garethace

Originally posted by phil
I have always wondered why that footpath is so thin along the Trinity side of Naussau Street and South Leinster Street. It does not make sense when you think of the amount of people waiting to get various buses. I know that if it were to be widened it would mean less space for the buses and cars etc. However, cars are for some reason allowed to park outside the Kilkenny Design shop. Surely the path could be widened slightly?!

I agree with you about the Arts block entrance Garethace. It is a nice little space, so much movement, but as you pointed out, also a chance to sit beside the tree and relax.

Thanks

Phil

Simple answer to any of the above…. Dublin City Council just don’t have any eyes in their heads, otherwise all of this would be painfully obvious to them. It is a question of someone taking responsibility for it really – and clearly Dublin city council down through the years have not been able to do anything like that.

Temple Bar Properties/Architects were the only ones in my experience who showed enough assertiveness to go and do anything. Most people do not realise how little land/influence Temple Bar Properties could exert on that area – but what they did do, they did well I think.

But I do kind of agree with garethace about standards. Sometimes we just bang down something as a quick reaction to what somebody else said in a post, cos we’re in a rush out or something. But I guess it is worth taking the time to write something worth reading.

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Well, if you want a really good example of where they made the right decision where to put something, take a walk over by Dawson Street sometime.

When ABK did the new Arts Block there was no entrance from Trinity out onto Nassau Street. So ABK put one in.

But look where they put it though, not in front of Reads, not in front of the Setanta Centre or Kilkenny Design, not in front of Judge Roy Beans….. but right at the bottom of Dawson Street.

I know that ‘trinangle’ pedestrian island and crossing there is awkward at best, and creates congestion – but from a point of view of coming and going to Trinity, it is in the right place.

What they also did is interesting – they made a nice overflow space with a seat around a tree – that is just enough to take the chokepoint of pedestrians crossing, coming from Trinity, moving along Nassau St etc, and manage.

You can even ‘wait around there’ for your friend, to meet someone, etc, etc. You can have a smoke there or a drink of coke if you want.

Compare that to the new bridge on the Liffey – where when you get to the oposite side of the road, there is nowhere to really stand and relax, you are shoved literally by the flow of the crowd down the Quays in either direction.

The really nice thing about the board walks is being able to linger around there without bothering anyone.

You could be waiting a long time, the Example of the Zhivago building in Bolton St is a typical situation. The college paid rent for 2002/03 for two floors which lay empty because the dept of Education wouldn’t give them the cash for the new desks and projectors etc.

Which is what I mean exactly, this is exactly the kinds of problems Universities get themselves into, if they are not contained on a suitable stretch of land, in which they can populate with various buildings – some possibly of shit quality, and other ones that are great.

I mean, TCD built a 10 million building, which they want to knock after only a few years. But they still get 10 million worth of use out of a building, and maybe replace it with something better – it could almost ‘work out’.

But generally, as clients, Universities on the one hand are very big and powerful – with very expensive property and facilities, and on the other hand they are like Moscow when communism fell apart.

Universities cannot take out short term bank loans – expect to make money on ‘the next big job’ like a company would – I don’t think.

Then Universities have to pay staff, manage staff, manage courses, manage catering….. a lot of stuff. In a lot of ways Universities are different kinds of clients to most other situations – a very interesting client too.

I wonder have many fifth years done thesis projects, for new buildings in Universities, with the Uni as the client?

To be honest with you, I am finding it difficult myself to remember any thesis project I have seen, like such. One or two maybe, but not that many. I know, a lot of small art schools etc, are often done.

Does need looking at for sure.

If they could move that basement stuff out of Bolton Street altogether, you could establish a whole new kind of ‘level’ of spaces and uses. I.e. the Concrete testers and the mechanics – into a totally new facility. You could bring those existing lightwells into the picture – which at the moment just sit there with dead pigeons lying in the middle of them.

I think pigeon shit is a real problem in dank, cold, mossy spaces like that. Dunno how one could design around it. It just says really, that light is an essential ingredient of any architecture. The architecture department is on the highest floor, so it tends to ‘lift itself’ somewhat out of the spooky, pigeon inhabited underworld below.

