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An often quoted architectural text from the seventies, Complexity and Contradiction, by Robert Venturi, expresses the point about hierarchies, and such in the following way.
Cleanth Brooks refers to Donne’s art as ‘having it both ways’ but, he says, ‘most of us in this latter day, cannot. We are disciplined in the tradition either-or, and lack the mental agility – to say nothing of the maturity of attitude – which would allow us to indulge in the finer distinctions and the more subtle reservations permitted by the tradition of both-and.’
The tradition ‘either-or’ has characterised orthodox modern architecture: a sun screen is probably nothing else; a support is seldom an enclosure; a wall is not violated by window penetrations but is totally interrupted by glass; program functions are exaggeratedly articulated into wings or segregated separate pavilions. Even ‘flowing space’ has implied being outside when inside, and inside when outside, rather than both at the same time. Such manifestations of articulation and clarity are foreign to an architecture of complexity and contradiction, which tends to include ‘both-and’ rather than exclude ‘either-or.’
Nice book, worth a look some time.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Historical experts are aghast at the proposals. One group of 21 British archaeologists wrote to the Irish Times, reminding the Irish authorities that “driving a four-lane motorway through the valley will destroy the integrity of this ancient landscape for ever.”
I guess three and four dimensional perception of these problems is still quite a ways beyond our reach as spatial strategists and spatial designers. Compared perhaps to other nations such as Britain, with centuries of tradition in building up large industrial centres, navigating the world via shipping, air and land, and building much social, political and economic infrastructure along the way. Lets remember, Britain managed to build up countries as far away as India. I mean, they have been doing for centuries, what we are just beginning to do for the first time now. Except, we never had any colonies to expand into either – I guess the ‘Irishman’ was always the guy who followed the Empire, with his faithful pick and shovel. It is a pretty large jump going from that, to transforming a whole landscape. Just because you have the means to do something, doesn’t imply that you are ready to go and do it well.
Which just serves to make me even more aghast, that in our spatial design educational programmes in this country, we are mostly still concerned with a kind of competition format of education – a merit system – where you encourage students to ‘beat one another’ in the design studio. Rather than just admitting to ourselves first of all, our complete lack of any discussion and tradition in these kinds of issues – and just start from a very basic point of view – the first principles, which are obviously going to be new to every one who calls themselves an Irish man or woman. It is one of the crucial things about the Archiseek project endeavour – it began with discussion – not as the AAI awards sort of idea, where you begin with a competition. Where a nice group of middle class individuals gather together to try and decide who has just built the coolest rear garden extension. Discussion is quite useful, and should be the first step,… as many of the people who ‘might’ have anything important to contribute, may not have grown up in any environment of discussion to do with spatial issues.
Really the gap now, between politians on one end, with absolutely no spatial training whatsoever, carving up actual landscapes. And ‘Architects’ on the other end, altering a rear garden extension, in a pleasant middle class suburb – and entering it for an award, in competition with other rear garden extensions – that gap has just grown far too wide today. And to be quite honest, it is justs a laugh.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Extract from David Green’s excellent work, The Serendipity Machine. The whole notion of Serendipity, is to do with the combination of different things, and to see how unexpected the conclusions are, as a result of this ‘serendipity effect’. If you had much stronger interaction of planning and bus transport information, then you would see the effect of serendipity working much more. Look at any web page to any local city or county council, and what hits you first is the strong hierarchial nature of the organisation – an kind of organisation which is strongly responsible, for how the physical environment is being created.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
The Nature of Hierarchies.
Hierarchies are familiar to everyone. Many human organisations, such as armies and corporations, are hierarchic in nature. Engineering systems, as well as complex software, usually consist of discrete modules with distinct functions. Large modules contain smaller ones, so forming a hierarchy of structure.
Hierarchies play a crucial role in complexity. The formation of modular structure is an essential mechanism for the emergence of order in many complex systems. For instance, the cells of a growing embryo begin to differentiate at a very early stage, forming modules that eventually grow into separate limbs and organs.
Hierarchies have an implied order, with a root node being the top (or bottom) of the tree. In systems composed of many elements, this order arises from the two ways in which hierarchies often form: lumping and splitting. Lumping involves objects coming together to form new objects (e.g., birds joining to form a flock). In splitting, a single object (say a system, class or organisation) breaks into two or more parts. Lumping and splitting are also associated with (respectively) the conceptual operations of generalisation and specialisation. For example, in architecture a building is a very general class of construction, on which includes much more specialised classes, such as a house.
In a tree structure, communication between elements is confined to pathways up and down the tree. That is, for data to travel from any node A to another node B, it must move up the tree until it reaches a node that lies above both A and B. it then passes down the tree to B. in a large system, a tree structure is an efficient way to ensure full connectivity. The ability of hierarchies to connect nodes efficiently makes communication via the Internet feasible.
