garethace

I should relate the above post, with this piece from Irish Construction magazine’s web site, about PFI. As schools are another form of public building, which are in constant need of work and renovation, like public leisure centres often are. The problem with any of these building types, is that they can be reduced down to the level of a ‘science’, built in rapid sucession according to some prototypical design, and it doesn’t leave a lot of scope for architects to be involved. You can get some idea from the Leisure Centre post above, just how important the scientific side of building is. Funny thing, is how both Herman Hertzberger, from Holland and Carme Pinos from Spain identified the school as an important building type, when they spoke in Dublin to the AAI.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

As the Government’s enthusiasm for Public Private Partnership grows, Ministers will do well to study the experiences of their contemporaries in Britain. The British Government is rolling out an extensive network of education facilities under its Public Finance Initiative (PFI).

However PFI has come under scrutiny for a number of reasons. Because schools are designed and built in batches, there are concerns that standard school layouts cannot meet the unique needs of different communities.

Facilities management issues may also overshadow education provision. As well as this, British architects are critical of the programme’s lack of creative design.

As our spiralling population (five million people predicted for 2020) puts incredible demands on the education system, a quicker roll-out of school buildings is urgently needed here. But is PPP the way forward?

Gee, is global culture really that predictable nowadays? It sounds as if you can describe a city such as Dublin from across the Atlantic, better than most people I know here can. The city as designed for automobiles. Wow. So close, to what Dublin is. Thanks to an inflated importance of the traffic engineer, and a lack of architects or other ‘spatial designers’ being involved in the debate. If there even was a debate. As a general point, and to make debate possible at all – I feel strongly that architects should be encouraged while in school to understand how code affects the environment we live in. Visa versa, I think that people educated in writting code for urban places, should have a basic appreciation how design can somehow make it all fit together. You do need the designer, otherwise it is pointless. There are certain things you cannot ‘code’ your way around. Otherwise, you are left with gaps, where things should join up. Take the following for instance,

In the historic cores the parking ratios are less and everyone complains about the lack of parking. Usually some behemoth shopping center(s) is sitting close serving the core business of the community and providing lots of free parking.

I think that is why projects like the LUAS, lightrail system here in Dublin have gained such a position of importance in the recent years – to somehow try and redress the imbalance created by the suburban betemoth shopping centre, and make city cores accessbile once more. As if the city core, is a place where all people should want to go. Dublin bus company failed to do anything much, after decades of campaigning, advertising and influence over the operation of the city. Today, Dublin bus has competition in the form of a new younger upstart, the Railway Procurement Ajency or RPA, for short. Which has become a very sexy and powerful institution in its own right, with its own attitude and way of doing things. The unfortunate thing about ‘competition’ between these too gorillas, is that wherever light rail stations are made, you can associate that with a tendency for Dublin bus to pull out of the area, and leave it all to the light rail. They are afraid of direct confrontation, and have become territorial with each other. Each one sticking to areas, where they can play up their own advantages. This seems the exact opposite to what you want. As pointed out by other posters here on the thread – you do need bus and rail systems interlocking with each one another, in loving, cooperative embraces. Rolling gently about in the dense undergrowth of urbanity, like two mating gorillas, as opposed to territorial competitors. To obtain the most efficient and best overall use from public investment in transportation. In a time of rising inflation, Ireland has a duty to cooperate when and where possible.

It needs to be pointed out, that one function of LUAS and Dublin bus has been allowed to overshadow all others. Over zealous use of PR to wage war on both sides. The apparent ‘linking’ of shoppers to the various retail centres. This one function, has been ‘done to death’, especially around the holiday season, for ‘publicity’ reasons. The over-emphasis on that function, has prevented people from looking much deeper into the possibilities presented by transportation in our city, of allowing the debate to take place. Emphasising one particular ‘cool’ function of transportation above others. Going to high street at weekends, or this-centre-or-that, to spend your weeks earnings on ‘all new shit’. This is really a debasement of the concept of public transportation and the very people who want to use it. It displays a depressing Irish characteristic, of seeing everything from behind the wheel of an automobile. In Dublin city, we are bringing thousands of foreign workers in every year. We thank them for coming here, by giving them a pretty useless transportation system. Sometimes, with a loosy attitude towards service to boot. In Ireland, we are guilty of having blinkers to transportation. The car is for getting to work, while the LUAS or bus is a cool novelty item, for going to parties in the evening or going shopping at weekends. This is an over-simplification of the whole problem, I feel. What is lacking in Ireland now, is an organisation or individual with real insight, into how different modes of transport need to fit together.

Yeah, the Dublin bus company has been around while. In later day, the bus service would have tried to fill a similar role to that of light rail now – trying to link up shoppers with their favourite high street. As a result of that narrow-ness of thinking, we have a series of bus-passges which are designed to carry people from the car-oriented suburb, into the high street. Like any project, transportation being no different – the important thing seems to be getting people to work and think as a team, rather than all pulling in all different ways. What we do have is governments who regularly use transportation to orchestrate large scale PR, on TV, on radio and in print. I began this thread to mention the behaviour of the taxi driving community in Foster Place, trying to establish their iron grip on that territory. I have discussed the personal automobile, the surburban shopping centre, Dublin bus and LUAS light rail system. I think you can agree, that urban transportation resembles a study into a gorilla behaviour in the jungle, the hard-fought battle for survival.

