garethace
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Open space within Dun Laoghaire is being swallowed up at a rapid rate at the moment. Soon enough Moran Park will be the only truly open space left within the town centre. I am looking forward to seeing this project finished aswell. It will provide a good focal point within the harbour. I am hopefull that it will provide the level of open access that it is promising.
Phil, open space seems to be a happening topic in other places too:
It is an oft quoted statistic (at least in these pages) that Los Angeles has fewer acres of open space per capita than any other major city in the U.S. TPR is pleased to present this discussion with landscape architects Mia Lehrer and Esther Margulies, in which they discuss the importance of natural andscape in revitalizing public space, and some of their local projects that are helping to regreen the Los Angeles region.
http://www.planningreport.com/tpr/?module=displaystory&story_id=981&format=html
Revisit a compilation of earlier comments….
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2744
Brian O’ Hanlon.
We really shouldn’t neglect to mention other similar efforts around the world, now should we? These are the main sites I visit everyday, for quite a while now:
http://www.aceshardware.com/forum
Editor: Johan De Gelas.
Editor: Paul Clerkin.
Editor: Jeff Mottle.
Dan Tasman
One thing in common with all of these sites? A single person, who besides doing a day job, has taken the interest to devote time, money and effort into developing online communities dedicated to their specific field of expertise/interest. Furthermore, has not actually ‘been ashamed’ to stand out and be counted, as an opinion…. perhaps not perfect always in every sense,… but nonetheless someone with the ability to discuss, listen and articulate.
The problem with major institutions for third level education and so on, I think… is they have ‘lost’ this notion of discussion, debate, argument, listening and points of view…. major educational institutions spend nearly most of their time attending meetings behind very closed doors amongst themselves, and planning what ‘they’ are going to do, and how ‘they’ could do things….. sometimes it just takes one person to finally say, right, let’s just try something and do it for a change…..
This aspect of someone actually committing themselves to a project, has gotten mislaid in most third level educational institutions nowadays…. unfortunately. And it is very difficult to find any ‘point of contact’ with them at all anymore….. whereas any of the four sites, I have listed work perfectly from the point of view of further education…..
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Don’t get me even started about having to walk from Parliment street all the way over to College green and back again…. because the only cash dispenser there… had a cue, that resembled a football match.
And the dear folks all along in front of the Olympia Theatre etc, just walk around as if they were strolling in St. Stephen’s Green on a hot summers day…. which means you have to step out on the footpath, and with traffic zooming down, the hill from Christ Church you really only have millimeters/seconds of margin to avoid getting splattered all over the road…. wellington quay style.
If ever there was a good candidate for footpath improvement, right in front of Olympia Theatre is a good one. What bugs me though, in this country is how we imagine how having more cops on motorcycles is going to straighten out these sorts of problems.
How a LUAS going through the city at 100mph is going to improve things…. https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2744&pagenumber=3 …. that is where I spoke of suburban shopping centre traffic/pedestrian relationship too…
Cash machine in square in temple bar is a joke too… avoid it at all costs…. horrible space there now really, and yet you would expect it to work,…. but it doesn’t really… dunno.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Who uses the Hapenny bridge now as much as they did before? Or do you ‘aim’ for the new pedestrian bridge instead? Anyone of you walking north/south in that direction on regular basis now?
I cannot honestly ‘remember’ the last time I purposefully ‘aimed’ to cross the Liffey ‘at’ the Hapenny Bridge.
Is this really a good thing?
I mean…. should one expensive bridge project be done right along side another pedestrian bridge project….. so that one entirely negates the value of the other?
Especially considering that, the rest of the country…. Cork, Limerick, Galway, would never get that calibre of pedestrian bridge building.
I really think that in future… these projects should be alot less to do with ‘curtain-raising’ and politicians cutting ribbons… and a hell of a lot more to do, with actually putting something where it is actually needed.
Just a side note, I was down in Henry St, this sunday morning at 9am, with the ‘spire’ at the end….. without the people, the concept works very different I think… any opinions.
In fact, the whole city of Dublin works very differently as a concept without the people…
At Harrold’s Cross bridge, where you could turn down towards the Locke restaurant and portobello before…. they have blocked off now to car traffic.
The swan wildlife have very cleverly taken advantage of this fact too, and the shelter from the bridge itself… and established this little patch as ‘their territory’. Birds tend to do that you know, and more species than one too.