In management, hierarchies arise from the dual desires to simplify and to control complex organisations. They simplify by the divide and rule approach. A manager at any node need only be concerned with the nodes immediately above and below them. The model also restricts communication between arbitrary nodes in the tree. This enhances control, but can limit the passage of crucial information, thus inhibiting responsiveness, efficiency and innovation.
In engineering, hierarchies take the form of modules. As we have seen above, the advantage of modularization is that it reduces complexity. Any large, complex system, such as an aircraft or factory, may consist of thousands or even millions of individual parts. A common source of system failure is undesirable side effects of internal interactions. The possibility of problems grows exponentially with the number of parts, but can be virtually impossible to anticipate.
The solution is to organise large systems into discrete subsystems (modules) and to limit the potential for interactions between the subsystems. This modularity not only reduces the potential for unplanned interactions, but also simplifies system development and maintenance. For instance, in a system of many parts, there is always a risk that some part will fail. This is why engineers build redundancy into crucial systems. Modularity also makes it easier to trace faults. In some systems (e.g., computer hardware), entire modules can be replaced so that the system can continue to operate while the fault is traced and corrected. In computing, the idea of modules has led to object-oriented programming, in which each object encapsulates a particular function and can be reused in many different contexts.
An important effect of modularity is to reduce combinatorial complexity – useful in many kinds of problem solving. To take a simple example, if an urban transport system has (say) 100 stops, then it essential that travellers can look up the cost of travel between any combination of stops. Now, if every trip has a different price (based on distance), then a complete table of fares needs to hold 5050 entries (assuming that the distance A to B is the same as that of B to A). This number makes any printed table unwieldy. On the other hand, if the stops are grouped into (say) five zones, with every stop within a zone considered equivalent, then the table would need at most 15 entries, which would make it compact and easy to scan.
What is true of computers is also true of cities. To support huge concentrations of people, cities have to provide a wide range of services: housing, transport, distribution of food and other commodities, water, sewage, waste disposal, power and communications. On top of these basic amenities, there are social infrastructures such as education, hospitals, emergency services and shopping centres. The interactions of so many systems, combined with external factors such as rapid growth, technological development and social change underlie many problems in modern society.
Although hierarchies reduce complexity, they can introduce brittleness into a system. That is, removing a single node, or cutting a single connection, breaks the system into two separate parts. Every node below the break becomes cut off. This brittleness occurs because hierarchies are minimally connected. There is no redundancy in the connections. For instance, the Internet is organised as a hierarchy of domains. If a domain name server fails, then every computer in that domain is cut off from the Internet. Centralised services, such as city power supplies, also suffer from this problem.
The new market will link Henry Street with Smithfield.
That is typical of the stupid statements you often hear cropping up, in relation to planning of the built environment in Dublin city. By making this very statement, all you are doing, is saying, that roughly ten percent, the most able and fitest and bravest beings in circulation around the city streets of Dublin today (street gouriers would form a large part of that ten percent btw) are the ones, this ‘re-development plan’ is being aimed at. That is a heck of a lot of time, resources and effort to throw at just 10% of the users of Dublin’s city centre. Seriously, most pedestrians, the major bulk of the foot fall on the streets of Dublin today, cannot get much beyond a quarter mile in any direction, or even less. That is why bus transport has survived to the extent that it has at all, in fabric of Dublin city. Despite it’s many bad features like waiting and dirtiness, pollution, traffic conjestion.
Bus transport pinpoints you at a certain destination on arrival and departure… bus transport has been very useful for old people living within a mile radius of the city centre… all that happens is the less energetic of the pedestrians, walk within a few hundred yards of the bus terminus stop and then back to that bus stop again. That is really what the city centre means currently, whole loads of buses, blocking up long stretches of some of the finest streets in the capital, with queues of people who don’t walk anywhere other than the nearest doughnut shop. In the daytime especially, buses just manage to serve a very aging population who live a half mile away from O’Connell Street. So that most convenience stores in the half mile radius of Dublin city center are ghastly affairs – because the local population, gets a bus into Dunnes on Henry St.
To even pretend, that the vast bulk of city centre day-users are going to walk from Henry St. to Smithfield is a big joke. Since, most of them probably just got a bus from Smithfield, to get to the city centre, in the first place. Now if a bus were to stop in Smithfield, and allow people to walk from Smithfield as far as Henry Street, that would be much more interesting. That would present some very serious and real architectural opportunities. But no doubt Dublin Bus would object strenuously, afraid to lose revenues from that bus line – and therein lies the trouble. Because Dublin Bus is so focussed on earning the maximum revenues, staying afloat and viewing itself as an island, a ‘self-sustaining unit’. Dublin Bus sees fit to plant every bus terminus, for every major bus number, right smack bang in the middle of the conjestion somewhere in Dublin City Centre. To hell with everything else. Being awarded this kind of unique freedom to do what it wants practically, Dublin Bus still complains, that it cannot make any money!
