garethace
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You don’t need to look at Trinity even to see disgrace of pedestrian usage/sympathetic design.
I remember doing a site over beside that old Casey building Georgian building at the end of Essex Street. The site beside the old church which is the Viking centre now. That street is absolutely dead, that area has nothing to draw people to it, and Dublin cco have insisted on using the pedestrian route through their building now as a place to put skips and park cars!
That Essex Street route, coming through Wood Quay civic offices continues right over to Pearse street as you have described has no activity either. That whole axis is terrible in comparison to the south/north axis from the Green to Parnell Square. It is amazing what cardinal points can mean isn’t it? I mean, in peoples’ mental perception of their environment, in terms of Kevin Lynch and his book called ‘Image of a City’.
I think people in Dublin see Trinity college as a useful way to define where ‘South of the river ends and the North really begins’. Unfortunately Wood Quay seems to have done just about the same thing, as has Guinnesses brewery too.
I mean Temple Bar is really the only only place along the whole length of the river currently where North and South seem to be joined somewhat – and even there they made a mess of things with the footbridge!
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?s=&postid=21596#post21596
I love the way in which Ringsend and the area around the point are connected in some small way by the bridge down there. I welcome the arrival of a new bridge though, between west link and buck bridge.
It isn’t just Trinity, the whole education thing here in Ireland is still carrying a huge amount of baggage and excess weight on all fronts.
Anyone who would try to put forward any aspect of Irish higher level education as a perfect solution, would be very foolish.
By criticising Trinity in isolation, are we somehow trying to imply that other institutions are without fault altogether?
Thread here:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?threadid=2761
Dealing with an idea, bit daft, but still an idea to ‘write a brief’ for a new improved faculty to do with the built environment.
Has the bit in the times been posted yet?
Cars passing canals at morning rush hour: 63,000.
A drop of 10% or something since 1997.
Taxis alone now form 5% almost, of all traffic in morning rush hour.
I think people are drving out to the pheriphery more and more to work etc, if this is the case.
I friend of mine who uses public transport going into town, has told me that the rush hour coming out in the evening can be much more severe than rush hour going in in mornings. Is that true?
Bit of a daft idea really, but down through the years, some very famous architects have indeed put their names to some very famous built schools of architecture. Alvar Alto I think designed the school in Finland, Mackintosh designed an art school in Glasgow, lately Bernard Tschumi, the dean of Columbia school of architecture over in New York did a lot of work there, to the school he taught in himself.
I was just hypothetically thinking about all the potential elements, i.e. Library space, exhibition space, AAI lecture theatre, perhaps UCD and Bolton Street courses located close together on a single campus – allowing better interaction of ideas and so forth – i.e. creating a good synergy about the place. Perhaps a jointly owned nice computer lab and so forth. Basically anything that would make the experience of doing architecture here in Dublin a more worthwhile one.
Perhaps even link it up with other courses in planning, landscape design, geography, who knows. But I think it could be a really internationally renounded centre – if some Getty or someone actually landed us all with a truck load of money in the morning! 🙂 I can see loads of problems with this, but I am just playing around with the idea in my head, as to the possibilities etc, it would create.
BTW, I should mention, that schools of music, schools of art and schools of architecture often come up as exercises in school for architectural students to do – especially for architectural student competitions etc, etc, etc. But what Archiseek web site has done, for me, is highlight how many strands of education currently present now in Ireland, have no point of contact whatsoever, and seem to be living in increasing isolation from each other as time goes on. Archiseek is just a vision of what integration is all about I think.
I am just trying to think, what would be the ideal brief one could write for such a place. We often think of advertising our courses in commerce, accounting and law around the world, to places as distant as CHina etc. But for some reason, I don’t think many would pay or want to come to Dublin to study architecture/planning/built environment subjects.
Just found this project over at: http://urban.cccb.org/
Again, I would have to ask the question, what strategic significance does Carlisle Pier have? Or more to the point, what strategic significance could other locations around the capital have some day?
Malmö, Sweden’s third city, has historically been an industrial centre with a lower middle-class population. It now has more immigrants than any other city in Sweden. With the economic decline of the 1980s, when many of its big industries closed down, Malmö, in the south of the country, began a period of large-scale investment in policies aiming at urban regeneration and offering a better quality of life to its citizens. In 1995, a town-planning project aimed to bring about the regional integration of the city and to act as the vehicle of its future growth. The inauguration, in 1997, of a university zone in the city centre, connected to the port and railway station, was the start of a process of urban dynamism and the acquisition of a progressively higher cultural profile. In 2000, the opening of a new bridge connecting the city with Copenhagen represented a new geographic positioning that brought other opportunities for communication and work, notably stimulating the city’s future expectations in the process and meaning that the initiative that had begun in strategic planning would continue.