Anyhow, has anyone ever seen a swan going to sleep? Just like a turtle the neck, head and feet all go in under the shell sort of….. but i was cycling by this way Friday evening late in the dark and saw, in the lamp light,…. what resembled a whole load of ‘white plastic bags’ scattered all over the place in front of me.
I quickly explained this fact away, by assuming that the builders in the nearby building site, were just reckless with their rubbish or something.
Anyhow, as I was ‘just’ about to do that thing, you often do when on a bicycle… ya’know when you see a plastic bag blowing around the temptation is to aim for it with the wheel of one’s bike?
Then at the very last split second…. the truth of what I was about to do…. finally dawned on me and I barely managed to swirve my way, and somehow navigate my way through a whole flock of about 50 odd sleeping swans!
I can assure you it was a rather skillful piece of cycling if I do say so myself.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Just a couple of thoughts… maybe, this you might relate to?
I have seen “old-timers” and kids out of school come through here. My money, for the long haul is on the kids just coming into the trade. Although woefully untrained, they are eager to learn new skills and not afraid of change. I feel that they will benifit from any upgrades, while us “old farts” seem reluctant to explore.
Or this?
I have found students to be great resources to the old timers for the program and the old timers to be great reasources to the junior staff because they can if willing learn their discipline. It is as you might say give and take.
But yeah, your point is duly noted, and a good one….. some forums ‘get over’ this by just dividing the board in half…… one half for the more ‘technical, nitty-gritty, analytical’ exploration…… which I being a young brain, who is woefully untrained…. but has lots of enthuasiasm. One where any attempts at ‘general discussion’ would be moved or deleted.
And another board, for ‘general’ discussion…. i.e. the type of discussion most favoured here at Archiseek board.
Yeah, the ‘technical discussions’ tend to be quieter places on the whole….. but allow us to examine issues, smaller issues perhaps in much finer detail – which Archiseek general message board is perhaps not appropriate for at all.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
In another thread I mentioned the IT phrase “metrics.” What are metrics? It’s any measurement to stuff on the computer (in IT lingo, at least). One measure of computer users is how many bytes/files do they create in some unit of time.
I had a program that was grafted to the End command that recorded the time-in-drawing, the file size, the drafter id, time and date. After a while of recording the data, I had enough to indicate some trends on what users were doing. Since I made no measure of the “difficulty” of the project, or of the day of the week, those differences generally tended to average themselves out.
Sounds good, right? Management then wanted to extrapolate how many minutes a certain amount of work took to create a “reward/punishment” line of performance. I said I couldn’t do that. That the data just indicated that process X took about a half hour, plus or minus 15 minutes; that process B took about an hour, etc. So, you have to be carefull with metrics, especially around people with no real background in process efficiency. (A 10 man-hour job cannot be achieved by 5 people in half the time–a logic that escapes far too many; same as torquing a nut twice to 20 foot-pounds is not the same as once to 40.)
I find this ‘metrics’ approach to CAD use, has been promoted by management far too long and too much now…. it really doesn’t make any sense.
Interesting thread:
Productive R12 users were hamstrung by upgrading to R13; but were really helped with R14.
Any opinions…. ? AutoCAD Users?
Thread spotted, might interest you’z:
I think ‘bumping’ is the web-savy term for it Ros. 🙂
Written ‘bump’, and repeated as desiring to get the effect you need.
Brian.
Did anyone notice the low tide the other day in the Liffey? It really was good to understand ‘just how much’ of an overhang the Liffery board walk really is. If you take the board walk, and compare it to a building, then the rock bottom of the Liffey, which was clearly visible the other day, is roughly 2-3 storey deep beneath the bottom of the currently constructed Liffey boardwalk from Chapel Street bridge to hapenny bridge.
I just thought I would highlight this observation, in this thread.
Any opinions? Something I picked up was…… Is architecture an art or not?
Well, taking up this line of questioning…. I do think that almost all of Mr. MacMahon’s Architecture displayed one very interesting characteristic, which may have been thanks to a background in art and crafts. In a painting, nearly every detail, every colour, texture, square inch is considered. I was once shocked at seeing the Mona Lisa in reality, by how small it really was. Yet its image seemed to be so universal. I have to say, I haven’t encountered this way of looking at architecture so much before…. but it is interesting.
How every little sketch done on week 1, when ‘throwing about ideas’, finds a relationship to a very slick presentation graphic – which was done at more cost, time and effort to benchmark that ‘little idea’. How every detail in the finished work, relates back to the ‘concept’ in some way. How even the section of Croke Park Stadium could be compared to the clay pot, which was carefully created by a potter. In some way, in this case, architecture was an art…. because like in a good painting, every area of the canvas was not just ‘incidental’.