Having destroyed some of the best streets in Dublin, with lines of buses parked there. I find DCC often have the right kit, just put on backways. DCC should know that much, since it contains both a planning department and a bus transport department, known of whom talk to each other obviously. This is what continues to annoy me about Dublin City Councils strongly ‘hierarchial’ organisation. This hierarchy of organisation is common to how engineers often look at design problems, and look at how to solve them. To break down the problem into smaller parts, and thereby tackle complexity – the enemy. Whereas to engage properly in spatial design, you need complexity. You need more often to dispense with those hierarchies, and to get information flowing around more freely between various departments.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
That a country of 5 million people (inc. the North) (basically the size of South London) cannot plan its physical environment (which we all claim as so precious) in a sustainable fashion is a sorry indictment of politicians, local councillors, voters, planners, money grabbing gombeen men and the apathetic public at large. Contrary to the above I don’t think that the Irish have any real feel for nor commitment to a sustainable urban and rural future.
Good point, needs to be said more often I feel. These ideas are good, but often forgotten at crucial times, when big decisions are being made with regard to future planning. I need to constant repeat and repeat, the most basic steps in regard to designing good architecture to myself, every day – you think that they stick, but really they need to be refreshed all of the time – so I don’t expect many planners remember the basics either, without a constant refreshing on regular basis. Very true, but unfortunately rarely observed, in either architecture or in planning.
I have friends they have bought starter houses out in Kildare and to a certain extent I can sympathise given the cost in Dublin. But what are young working childless couples doing in a three bed houses with front and back gardens (they never use or concrete over) which they basically occupy from 7pm to 7am. A complete waste of space. The demographic of Ireland is such that two parent three odd child families are very very much in the minority yet we keep building and buying such inflexible space.
Again, what I like a lot about your post, and often when guys like Frank McDonald from the Times talks on radio etc, is you are just issuing very obvious (what should be obvious) statements or guides to proper approachs to design. You aren’t saying much out of the ordinary – but sometimes, I guess in the attempt to create stuff which is ‘extraordinary’ (trumpets and big drums) we can just forget the ordinary stuff, which is far, far better for design and planning in general. And, you know, if you take a lot of the quoted points, in this post, on board at all – we here in Ireland could be contributing to problems in the future – problems this country is going to have to deal with at some stage or other.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Another quick quote from Neil Gershenfeld, that I like to interpret in the context of design of spatial environments.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I vividly recall a particular trip from my childhood because it was when I invented the laptop computer. I had seen early teletype terminals; on this trip I accidently opened a book and turned on its side and realised that there was room on the lower page for a small typewriter keyboard, and on the upper page for a small display screen. I didn’t have a clue how to make such a thing, or what I would do with it, but I knew that I had to have one. I had earlier invented a new technique for untying shoes, by pulling on the ends of the laces; I was puzzled and suspicious when my parents claimed prior knowledge of my idea. It would take me many more years to discover that Alan Kay had anticipated my design for the laptop and at that time was really inventing the portable personal computer at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre.
Despite the current practice of putting the best laptops in the hands of business executives rather than children, my early desire to use a laptop is much closer to Alan’s reasons for creating one. Alan’s project was indirectly inspired by the work of the Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, who from the 1920s onward spent years and years studying children. He came to the conclusion that what adults see as undirected play is actually a very structured activity. Children work in a very real sense as little scientists, continually positing and testing theories for how the world works. Through their endless interactive experiments with the things around them, they learn how the physical world works, and then how the world of ideas works. The crucial implication of Piaget’s insight is that learning cannot be restricted to classroom hours, and cannot be encoded in lesson plans; it is a process that is enabled by children’s interaction with their environment.
There is a much wider issue, you need to absorb in order to fully grasp what the shopping centre is about. As I often say about urban design, the worse thing possible that you can do, is to just view its facets in isolation. That is typically the sort of ’cause-effect’ mentality we now have in urban design. Running a country and considering urban design, have something in common, it is about the interaction of so many influences, it is all just one big system.
So just bearing this in mind, I am now going to demonstrate, how developments in the urban environment of Dublin are inter-related in their nature. Indeed, how the Financial Services industry development, the closure of banking premises all over the city,… or just the plain lack of investment in the existing banking premises,… and the idea of a Shopping centre retail space,… as just a type of financial service,… for ordinary joe soap people who do not deal in equities and assets, but rather in commodities and consumables.
The key thing to understanding all of this, is the transformation from a world based upon atoms and physical things – to one based on bits and information flow.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
The Gold Standard.
Just after World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement fixed a conversion rate between dollars adn gold at $35 an ounce, and in turn set exchange rates between the dollar and other currencies. The U.S. government was obliged to convert dollars into gold upon request, using the cache held at Fort Knox. In 1971, saddled by a dwindling gold supply, a persistent recession, and an expensive war in Vietnam, President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Since then, the value of currencies has been fixed solely by what the markets think they are worth. We maintain a polite fiction that money stands for a valuable commodity, but it now represents nothing more than beliefs.