I mean even the Georgian terrace, was a very dense form of development too, but at least it made one great shaft of space, as the street, to allow ventilation, views and light. Bolton Street is some kind of ‘knotted’ up figure of eight Georgian terrace gone badly wrong.

I respect the background of Bolton Street though as a place for technological, engineering etc, etc, etc. Like the trades school thing across the road and all. The number of people down through the years who have passed through Bolton Street, Rathmines, Cathal Brugha Street, Mountjoy Square, Angier Street…………….. stands on its own merit.

But DIT doesn’t really have a home as such. You have Bolton Street and the trade school, you have Kevin Street and Angier st. as sort of ‘hubs’ of activity in various parts of the city. With some ‘sporadic skermishes’ occuring at places like Mountjoy and Rathmines.

I suppose this is really the advantage of ‘having a home’ though, something like an actual campus. Because you can invest in good once off building projects at least every decade, and be reasonably assured that it all adds up to some improvement of existing facilities, spaces, environment etc. With all due respect to University facilities, I think any of the investment in education pays itself back well.

But it is always a good thing to see developments all happen on one campus, just so as to monitor what is being spent and where it is being spent.

Angier Street have a new Library facility, which is very, very, very underused, as a main college facility. It is offered to anyone witha student card, for a cost of €1 per day ticket, which is wonderful – but that fact is not well advertised either. In Trinity, in the libraries, the number of bums on seats at all points during the day is just staggering by comparison.

Limerick campus perhaps doesn’t ‘come together’ very well, where the lack of a central grand vision really tells. While having all this US money to build new big huge buildings for labs etc worked against it a bit. That new Olympic Swimming pool they have is interesting, because noone can really use it – it is just like a huge high security prison facility like in the movie ‘Face Off’.

It towers over everything around it, including a village made of semi-d’s which they referred to as the on-campus student ‘accomodation’ up til quite recently.

It might be noted too, that O’D & T started out years ago with Jim Stirling, and that their Virus building on UCD campus, in a way perhaps does pay some sort of homage to their first teacher and experience as architects. Where are those lab buildings, which Stirling did in England again?

In general though, I think that the campus out in Belfield is starting to come together bit by bit and hopefully will continue to improve in the right ways.

Well to be perfectly honest with you I am more into how the external spaces are treated in university planning/architecture. Because that is where the students spend a larger portion of their time. Louis Kahn believed that these corridors and so forth, would be like class rooms in themselves where students would learn from no teachers – but from each other – rather than long narrow sneak passages as he called them – normally what is called for in educational budgets.

Notice that nice new space created in front of the new MOLA student centre building – grey brick one, horizontal building. That new space works well I think and ties in the old existing sports hall, pub or whatever, which was quite isolated before now.

MOLA have done a nice little DIT student residence building up at Broadstone, which should also be nice. I have seen the new buildings you are describing, the new Lab is indeed a good effort and commands the space around it nicely – but as you are possibly familiar with in Trinity college campus, new developments always seem to be a mixed bag – with some excellent examples like Arts block in Trinity and some trully awful attempts – owing to lack of budget etc, etc.

It is as if they break the bank on one development, and then build a couple of cheap-o’s following that one great building.

I am not really a big fan of the O’Reilly hall in UCD – not because of the building itself as such, but rather the lack of an attempt to deal with and create exterior spaces, like the new student centre does. The main boulevard type of space in DCU isn’t at all bad either I don’t think. To be honest, I find the UL campus a bit all over the place and lacks any clearly defined grand central space or avenue. Despite all kinds of buildings and investments down through the years, and attempts at making it better. Plus the campus at Plassey doesn’t seem to suffer from any problems of vandalism or other difficulties like Trinity college would be exposed to.

What UL campus definitely lacked is a good architect with a vision.

Similarly with the former RTC’s, Institutes of Technology around the country. But I think that main ‘mall’ type space in DCU is alright. In Bolton Street, there was no opportunity to make a good external space, so they opted instead for a grand atrium idea, which is worth visiting. In Angier Street there is a grand central courtyard, which isn’t even used, and very little other gesture towards public open space. In Kevin Street, nearby, they have tied together a mess of buildings quite favorably with a nice new hard landscaped courtyard now. Worth taking a look. You should try the little entrance on the side street, which is the one most used by the students now I think. Making the front entrance a bit underused now I think.