Starbucks likes to nest among these places on corners as well as at transit locations.

I also noticed something with ‘record’ stores – (gee, I still call them record stores, even though they are really CD stores nowadays) sometimes when in the city centres – the big HMV idea doesn’t work at all. I notice where they have stores on the main streets here – selling thousands of CDs and DVDs, the que at the counter is a mile long. Just walk down the road, and drop into a small store and you can usually get what you want, without the que. So it isn’t always handy to be big in the music retail game. I mean, if you are even inside the HMV store itself, and are waiting in a que, for ten minutes to get to a counter – that is just not fun to me. And being big, on main street, they are probably losing business as a result. Because they have to staff the place, just the same, on slow days. While on busy days, the existing staff aren’t able to cope with the sudden surge in customer volumes. That is why I think online, is probably suited to selling music – because digital network bandwidth is the only thing able to cope with surges and drops in customer demand.

While I am on the topic, of all things global, I might as well mention construction too. Which appears to be going the way of prefabrication and about getting greater economy of scale, with more predictable quality/costs/timescales. The building industry here in Ireland was organised around a lot of separate trades for a long, long time. This makes projects hard to schedule and predict in terms of time and cost. You are seeing a lot of projects, re-designed to avoid, bottlenecks and time overruns. We will probably end up with a different Irish construction industry than before.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Any one of you urban savy planning types, want to try and define a ‘clamper’ for me? ? ? Or perhaps provide a link to their website?

🙂

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Howley Harrington’s revised Temple Bar plan included mention of Foster Place. As far as I remember, there was talk of opening it up to plug into the rest of TB, but just how this would be achieved is unclear to me. All of the buildings are of merit and part of the charm of FP is its enclosed nature- I’d be cautious about any measure that diluted this characteristic.

Interesting observations there indeed, …plugging into Temple Bar, now there is a thought indeed. Long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away before the abomination of private greed that turned out to be Temple Bar, people imagined Temple Bar would be this pristine and other-worldly location, where people would not behave like people, but like some breed of cosmopolitan, urban-aware, sophisticated social animal. The truth turned out to be very different, and now we are all wiser, and understand what ‘plugging into Temple Bar’ would actually entail. I mean look at Grafton Street, black with people all day long. A real pity how Grafton Street was raped with people. If you were to link Foster’s Place with Temple Bar, no doubt, Foster’s Place would be raped too.

This little gem of a street should not be connected to TB. The fact it’s a cul de sac is part of its charm.

Similarly, well said. We should try to mention here, the behaviour around the Central Bank, and its use as some kind of teenage hang-out area. Usually, I associate that behaviour with a teenage pop concert or rock festival. But in front of the Central Bank, it appears you can have the same behaviour without any concert at all. Maybe we should think about teenagers, and their need to gather and be in one big open air space, in the way we design and build new parts of the city. It seems at a certain age, these young just need to get together and interact a whole pile, in ways, that cannot be accomodated through the use of nightclub, and other quite large interior spaces.

No doubt at all, if Fosters Place became a linking space, it would become ‘owned’ by some other tribe or sub-culture. It would be like exchanging the taxi-drivers for some other monopoly of use. I cannot understand it, but the behaviour of teenagers screaming and shouting in front of Central Bank has escalated a lot since the hoarings went up around there. It is quite an interesting study in adolescent human behaviour. It wasn’t as bad when the skateboarders owned that space. I suspect strongly too, that the teenagers from the old O’Connell Street, have adopted Dame Street, in front of Central Bank, as their new abode.

The Wesrmoreland St/College Green redevelopment will be very interesting. I really hope Luas line A is chosen and private motor vehicles are excorcised from this axis, along with O’Connell St/Bridge. The whole area would make a magnificent pedestrian plaza with Foster Place being a little shaded haen in the summer and a cosy enclosed space in winter, imagine those trees outside the ex AIB building as a bar/restaurant all decorated in twinkly xmas lights, lovely.

I am all for keeping car access to Foster’s place. They manage to do it in many of the best European cities. But there seems to be something about ‘how’ the taxi driving occupation evolved in Dublin city, and similarly the bus transportation system evolved, that seems to be about dragging places down. Making them into the lowest common denominator – for some strange reason, people who drive vehicles around our cities seem to have pure contempt for their urban environment. You can see this similarly in suburban villages and areas, where if there is a video store or laundrette alongside a road, it is free-for-all for anyone in a mini-van with two kids to use the footpath as a parking lot. I understand the climate is bad, peoples’ lives are hectic and keeping kids in your sight is paramount. But something tells me there is more to peoples behaviour and lack of respect for urban places, when they are sitting behind the wheel of a n automobile.

You can already see the pressure that Habitat is having on the pavement outside as more people fight for a limited space. And plans are afoot to open a second store in the EBS premises beside Habitat.