The implications of the end of the gold standard reach far beyond the passionate debates of that time, because of an apparently unrelated event that was quietly happening in a handful of laboratories: in 1971 the ARPANET entered into regular service. This was a project supported by the U.S. Defense Department Advanced Research Projects (DARPA) to create a computer network that had no central control and multiple ways to route messages, just the thing to survive a nuclear attack. In 1971 it had all of fifteen host machines. Its original research function was soon forgotten as the network filled with people sending E-mail, and connecting more computers. With millions of hosts on it by 1989, DARPA gave up on trying to manage the experiment, and the Internet was born.
At the end of the gold standard, computing was done by relatively isolated mainframes; computers were needed to record financial trends but did not create them. With the arrival of instantaneous global connectivity and distributed computing, money can now travel at the speed of light, anywhere, anytime, changing its very nature. The only physical difference between a million and a billion electronic dollars is the storage of ten extra bits to fit the zeros; money has become one more kind of information.
The Electronic Penny.
After all, what could be more useless than a penny? They travel between bowls on shop counters and jars on bureaus because it’s too much trouble to take them back to the bank. There’s a solid economic argument that the net cost of handling pennies exceeds their worth, therefore they should be eliminated as the smallest currency unit. The future of the penny does not look bright.
Qualify that: the future of a physical penny does not look bright. The value of electronic pennies is just beginning to be appreciated. On the Internet the packets of data representing financial exchanges are a drop in the bucket compared to high-bandwidth media such as video. THere’s plenty of room to send much more of them. The total amount of money in circulation can’t go up, but the size of a transaction can certainly go down. The overhead in selling a product sets a floor on what people are willing to purchase. Either you buy a CD, or you don’t. If, however, the CD arrives as bits on the network, you could pay for it a track at a time. Rather than buying an expensive video game cartridge, you could be billed for each level of the game as you play. Your taxes that pay for garbage collection, or highway maintenance, could be collected each time you take out the trash or drive your car.
Value derived from the market.
Stepping back to recognise that it is more natural to view electronic money as comprising the combination of data describing quantity and algorithms specifying valuation, it then becomes possible to create combinations that are useful for purposes far from high finance. Think what could happen if e-cash contained the means for ordinary people to add rules. A child’s allowance might be paid in dollars that gain value based on the stability of the child’s account balance, to make the benefits of saving apparent in the short term instead of just through the long-term accrual of interest. Or a store’s price guarantee could be implemented by pricing an item in dollars that stay active after the transaction, and that have a value derived from the market for that item. You don’t need to search for the lowest price; the money can.
Tax policies.
Such goals are currently implemented by familiar mechanisms such as tax policies and sales contracts, without needing something so ambitious as a redefinition of the nature of money. But as the money, and the information about how the money can be and is being spent, merge in packets of economic information running around networks, the distinction between the money and the supporting information becomes less and less meaningful, until it becomes simpler to recognise the financial packets as a new definition of money.
Taken from Neil Gershenfeld’s book, When Things Start to Think.
Just going back through this discussion, picking out some useful bits, as I go along.
True, the inside is just like every other shopping centre. But I still maintain it integrates well with older Dundrum.
By this Devin, I think you are coming from the observation, that many shopping centres just landed from outer space on top of some pheripheral site, and just created acres of parking spaces around them. It is quite true, that Dundrum adopted a different approach, it didn’t do the usual thing. It seems a bit obvious I guess, but yeah, what you have said is true and fairly simple to understand. I am not in the habit of looking at very many suburban shopping centres from a design perspective, so at first I didn’t quite notice how much Dundrum departs from the norm. You are obviously much quicker at noticing things about suburbia than I am. I feel more familiar with urban or rural sites I have to confess. Some other poster mentions how the site itself was an industrial site acquired for a mere 10 million. Which for a site, like this, seems quite small. I guess it highlights, something about strategic location having much more potential, than a massive arbitrary green field site development.
I guess, with your above observation Devin, you have underlined a fairly obvious fact: that is, where the circa 1980s shopping centre concept, would have came from,… accompanied with an explosion in personal car ownership, cities got the bright idea to do shopping centres as a big huge space, with enough space for loads and loads of cars. Shopping centres nearly became a car park with some shops, as opposed to being some shops with car parking. The shops were almost an afterthought, the buildings and the architecture were made to last for ten years or so, and that was it. Dundrum struggles to re-address that imbalance, is a start, to getting a more sane balance between car lot and shopping space. Dundrum centre does feel a little more like some shops with some car parking, as opposed to the other way around. The initial impetus behind the shopping centre concept may have been: provide loads of car parking spaces, and the rest will take care for itself. But I guess, there are many examples of centres around, where the ‘rest’ didn’t take care of itself very well. Maybe shopping centres aren’t that simple, maybe Dundrum does look at the design problem more in depth.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I am not sure what the the space will feel like at nightime now in Eyre Square, because that is a forgotten aspect of urban design and open public space sometimes too – and as I made the point in that thread:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3968&page=2
Sometimes you can think a bit ‘out of the box’ as to where and how you place/direct your street lighting.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
When Dublin City Council hosted that Landscaping lecture no too long ago, one of the strongest points I took away from the talk was of green spaces, mixed with harder wearing surfaces, so that spaces were usuable, but less prone to the damage usually associated with green squares, most of our squares in Dublin and throughout the country, being of that Georgian legacy, of green square parks etc. This picture of a scheme….
