-Donnacha-
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The formally-planted urban park look would not suit Eyre Square or Galway. Aesthetically, I think it’s absolutely fine as it is.
The problem with Eyre Square by day is the traffic. The problem at night is the mass of pubs and clubs spilling out into fast food joints, then onto taxi ranks in a city with a very young population and woefully inadequate numbers of gardai on the beat.
I don’t see how digging up trees is going to fix that.It may be a long streetscape, but it’s fairly unremarkable. And on a selfish note, it tended to remind you how far you had to walk to the shops in Henry Street when coming from Connolly!
Give ’em a break. They’ve only been at it a few weeks and in fairness it looks really tricky and the weather has been crap.
Hmm. I’ve been in buses stopped at lights enough times to have grave doubts about that one.
Get this; when traffic in Drogheda gets really bad – like when northern teams coming south for big matches in Croker – they just turn off the lights. Want to cross to the other side of town on foot? Tough luck!I’m sure you’ve all seen the gardai directing traffic at major junctions when things get hairy. As far as I can see, it just makes things worse!
When the QBCs were first mooted, they were to include technology that prioritised buses at traffic lights – so they could effectively zap themselves through when the lights were re. I wonder what happened to this?Don’t you think the Spike is trying to say something about Ireland the same way the Eiffel Tower was saying something about France?
Even if it’s just that we have (had!) a lot of money and we can afford big shiny monuments…Of course everyone has a right to their opinion, irrespective of education. But in a rational society, you have to give greater weight to better- informed opinions.
The vox pops have certainly not been selective – I was down there when the second bit was going up and everyone was commenting as they passed – ‘stupid’, ‘what’s it for’, ‘waste of money’, ‘the state of it’, etc. At one point, they were practically queuing up to share their pearls of wisdom with the TV cameras.
If everything was a popularity contest decided by public consent, you’d never get anything daring or innovative built. The public has to take some of the blame for the way Ireland looks today.
The reason our cities are ruined with space-wasting semi-Ds and countryside covered in ugly bungalows is because that is where the housing market has driven architecture.
That’s how the people want to live and that’s what your ‘man in the street’ thinks is good design.
Yes, the Spike is being built with public money, but at some stage, you have to let those whose job it is to run the city to make the tough decisions.
I think the vox pops we’ve seen on the Spike show the depth of ignorance in Irish public opinion on art and architecture. The two main objections seem to be:
-What’s it for? It doesn’t do anything.
-Why couldn’t the money be given to the homeless?
Well, the national gallery is full of stuff that doesn’t do anything, why don’t we throw it all out and fill it with useful things like buckets and engines and hammers?
And then there’s this illsuion that there’s a central Art or Homeless fund that denies a poor person food and shelter for every non-essential public project.
Nothing else in Ireland that gets public funding is attacked for taking from the homeless in the same way. All because it doesn’t ‘do’ anything.
If you take the moral argument to its conclusion, the Eiffel Tower or Taj Mahal would never have been built – useless monuments in countries full of poverty.
I don’t care where they went to school, but I think most people in this country don’t care much about their built environment. So I’m not paying much attention to the vox pops.It may appear to ex-pats that Ireland and Dublin are getting better – it certainly looks better (litter apart), and is more socially diverse, secular, confident etc. On balance, it’s definitely a better place than it was, unless you were in a coma up to the mid-90s.
But there are a couple of glaring exceptions that threaten to negate everything else.-Transport, public and private. Dublin is in danger of ceasing to function as a working city. It actually ceased to function a month or so ago when a few extra inches of rain fell.
-Housing. Professional couples on good wages are forced to live like trappist monks to afford massive mortgages for either a kennel-sized city flat or some bland semi-D in Naas or Balbriggan. If you’re single, forget it, you’re renting for life. And there are no rent controls.
Heard (!) the first section being lowered into place at around 9am on Gerry Ryan. Hopefully RTE TV was there to record the moment for posterity. Pity they had to choose rush hour for what should have been a real event – I live nearby, but had to be in work.
As for the cost of keeping the crane on site, the cost of the contract is apparently fixed.News this morning quoted city council as saying it would go up ‘early in the New Year’.
Crane seems to be fully extended, but not visible from street level at Dorset Street…Respectful name for the Spike?
I think after three years of a delay, news that they’re making a hames of putting celtic stripes onto it in Waterford, and watching the country’s biggest crane languishing in what threatens to become a permanent building site on our main street, we’re entitled to take it less than seriously.
And ‘pole in the hole’ wasn’t meant to be rude. Honest.No, we need to demolish all the remaining bridges and get Calatrava to build massive new cantilevered jobs the whole length of the Liffey to swing out of the way of the water taxis as they bring me to the Point for concerts.
How come nobody has got this off the ground yet? There’s something absurd about a city having gridlocked quays and an empty river. Particularly as the centre expands in an east/west direction, this would be a great way of making short (but long on foot!) trips without laying any tracks or digging up anything.
Why did the original idea ‘die on its arse’? Surely a shuttle service from Heuston to The Point would make a tonne of cash.The pillar may at first have been an unneccesary intrusion on the street, but once you establish a monument of that size on such a central site, it becomes part of the landscape, whether its aesthetics are questionable or not.
The pillar said, “this is the centre of Dublin”, and was treated as such by the people. It was before my time, but I’ve always seen the site as a gap just from seeing the old pictures and from my parents going on about it.
By comparison, I don’t think anyone could call Liberty Hall good architecture either on its own merits or whether it’s right for its location, but Dublin wouldn’t be Dublin without it.Actually, I think bigger is better when it comes to building a monument that’s for the whole city.
The more visible it is from afar, the more different contexts you can see it in.
Like the Eiffel tower, that slips in and out of view all over the city, contsantly reminding you that you are in Paris.
The World Trade Centre was an even better example, creating a sense of place as it rose up, sometimes unexpectedly, in the distance from within the different boroughs.
And tall strutures help you find your way around.
OK, I admit it, I just want to be able to see it from my flat…