I have not been to Cathal Brugha Street in ages now, but I wouldn’t expect much out of it really. MOLA seem to have a fine portfolio of educational projects at this stage, have a look here:

http://www.murrayolaoire.com/education/projects/projectsindex2.html

No attempt there is made to sell the UCD student centre project though – but other projects are a little bit better featured.

Be a while before this kind of thing finds it way beyond Milltown Road, here in Dublin. 🙂

http://www.cgarchitect.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=000518

Originally posted by BulldozerGirl
The problem with this forum is that the posts are squashed at the side of the screen.

Message board formats.

This is where I started off as an online message board contributor:

http://www.aceshardware.com/forum

It is a pretty radical approach to a message board design, and serves that online community of computer specialists surprisingly well indeed. Notice how you can cut in anywhere in the thread. Meaning you can have a number of parallel discussions on the same thread. The only way you know what is a new post, is by the red ‘new’ sign at the start of a new post.

Any threads you have looked at turn from blue to purple in the main message board list. The messages just move off the screen as each day goes by. You have to keep the links yourself somewhere, like in an email or somewhere, if you wish to re-visit an older thread from a month ago say.

This means the message board constantly gets flushed periodically rather like a toilet. Allowing discussion about new computer products, new articles, topics etc to take precedence all the time. I mean, I could keep adding some stupid comment to a thread of my own making every day for months to keep it at the top of this message board.

While this feature can be an advantage for some old threads like ‘The spike’ where some new piece of information breaks about it. I can see how it would ‘piss off’ regular posters a bit too, with guys like myself camping on the discussions I just wish to stay active.

Products can sometimes be introduced into the market place from the top down, while other times, introduced from the bottom up. Education is no different. The top down, is where you release a product say at €4,000 and watch it get more competitive in price as time goes on – clothes and fashions are a bit like that. As next season approaches, it tends to reduce in price. Only to become replaced by something totally new, hip and trendy.

Then with the bottom up policy – you introduce a simpler product at the bottom and watch it grow in sophistication, as more improvements and additions are contributed over time. Eventually the difference between the low-end product, and the ‘high-end’ product might be so small, as to catipult the low-end product into the high end market. I am worried that too ideas and concepts in planning, architecture and the built environment, are just being introduced from the top-down. With very little new coming in at the bottom.

I would love to see an R&D project, part in college with a masters program or something, part out of college with existing experts done into ‘architectural space’ or something. Like the way geographers seem to grab so much R&D money to do GIS, population surveys and census analysis. Architects don’t have any R&D output at all. Except in the building materials end of it, where Duncan Stewart tests glulam beams to destruction etc, etc.

The said finding from such an R&D project into ‘architectural space’ could indeed form the basis for a lecture course to undergraduates or something. So the value of the work gets recycled back into the system over and over again – instead of just sitting on a shelf in Bolton Street Library in the form of a 5th Year thesis report, never again to be used or opened. I imagine, there is probably even enough material in those said 5th year thesis reports, to mine into and actually compile an R&D project on architectural space here in Ireland or something.

But it is this whole point of recycling and churning the knowledge and learning, back into the system at various points, which I am trying to discuss. I have never heard of any year head etc, in architecture school ever heading up such an R&D project or anything. What we have in Ireland is loads of money – but money just sitting there doing nothing is of no value – not in the building industry, not in any industry either. Convert it into knowledge, expertise and ways to go forward.

Just one case, where I am familar.

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2664

I hate the way that computers were introduced into architecture from the top down in this country. Normally by some old guy at the top, about 10 years away from retirement. Instead of from the bottom up. Ironically the old guy is probably more worried about what will last for the next 12 months and just do enough ‘to get him/her by’. Indeed, the older guy might introduce something, and replace it at great expense and hassle, loss of productivity etc, every 12 months.

Whereas the younger person, might actually be more worried about how it could evolve and grow over a much longer period. Using computers as design tools was clearly a situation, in which a bit of help for R&D, masters working in college and a bit of outside help etc, that the young raw recruits could actually be the ones to bring computing into the design of architecture in this country. But it was all down by big ‘grey beards’ from the top down, who could only see a few yards in front of their own face.