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=882
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=884
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=885
…realised for the city of Manchester sums up alot of that common sense approach, to making open space, accessible to urban inhabitants, in everyday life, but still keeping greenery as a large part of the equation. That is Terry Farell’s building in the side of the picture.
This image shows how buildings can be tucked into the park landscape, but done so in a way, which still facilitates access by people, through the green space…
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=886
I felt around the Dublin City Council Civic Office, this lesson was sorely missed, and pedestrian access to anywhere near Wood Quay offices now has all but vanished.
Which is a pity I think.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I like the idea of the black poles around the Squares I think that the railings would kill most of the effect and give a good contrast to the signs making them clearer to drivers.
You will find an unusual point of view about signage, on this link:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3896&page=2&pp=25
What are all of the signs stuck in the ground, doing on Grafton St., anyhow?
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=663
Street Lighting from Belgium pic attached. To be honest, when you think about ‘street lighting’ you don’t always have to imagine this thing stuck on the top of a very large pole – but that is the cliche that most of us have stuck in our heads unfortunately.
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=876
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=879
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=880
If the series ‘Behind the Hall Door’ is available on DVD, it would be about as good a starting point as any for the design of street lighting, as part of the urban space. In lighting interiors, the ‘Behind the Hall Door’ teams, went to pains in several of their episodes, to demonstrate how diverse lighting actually is, and what you can do with it, how many different things, lighting can actually be. I mean, this picture demostrates the approach where you stick everything on some kind of cantilevered pole object, and most of the time, it just contributes to dead space, in urban areas, which are already too conjested and unattractive.
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=662
Why do you need those large protection bollards on Grafton St., anyhow? Here is just another simple example where lighting is used to turn a potentially disasterous utility kind of truck ramp, into an attractive looking piece of urban furniture.
https://archiseek.com/content/attachment.php?attachmentid=881
Even if lighting from on top of a pole, is a good way to provide basic levels of illumination to an urban space, there is still no need to go overboard on the design and embellishment of those poles. I think that some urban spaces here in Dublin could benefit from less ‘flowerly’ and visual loud lighting poles. That is why I tend to like the ones in the Belgian town picture above.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I notice there are several small roundabouts in areas around Killiney area, which get quite busy serving a lot of residential areas, and small local retail centres etc, and this kind of ‘eye-contact’ approach, to the use of the intersection, by pedestrians, vehicles and bicycles does work. There isn’t a huge amount of signs and stuff out there,… more by accident I would say, rather than by design. You will notice too how much safer it feels too, than if you had the usual paraphenalia, the sets of lights, the steel poles that make noises for you to cross, and little men that ‘light up’ and tell you when to cross,.. all of that usual bag of tricks that engineers bring with them. In certain areas, one should just dispense with the signage and make the people themselves more responsible.
Even in really chaotic junctions, which are in existence at the moment in Dublin city, around shopping centres and stuff, I think the only way, is to make people responsible. At the present, cars often just drive through, when the green man lights up, and just people walk across when the cars have the right-of-way. In order to successfully design a junction, you would have to get rid of a lot of roadside parking of vehicles. That is, to improve view lines of the motor drivers and pedestrians alike. As regards to small people crossing the road and so forth. It would take a lot of effort and committment, on behalf of everyone in the immediate area to get it right. But I should imagine, with the right resolve and people behind the project, you could get places.
For definite, that whole approach of allowing the traffic engineer and the city council to tell everyone what to do – was really doomed from the beginning.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Anyone care to try this in College Green some afternoon?
With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square – backward – straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.
Article:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.htmlSome theory behind Monderman:
http://www.transformscotland.org.uk/conferences/homezones2004/HansMonderman.htm
There is, something very messy happening around the top of Grafton Street and St. Stephen’s Green currently. Any ideas or observations anyone?
But lets be honest here guys, I am mostly repeating myself again and again and again, here at Archiseek, just seeing the exact same type of pattern or problem repeated all over the urban sphere. The more you look, the more of it you are seeing, and it points to a vacuum that seems to exist in both the planning and architectural disipline traditions of this country,… an no-man’s land area, where neither disipline appears to meet the other. Which as a consequence, has been mostly filled by lots and lots of cars, and lots of guys in dark navy uniforms trying to keep a lid on it all. It is just costing everyone more money each and every year that passes, and making life just awful in general.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Other related threads:
Herman Hertzberger Lecture:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3933
Capel Street Bridge:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4084
Parnell Street Area:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=2541
Shopping Centre + Car and Pedestrian Indoor Condition:
I agree Parnell is a triumph of bad planning and lack of imagination. The policy towards it seems to have been build anything as long as those caparks and vacant sites get filled. I cant see anything on that street thats worth highlighting. The area north of O’Connell St is even worse.