The very worst these days, for my money, is the bottom of Grafton Street pedestrian route, with a busy bus route intersecting right over it going up to Suffolk Street. Using places like Dame Street and Suffolk Street, as bus stops, in the way we do, is not working very well. Just to complicate matters then,… and most of this was true of O’Connell Street in the bad old days,… was the taxi ranks getting ‘stuck’ in there aswell. In case, traffic plus pedestrians wasn’t hard enough to do,… you throw in bus stops and taxi ranks, and you really do have the chaos and mess that is, and has always been my experience of Dublin city center. I mean, at the bottom of Grafton Street, Fosters place, the middle of College Green and O’Connell Street in the olden days, were all taxi and bus parks, nothing else really. This is what you get when you form your whole ‘thinking’ around the internal combustion engine. If all you have is a hammer, then every problem becomes a nail.

I don’t think Foster Place should be linked into Temple Bar whatsoever – it’s a charming little street, why spoil it by linking it into our “British Stag Night containment unit”. Trtust me the malignancy of chain restaurants and theme bars would soon creep in. The old AIB would make a fantastic high end restaurant, but it wouldn’t take off if it was tarred with the Temple Bar brush

All very true, sad, but true. As I mention above, when we were all looking at the Temple Bar concept, when it was still just a concept in the mid 1990s, we were all still very, very naive. We considered that in Temple Bar, people would somehow behave better than you normally expect them to. That has not proven the case, and a lot of very trendy architects, who won awards in Temple Bar for their design – protested afterwards, about the facts, of how badly people can behave! As if people should behave better, just to preserve the dignity of the lovely ‘designed’ environment they are in. What I mean, is that in the early days of the Temple Bar framework stage, everyone looked at Temple Bar as some benign, inner urban development, which did not need any containment. People were suddenly, going to become so well behaved, they would naturally ‘respect’ their environment and surroundings. And all the Architects could build more Temple Bar areas, and win themselves more awards from the AAI.

I was watching the movie ‘Doom’ last night, and found it funny, to notice the same issue there. The containment of creatures, with 24 chromosomes, who tried to break out of containment on Mars and come down to Earth via a space travelling machine. It would be a shame, if the 24 chromosome creatures in Temple Bar were to break through into Foster’s Place and infect everyone else with the same genetic mods. Nice point about the stone setts too btw. I will tell you, I give this one to the planning brains here. I didn’t see the potential destruction of Foster’s place, via linking it to Temple Bar etc, etc. I think the sensibilities of a planner, here, have proven to be more effective than those of an architect. In Temple Bar, the sensibilities of architects alone, were proven insufficient. This is a good place to mention, that Temple Bar, as an artistic and cultural quarter, (I know, don’t laugh) was an idea that came from cities like Paris in the 1980s. That ‘concept’ was championed by Charles Haughey, then Taoiseach.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

OMG, whoever designed that site, doesn’t no squat about web space.

Calendar view is gone, so now the new site design actually increases the likelihood of anyone getting the date, month, and even year completely wrong for any event! Furthermore, as a means of reminding oneself, when browsing through the AAI’s web site, now even the copy and paste text feature is totally unavailable, so forget about those last minute reminders via email to friends and oneself – you have to wait for this flash business to load up, and hope you manage to navigate correctly. It is only ‘hit and miss’ you don’t scroll past the next event and miss it completely – on a page assumed to keep one informed of upcoming events. I hope who ever designed and planned this web site, doesn’t sell their services too often designing buildings for clients. This is what I mean about aesthetics – if this were a house, I would probably like it for the first 5 minutes and curse the designer for the rest of my life. Whatever functionality there was in the old site – and it was enough – has been washed down the toilet for the sake of a flash gimick. Nice one AAI.

Final word, face it AAI, if you cannot manage this kind of endeavour properly, don’t even try. Stick to basics, and get back to basics. And above all, please get into to mindset of feedback – whenever you go doing a new website, you can’t just ‘throw something up’ overnight,… when you launch a new web space like this, after building it and launching it, you need at least a month or more of constant feedback from users, actually using the web space, to improve the product and make it function in some manner acceptable to those users. What the AAI has now for their website is a complete spagetti mess, it is almost impossible to navigate through. I only barely managed after a couple of goes, to actually find out when the next event was on, and I am still not sure given that fancy 10/11, or 11/10, minimalist descriptions of the date – yeah, may look cool, but functionality wise – s****.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

what about the fancy new flash site over here:

http://www.irish-architecture.com/aai/

I guess I was never a flash kind of guy, since most sites I tend to like are very plain indeed. But I guess, one has to hand it to the AAI this time, nice effort, looks quite nice. One complaint though, when you click on an event, and then go ‘back’, it takes you to the top of the list all over again and boy does this get to be annoying. Maybe this message might find its way back to the AAI, and they can take a look at how this works. Gee, I wonder if the AAI should invest some effort in making feed-back loops. Most vibrant online communities I have known, when you do a new web site, the feed back is almost instant, and form a debating point, all by itself for at least a week. Any thoughts?

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Other very interesting articles in the back issues page:

http://www.masstransitmag.com/script/metasearchstart.shtm

Brian O’ Hanlon.