the applicant or more often a councillor.
Any one individual or organisation would want to have a bottomless pit of gold to appeal all of these – which would almost certainly be overturned on appeal.
The system is rotten to the core and it makes me sick!
No. 2 Capel Street – Diagem – was not part of the DCC flagship – it was just 3 & 4. The refurbishment of 2 was a private initiative.
There was a ghastly oversized plastic fascia on the Diagem shop previously. But underneath that there was actually a nice ’50s black vitrolite shopfront. When the owners applied to refurbish the building a few years ago they sought to replace that shopfront with a modern wooden one. an taisce’s dublin planning committee asked that they retain the vitrolite one. Parts of the vitrolite were cracked and exact matching replacements couldn’t be got, so it was agreed to replace the whole thing in the same style. It’s a pity the original vitrolite couldn’t have been repaired, but I think the end result is good and looks smart.
Now if only somebody would do something about that awful ‘Pops Deli’ one on the corner.
Yes I heard about that plan too. It is disgraceful that, after neglecting the fine urban vernacular architecture of Pearse Street (in its possession) for so long, TCD should come along and seek to demolish it. As well as the lovely teracotta Nuzum shopfront, I believe those unusual faience columned shofronts (the bricked-up ones) at nos. 183-187 will be up for the chop as well.
I like the way, in the Merrion and especially Fitzwillian Square areas, if the ground-to-top floor windows of a house have been changed at some point, there’s almost always a nice 8-over-8 or 10-over-10 original sash lurking in the basement.
200 year old sash windows kick ass! You can’t beat the encrustation of paint, the panes of sparkling old glass here and there, and the general well-aged look.
That building you were talking about recently Graham has just been painted – the 2nd building in on Henry Street – not sure about the paint job – yellow and black. not sure if it does anything for it.
Regarding windows, from what I know of sash windows (I did a course that involved going round looking at period building details, so I gathered a certain amount of knowledge on the subject) those sashes date from the 1830 to 1850 period. The small, quadrant-shaped sash horn came in at about that time, as a strenghtening device (before that there was no sash horn at all).
After about 1850 it became possible to make larger panes of glass, so multi-paned ‘Georgian’ windows fell out of fashion – though they were still used at the back of houses cos they were still cheaper to make – and gave way to Victorian two-over-two or one-over-one paned sash windows. Sometimes, to economise, the glazing bars of Georgian windows would simply be removed and a single pane of glass inserted. This is what I think happened with the windows at the corner building – the travel agents. They appear to date from the same time as the multi-pane windows next door. I reckon if you could see them up close, you would see the marks of where the glazing bars were removed.
A larger and more decorative sash horn began to be made with Victorian windows. A really common mistake around town that annoys me is when newly-made ‘Georgian’ sashes include the curly Victorian sash horn – it looks too fussy on multi-pane sashes!
The question of integrating the boardwalk with the Liffey bridges raises the fundamental question: Should the boardwalk have been built outside the quay wall?
Everybody agrees the boardwalk is wonderful, and it’s undeniably a pleasant space. But it’s no harm to ask the question: On a relatively narrow river like the Liffey, uniformly enclosed by a stone quay wall and Classical bridges, was it right to put the boardwalk out there, to encroach on that ‘sacred space’? Is the boardwalk an acceptable solution to the problem of providing pedestrian space by the river, pending the removal of heavy traffic from the quays?
Elsewhere on the forum somebody said An Taisce was wrong about the boardwalk (because it objected to it in the first place). But An Taisce asked these questions at the time, and they are still valid.
If you were building a bridge on the Liffey, with carefully designed abutments, would you want a boardwalk coming along and crashing into one side of your bridge, messing up the symmetry etc.?
What about yesterday’s architecture page in the times? It sounded like it could have been written by garethace!
Relax people! I enquired on-site and the stumpy bollards will put back as they were. The authorities want to open that part of the paving around the portico for Paddy’s day and there wasn’t time to finish it with the bollards.
Still, I don’t approve of the way those bollards have been treated up to now. They are valuable items of early Dublin street furniture, but were just left lying randomly around the site – and left out at night with no protection against theft other than the wire hoarding which often has walk-in gaps anyway, inviting the civically-inconsiderate passer-by to nick one for their back garden!
The bollards don’t appear to have been numbered during removal either. Assuming they had been in-situ for a long period of time up to this, each one should – for the sake of histortic continuity – go back to its original column base.
That’s very serious if those iron bollards at the bases of the columns have been removed and paved over. I’m going down to check it out now. There’ll be hell to pay!
That piece of paving from 2 yrs ago was made of poured concrete – no slabs or anything.
I thought it was put down as a gesture to the people, because the permanent paving work was taking so long to commence – or as a space test, to see how traffic would cope with only 2 lanes.
But maybe you’re right about the military parade Peter F.
Just to reiterate, Prime Time last Thursday week was about one-off housing, not An Taisce. That’s important.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
