Frank Taylor

I think it depends on the number of clients you expect. If it is so small that nobody notices then I don’t think it is a ‘material’ change of use. If you want to put up a sign and run a busy practice, you will need permission and you may have to pay rates.

@Fennetec wrote:

That is exactly the type of response I would expect to get elswhere. I was trying to solicit ideas on the type of pedestal that would be most suitable, not a running commentary on the commercial aspects of running a payphone company.

This was not a comment on the commercial aspects of running a payphone company but a question about the usefulness to the public of payphones given their tendency to be broken and the space they take up. I would favour fixing payphones to one of the myriad of street furniture already existing on the street, rather than constructing yet more vertical poles, reducing the space and visual amenity of the street further.

O’Connell street has a number of internet/call shops so if someone is caught short without a mobile they can sit in shelter, quiet and comfort and make a call with the rates shown in advance. They even have phone books.

Payphones sometimes fail to provide the service they should in return for the space they take up.

As soon as they break, they stop providing the service and become street junk or street thieves, swallowing coins into some device to be collected later by some urchin.
There should be service level agreements on payphones to allow for removal of payphones that are too frequently out of order.

Many payphones do not display the price of calls, just a ‘cost per unit’ like a hotel phone. None provide freephone directory inquiries as they used to. No phones return change, despite other vending machines having this capability.

They could be more useful and still comercially viable.

The Barbican open space is semi-private overlooked community grounds. The hofjes in Amsterdam are another example. They often have a gate but the gate is not locked. You need some local knowledge or some courage to push the gate and you’re on your best behaviour. Trinity campus is another example.

Courtyards are a great form, enclosing you from the city noise and having the security of being overlooked. Most are car free (even the Barbican) which improves them by an order of magnitude. It doesn’t work so well when all the residents have been hand picked for their poverty.

Every town in Ireland seems to be getting its very own LIffey Valley Centre. nearly 2,000 parking spaces.

@Graham Hickey wrote:

I’d like to read the height survey commissioned by the CC – is it included in the city dev plan, or is it a separate entity? In spite of it, there still doesn’t seem to be a clearly defined vision for the skyline of Dublin. The goalposts keep changing.

It’s 6 years old now, but if you get a copy from the CC let us know, I wouldn’t mind reading it. Here is a summary of the report as produced by DCC:
http://www.dublincity.ie/Images/HTN_ANALYSIS_4.0_tcm35-13613.pdf

and here is Frank McDonald’s assessment of the report:
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/property/2000/1102/arch.htm

@paul h wrote:

dublin is not paris and never will be!

Yes, of course!

why do we always have to look to other cities for inspiration
can we not do anything bold or innovative so other places can look to us and think ‘ see what they did in dublin!!’

We are now at a growth stage on Dublin, We are planning and building entire new city districts. Point Village, Poolbeg, Adamstown, Cherrywood, North Fringe (worst name!). We have a chance to decide how these districts should be shaped. It is a a crucial time.

A city district is a complex system with many interacting components. Complex systems are never purely innovative, or else they fail. They have to consist of as many tried and tested subcomponents as possible, arranged in a way that is known to work. Innovation is always a tiny proportion of a successful system.

The safest type of system to build is a copy of one that works well somewhere else and suits the local needs and environment. I know architects don’t like using someone elses plans, but from an engineer’s point of view, this is the safest way to proceed. Every innovation is a chance for failure and while architecture is art, at least a poor painting can be left in the basement while some poor bastard has to live in Bachelors Walk.

The success of a city district might be measured in efficiency, house prices, sense of community, whether it turns out to be a pleasant place to be, whether it is regarded as a place at all.. Architects often aim to make their buildings remarkable and succeed, but to the detriment of the former goals. Remarkable buildings that vie for attention with each other in a district that doesn’t work.

When we choose the parameters for a city district in terms of building height, variations in that height, floor-area-ratio, plot ratio, street width- well whatever we choose will certainly have been done before elsewhere in one of the hundreds of thousands of city districts around the world. We would be crazy to ignore the success or otherwise of these living examples.

Great art is often produced within constraints, and there are many outstanding buildings in cities with broadly uniform building dimensions such as Amsterdam or Paris.

georgian dublin is beautiful and should be preserved and most historic sites but we must grow also
a lot of our old city was built before the invention of the elevator which made higher buildings possible
does anyone think our planners of those days would have only built 4 or 5 floors if they had elevators and demand for taller houses

I hate to return to Paris but the Haussmann buildings of 6 floors plus two attic floors mostly date from the 1860s, predating the elevator. Maids and young people lived at the top. The rickety lifts went in later.

8 floor buildings cannot be bracketed with tall buildings as high rise. We don’t have a simple choice between semi-d and 50 storey towers.

In the absence of architect designed guidelines dimensions for a city district, we just give general guidelines on density alone to builders and a few vague words about tall buildings at the corners of blocks and so forth. Now we are developing a special Irish house form, the semi-d on steroids. A fatter semi-d with an extra floor shoved in below. Nice.

Next time you are in Paris, go to one of the department store roof top cafes like Printemps on Blvd Haussmann or Samaritaine and have a look at the Parisian skyline. You will see a rich pattern of rooves at a height of 8-11 storeys punctuated by church spires, the Eiffel tower the Sacre Coeur up in Montmartre and of course the Tour Montparnasse. Way off in the distance to the West you can make out La defense and to the East are the towers of the Bibliotheque Nationale. And that’s it.

Montparnasse stands up like a big mistake and a reminder to Parisians not to try this stunt again. It’s a false monument to nothing. Oo look darling – a call centre. Paris has 100 people per acre with just one highrise in the centre. To get an idea of the size of Paris, draw a box in Dublin around O’Connell bridge, reaching as far north as Griffith Avenue, as far souh as Milltown, to Ballyfermot in the West and the docklands in the East. There you have it – 80km squared in which the Parisians can house 2 million people in very pleasing buildings. While the Haussmann buildings create a pleasant character for Paris, they are often individually fairly uninspired structures. They follow the forumla of 6 storeys plus two mansard roof floors the builders had enough leeway to avoid monotony and enough planning restraints to create cohesiveness. We can see that a similar approach worked well in Dublin where the Georgian squares consist of a simple repeating pattern with just enough uniformity to create cohesion and just enough variation in roof heights and balconies to make it interesting.

Now take a trip out to the Banlieue on the RER and see what happens when architects are given free-rein trying to out-do each other in genius modernism. Randomised, oversized, low-density, inhuman shitsville. We are not going to solve anything with a few Tour Montparnasses – we need to rezone our inner-city semi-d housing estates for 8 storeys and let the market do the rest. I know I’d sell up,.

Well the Jesus statue has finally been refurbished to the standard of the other monuments on the street. He has been made more positive and accessible to people and the addition of LED uplighters really helps. This photo shows beautiful detailing previously not visible through the perspex casing. The whole character of the work has been transformed from a rather dreary Jesus to an optimistic 21st Century JC. Great work DCC.