I wish it were just down to something as simple, as ‘bad planning’ or ‘lack of imagination’,… but I am afraid, it goes much deeper than that even. It points to a very fundamental lack of confidence, in how to build, that we as a nation still suffer from in 2005, and possibly goes all the ways back to Famine times too. The only place to confront this sad under-confidence, is right in the architectural schools, where instead of decorating over the cracks and trouble, with reference to Rem Koolhaas or Foreign Office Architects, we badly need to admit we have a collective problem, a systemic brain seizure in this regard, and look at solving that problem initially.
Whenever the city decides to build up an area, the way that Parnell Street has got built up in the past couple of years, there should be a very strong parallel initiative, with suitably able designers, looking at the pedestrian and public spaces,… that should be a must, not an option. Whenever you cover as much vacant land, as has been done now in Parnell St., right from the off, there should be embedded in the entire masterplan, a provision for ‘X’ amount of new open public space, which is treated as a high quality of open space, not a token gesture, just to gather beer-cans for the next 20 years and generally become an eyesore. But a real jesture, back to the city, that ‘we care about it’s condition’ and the people living within the environment of the city. The fact, that you can go ahead and build up an area such as Parnell Street without any focus on these sorts of issues, just speaks for itself, about how we ‘build’ in this country, in any city, any small town or countryside.
I see exactly the same kind of lack of confidence, and positive initiative displayed in other schemes around Dublin city too. The scheme to ‘re-develop’ Stillorgan Shopping Centre is certainly one that springs to my mind. It is a unique opportunity to deal with open public space – yet that was entirely absent from the presentation put up on display. It is like the main driving force, behind that whole project, was that ‘Dundrum is just down the road’ and poses serious competition. In other words, from the off, you are trying to initiate something based on reasons of fear rather than couragiousness. I have a suspicion that a lot of new schemes do happen, within this overall context of ‘fear’ as a motivation, rather than something else.
I certainly didnt feel Dundrum was a stunning departure from the retail centres of the last 10 years. Its just bigger!
I really need to get around to doing my review piece on Dundrum, I took some major points down on paper, when I was visiting there a couple of evenings in a row, last week. I gave it a while, until the hype had sort of died down, until I could look at the project calmly and rationally. More to follow.
…full of state of the art technology (scanners, anti-theft devices, search facilities etc.
Yeah, they managed to include everything, except the ‘architecture’. 🙂 I have thought a bit about Library design myself, because of two reasons. One, I like to read and enjoy an environment condusive to reading of anything. Secondly, because a lot of major figure architects down through the years have left their stamp on this building type,… Eric Gunnar Asplund, Alvar Alto, Louis Kahn, Rem Koolhaas, Bolles Wilson,… I am sure there are tonnes of others I am leaving out. There is still a lot of case to be made though, that in urban centres, the web cafe might have become the new ‘public library’. That would certainly be an interesting line to take with a design thesis or something I would think. I mean, lets not just build ‘a new Library’, just because, we think, we need to build a new public Library. Des McMahon, the architect, is always saying, what is it? Whenever, he goes to approach any new design. So a public library in 2005, and for the future, what is it?
Brian you’ve perfectly summed it up about Parnell St – it is exactly as you describe, the back yard, the service area, the plant room – not only of Henry St, but of the inner city in general.
Everyone sails in on its crude dual-carriageway ignoring the streetscape and environs and what they may have to offer, up into the gaping mouths of the various car parks belching their fumes around Parnell St’s patrons, and then ta da! – out the other side into the nice and shiny city centre as if everything they’ve just come through never even existed.Parnell Street has huge, massive retail opportunities, but from the beginning, it was ear-marked for something else – just like the oldest son, on a farm of land or business, is supposed to stay and look after things. Or as women in the olden times, were pre-designated to stay at home and mind kids etc. There was just a kind of pre-decision as to the faith of Parnell Street, which I certainly don’t think was helpful or intelligent at all. Getting cars into the town, is not a bad thing,… but it would be clever, to allow people to disperse around a much wider area of the city centre, when they arrive, rather than being dog-collared around a pre-designated route, as is the current philosophy. Then you could see streets like Parnell Street, the upper reaches of O’Connell Street, Capel Street and so on, becoming much more than nightclub areas, and weird in-between spaces. The notion of front door/back door is something that has been repeated in other cities around Ireland aswell. It is probably a trick learned from some other country like cities in England, Paris etc, etc. I am sure planners, just like Architects are groupie’s too, in that respect of copying was is done elsewhere. But cities are complex organisms, and they deserve a little more thought than repeating the same cookie-cutter solution a million times.