In fact, this all fits rather neatly into my own impression of architects, who are individuals capable of looking at the same problem from many different angles. In contrast to any good engineer, who is capable of seeing many different problems from the same angle. 🙂
Brian O’ Hanlon.
The friendly face of privatisation? 🙂 Free market economy and all of that? Anyone care to comment on this situation of three ESB poles.
Map geeks aren’t made. They’re born. They come into this world with a special sense of spatiality, a heightened awareness of their place in the world and a need to help others find theirs.
A preacher guides lost souls. A map geek points to Page 830, Grid E-4, and says, “There you are.”
I think these shots are priceless, like a scene from the God Father, not a sign of a Rem Koolhaas anywhere, you couldn’t miss that nose eh?
This is kinda new urbanism I think,
Very ‘thoroughly’ have shown all the roads and servicing for this project, mapped out in advance, or comissioning your architect to do some nice one-off house on a decent plot for you.
The way the golf course is weaved in between the planned development.
Just to follow up on my previous point there, I think engineers are responsible for some very useful creations/designs which hope or achieve the seemingly impossible – that is, to furnish a lot of different problems with more or less the very same solution.
Example: Microsoft windows – same solution, used by a whole range of different people.
The important thing about my ‘arrow-maker’ in the first example, was to allow people to go into the ‘arrow shop’ in the middle ages, and be able to buy arrows, that conformed to a certain high standard, so when going hunting or into battle your arrows didn’t drop into front of your own feet. :0
The important thing about ‘engineering code’ is that it must conform to a standard…. USB 2.0, RISC code, CISC code, Intel x86 instruction set, ATX chassis, AGP graphics, DPS Power supply, MS Windows compliant…. these are all computing standards….. which are painstakingly kept very, very clean through the establishment of standards, of bodies to maintain a keen and critical eye over all products produced ‘claiming’ to meet this particular standard.
You simply do not find ‘designed for Windows XP’ or ‘Low fuel emission’ stickers, stuck onto the outside of an architectural creation, but you sure as hell will look for them when buying any other large/small products. I think the bungalow, kinda introduced this notion of ‘standards and compliance’ into the house building industry…. houses became sort of like buying a fridge or TV.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
My moto about architecture…. you can put it on my grave people. 🙂
Architects are very good at looking at the same project from many different angles, but are not very good at seeing many different projects from the same angle.
Because that requires a level of disipline, dedication and stubborness, which they simply do not have.
Engineers, encode things very careful to be read by other engineers, and only other engineers… any of their best creations, from bridges, bicycles to cars are embodiments of an engineering code, that is only understood by other engineers.
That the guy who invented the first arrow for instance, he probably wasted a lot of arrows before finding one which flew fastest and furthest, with the minimum of effort.
I.e. He probably looked at many different arrow designs from the same viewpoint – efficiency.
Having by chance fell upon an arrow that worked well, the lessons learnt were possibly encoded into some obscure guild or brotherhood of arrow-makers, in some kind of ‘arrow-speak’.
I don’t think this is the case in Architecture…. and personally I think that it is both the worst and the best for it.
The education I received in architecture was excellent because it showed me how to review the same design from many different points of view.
But it never once even suggested that I may do the inverse – to look at many different designs from the one consistent view point.
You could see how self-destructive an attitude that would be for any architect to take.
Once I remember, I was asked how did I choose a design for my site…. my reply was, I choose a design and went around looking for a site! 🙂
That kind of reply, is calculated to drive even the mildest natured architects, stark raving mad – and to become utterly disgusted with you!
Bungalows are a classic example of ‘the engineering way of thinking’. I don’t find it surprising that engineering ways of thinking have dominated the creation of the built environment in the last century, as everything else in our daily lives at this stage has also been engineered.
We have grown to rely heavily upon engineering and to trust it.
In conclusion, Architects have not got the ability to encode anything – if they did, we would have a set curriculum and body of knowledge, which we could pass on to young students of architecture in third level colleges all over the world.
You would be able to look at any design and talk at length about how many pistons it uses, how much air it needs to compress and fuel needs to be injected. Standard variables.
But instead, we have the exact opposite to that. I don’t accept the fact that drawing is a code, as has been argued…. it is a means of representation used by all kinds of people besides architects – rather than being specific to architects themselves.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