In 1997, the city acquired seafront land that was mainly in disuse. Artificially recovered from the sea between 1948 and 1987, this land offered the opportunity to imagine a new maritime façade for the city in an area that is crucial for the revitalisation of the city centre and for developing a new role on the regional scale.
Another site I tend to like is this one:
With plenty of schemes all over the globe.
Another good point to make: total lack of a dedicated top class architectural exhibition place in the capital. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but preferably I think it should be located beside or as a part of the architectural school.
Opinions?
Have any of you favourite schools of architecture designed around the world? I am just thinking of the likes of Trinity who run a cottage industry out of importing foreign students/fee to their facilites. I wonder if we had top class facilities here in this country could we potentially attract the same?
The Quantity surveyor thing – do you have them in Canada? – that was dragged straight into the 55 post thread at CG Architect – like out of nowhere and reminds me of those times in college doing interactive projects between architects, engineers and surveyors – in a discussion about CG visualisation, of all places!
The one important thing, which did come of the 55 post thread over at CG Architect, in the Finished work forum, was that situations for the architectural profession vary to a high degree in different parts of the world.
You are writing your replies from Canada – I have worked with Architects from Canada over here, in their fifties who were using more computers back in the 1970s, than we are using them now here in Ireland.
Just said I would include this too:
Another example, and one of the first times way back in 1997 that I ever saw computer visualisation used in architectural practice at all.
A big American Tech company were outsourcing their operations over here to Ireland and were gong to build a brand new state of the art factory space. The architect came up with a design worth 12 million pounds, which had this very nice space frame roof construction. The building was probably big enough to justify the cost of the space frame components etc, but it would have cost only 11 million to build the same building with a standard flat roof construction, using girders etc.
But visually speaking, the space frame just looked awesome, out of this world, by comparison with the flat roof, girder solution. So the architect in a last ditch effort to sell his ‘space frame’ concept to the client went out on a limb and did something almost unprecedented in Ireland here at the time – he paid almost 5,000 pounds I think to commission some digital artist to do a CG render showing the building ‘as it would look’ with the space frame.
None of us had ever seen this technique of representation ever before, and we all ganged around him in the office one day, to see the new CG visualisation when it finally arrived. Anyhow, the excitement was short lived, as the client would not go that extra mile for a space frame, but it might have been worth it, dunno.
Anyhow, it is an interesting early example of the roots of visualisation and its use in the architectural profession – in that case it helped the said architect to really argue his point much better, than he could have done without it.
But thinking back upon this instance now, it is amazing how closely the visualisation and quantity surveyor, cost issues are linked together. Just in the debate I had raging with Nisus and the boys over at CG Architect, about the over designed balconies.
i am actually appaled at the reactions u have been getting brian. i would suggest backing up your drawings on ur hard drive if they do that.
Exactly how many young architects starting off in practice for the first time in their lifes do you think are going to know what a hard drive even is?
I regularly have to show people how to format a floppy disk, find the C: drive in their computer and show they how to save a document. I still think it is a bit beyond the average abilities of young architects out their in practice to prempt such disasters occuring, in the manner you have described.
In the case of files disappearing from the main file server – I had a CDROM backup of all my work in that case. But I didn’t even bother to restore the files to the file server. Because the damage was already done in my opinion – if people want to do things like that at all – why even bother?
The client phoned up asking for a print of the drawings, and the said building was already at foundation DPC level and my architects firm had to just tell the client, ‘we have no drawings’.
Of course, they did suceed in making me look bad in this instance, in the eyes of my particular employer. But then, I believe that everyone in the practice should be playing on the same team at least, otherwise it is hopeless. The client is just paying you to hold very expensive personal arguments, and that is in general the service which clients are receiving in a lot of cases today.
Something even more badly needed too, in alot of cases – the whole IT thing is a pretty mess at the moment in the architectural profession here in this country.
You are talking to someone, who got kicked off a job once, for making chairs in a CAD file red instead of blue. The fact that I changed it in 5 minutes didn’t manage to change their minds. If that action wasn’t a ‘knive in the back’ I don’t know what is. Two months worth of my drawing work in CAD format completely disappeared from the main file server, only a while before that.
Basically the architectural technicians love opportunities to take a good ‘cut’ at young architects and architectural students. In the case of CAD in offices, they are having a field day – the computer presents such an ideal ‘camouflage’ condition to sucessfully mount gorilla-sytle attacks on young architects. Where the boss hasn’t a clue generally speaking what is going on, and only has the word of his/her trusted authority in the matter – his/her architectural technician.
In the matter of supervision, the project architects are now flying completely blind in this situation. Most worrying of all, is the ‘panic reaction’ by architect employers now, to only employ technicians period, because architects aren’t seen to be able to use these machines at all. Making the entry level jobs for a young architect, very difficult to find indeed, by comparison with the said positions for young technicians. If I could choose again, which course to actually do, I know which one I would almost definitely go for.