There is a certain behaviour I have seen in Dublin, with regard to urban design, of tackling things, ‘a street at a time’. It is just positively weird right now, how people applaud how well Henry Street looks, while lesser places like Moore Street look as if a Civil War had happened there recently. Of course, that is what the current tenants of Moore Street would like one to believe to keep rents at rock-bottom prices. While at the same time, benefitting highly, through association, to the richer big brother, which is now Henry Street. The lack of a strong approach, by Dublin city, to create a positive urban jesture on the corner of Parnell Street and Moore Street is just going to further reinforce the whole pitiful charade. I guess DCC approaches urban design using the ‘boot-strapping’ approach. Now we have fixed O’Connell Street and Henry Street, and done something with Abbey Street, we will try to ‘pull-up’ the rest, by their boot-straps. This is unfortunate, it would be far more realistic to bring everything up together at a steady rate,… instead of approaching each consecutive area one after the other,… like you would an army, trying to clean an urban area of undesirable resistance. It has a funny kind of effect on cities, as soon as an area, is set to receieve ‘the treatment’ all of the quirky stores, and stuff that lends some character, or diversity, scurries off to someplace else, and buys themselves another decade, before the cycle repeats again.
And I’d include myself in that brigade – used to do the exact same ‘going into town’ for Christmas, park the car on a derelict site, pay someone in a shed to look after it and saunter off into the city ‘proper’, as if it only started with Henry St.
Directed along the pre-designated route no doubt. The whole attitude of DCC to the pedestrian, rarely gets far away from the idea that you instruct the pedestrian what it must do, where it should go, and when it should go there. It is like some oppressive regime, which was never going to overlay very well on top of the complexity of urban life. Louis Kahn, the architect had a lovely name for these tunnels, that DCC seem to love making,… in lieu of proper open public jestures,… he called them ‘Sneak Passages’. The extremely anti-social ‘Sneak Passage’ is by far the most dominant new urban form, throughout Dublin in the last few decades,… the IIlac being one of the most notorious in my humble view. It reminds me of those Vietnam War movies, where you see the Viet Cong burrowing around in the ground, trying to make themselves invisible to the Americans.
That brand new pedestrian way, through the wine bars and stuff, after you cross the Millenium bridge now, is anything but a ‘social space’ I think,… if anything it is almost anti-social,… because there are so many people drinking there, and so many eyeballs looking at you, that you just have to move on,… it is like one of those larger rooms within the earth, the Viet Cong used to make, along there tunnels, where the living quarters would be. Especially when you have a grand new urban space over at Wolf Tone Square, within nobody using it at all, think of how well that square could have worked, had DCC put the new pedestrian bridge in line, with Jervis Street, as was designed in the Temple Bar framework plan. No, I am afraid the DCC ‘strong handed approach’ to things, just doesn’t suit, when it comes to urban design in a city centre area. Sorry guys, but you just cannot force pedestrians to behave the way you wish,… it is exactly like trying to dictate to an ant colony, or trying to herd cats. Sooner or later, they are going to beat even the most determined trainer.
That is how you get the dicotomy, that is Moore Street and Henry Street. Commerce has become attuned now, to DCC’s approach of tackling problems, street by street. With the small shops always nesting in areas, with the lowest rents and greatest proximity to a major, ‘over-tuned’, fancy, all bells and whistles, Henry Street type of approach by DCC to urban design. Think about it, the worst looking street in Dublin right now, is Moore Street, and it is located right along side the best looking shopping street at the moment. As I said, if DCC wasn’t such a big ‘King Kong’ kind of figure moving around the city, doing it’s thing,… if it brought the whole city, up more gradually as a whole,… it would be less visible to the kind of Moore Street effect, where you drive an area into a slum, on purpose, to lower you rents and maximise your profits. Dublin City Council, in short, needs to wear camouflage I think.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
The developer of the Dundrum Centre has just bought 50% of the Ilac – perhaps some innovation will be brought to the redevelopment?
I will will get back to Dundrum shortly, but for now, I will just say this much on the IIlac Centre. It would have been nice I think to have created a square at the corner of Moore Street and Parnell Street, sort of a starting point, from which that entire area could have been centred,,… I mean, some grand jesture of open space. The city needs to breadth,.. I know DCC are busy in plans to borrow around through all of that area, using the Rotonda and god knows what else,.. but this borrowing they always do,… is just like a ‘knee-jerk’ response they have acquired down through the years for dealing with almost every problem in Dublin.
Look at Moore Street and the condition it has deteriorated into? Imagine if there was some fresh air breathed into that area, with the creation of a major public space, on the location I have described, that very corner of Moore Street and Parnell Street,.. that space should have been created to revitalise Moore Street as an entiry, and to link the Rotunda development, O’ Connell Street through the Carlton, and Henry Street to Parnell Street, and also bring all of that social housing up towards Dorset Street into the picture too,.. broadstone, Constitution Hill all these areas, need badly to have a focus,… and that is the real opportunity that has been squandered with the IIlac site. But that is the whole trouble with O’Connell Street and Henry Street re-develeopment in my view, it has perhaps detracted from everything else around it… focus has definitely been lost on other key opportunities and land in the city centre, because of the attention paid exclusively to ‘banner’ projects like LUAS, O’Connell Street and Henry Street.
The mere fact, that Parnell Street has been created in a way, that is so hostile to pedestrians, further reinforces my own conviction, that DCC does not understand at all how to create an environment in that area, that is focussed from the point of view of people walking and doing their thing,.. as opposed to driving in by car from Clontarf or someplace. All of those shoots of cars, turning into car parking all along Parnell Street effectively kills whatever chance that Street had to start off with,… it is a real example of a mess. I mean, even in front of the new Pennys, you are still losing pavement there, to car parking spaces on the street. Sometimes, it is not so much how many cars you bring into the city,… but much rather, how you handle those cars when you do allow them in. Parnell Street has effectively been used ‘as a back-door’ to Henry Street. Sure that is very good for Henry Street, but it has been achieved at far too high a price, with the destruction of Parnell Street’s chances to become sometime positive too. The over-emphasis on ‘Henry Street’ as ‘a sucessful project’,… as this mono-use, pedestrian hell-hole of commercialism, has detracted attention away from other worthwhile opportunities on streets like Parnell Street… this favouritism between streets is all warped. Sometimes you can make one street just too pedestrian like Henry Street, and not leave enough consideration for the pedestrian, as you can see now at Parnell Street.
In my view, Henry Street has been too sucessful and Parnell Street has not been successful enough. This is the high price ones pays, for going all ‘black and white’,… but that is how DCC seems to have approach the problem. With Henry Street pristine clean, white granite for pedestrians, and Parnell Street, dirty, smelly, oily, car-fumes, service entrance. Then of course, the one link between Henry Street and Parnell Street… is this ‘Limbo-Land’ of un-resolved issues,… this hair-brain, in-between space, where you can take your pick of several different salons offering an Afro-Caribbean Hair Cut, of all things! That is the trouble I think, when you try to organise and plan everything so clean, well defined and tidy – you can over-manage the entire thing. It is very easy to treat Parnell Street as a kind of back entrance to Henry Street of course, because noone up there is going to complain. Because everything north of the IIlac is blanket social housing. It is a very poor reflection upon DCC’s opinion of social housing, and of their own city itself, that it allows Parnel Street to be treated in the manner it has done. I mean, even here at Archiseek, there is a huge thread a mile and a half long, describing everything on O’ Connell Street, but not one single mutter about the mistakes made with Parnell Street. It is a great achievement to have made so much discussion on a single street, but therein lies most of the problems we face here in Dublin too, with regard to the design of our city.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I wrote this paragraph, as part of my Herman Hertzberger post a while back, and I think it is particularly useful in the context of this argument about Chapel Street Bridge:
Herman is someone, who struggles to find meaning first and then form. Hence his use of physical models through which he tries to understand the existence of what he calls ‘view lines’. All of the ideas about the building as a city, and how to raise people – are thereby incubated and encouraged through his process of using physical models. ‘I am one of those older Architects who tries desperately to find meaning first and then form, as opposed to form first and then look for meaning’. Though the above is a rough approximation to Herman Hertzberger’s comments on the search for form in Architecture, the are very similar to the words uttered down through time, by other people in other fields of expertise. I always like this quote from Sun Tzu in the ‘Art of War’.
Quote:
What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated. Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.I do hope the paper, verbal, ideas-makers, in the Dail and City Councils… properly get to the bottom of this Aquatic Centre issue too,… when the state wishes to build something, anything,… when it has some vision,… it should be able to go about it’s business,… while receiving the best possible service and advice from the designers and planners they pay to get on with the job. I have never once heard the GAA complain of how bad their Croke Park Stadium is. This is what still separates Ireland from other first rate European countries,… other European countries have been hosting Olympics and what not, for decades, and they manage to build minor projects and ‘stuff’ for society all of the time.
Ireland still cannot get to that stage, where it can just flick a switch and make things happen. A lot of it must boil to how we work together as a team. The Government obviously has money to do things nowadays, and has land they always had, and ideas abounding. What surprises me, is how availability of land, surplus of money and design ideas are ‘not’ all coming together quite right for the State. I still think, one has to respect their attempts, even if heavy-handed at times – it is a new departure for this young nation – let’s look forward to the future. Here once again, Herman Hertzberger gave us a really good pointer, in highlighting a scheme in Holland, where the competition brief was merely to provide a bookstore and cafe at a bustop,… instead of doing that, the designers, came up with a brief to build a bookstore and cafe, at a bustop, with a basketball court on the roof! So I think, what we really need is spatial designers who are strong enough to sometimes alter the brief they are handed it, to flesh it out in a 4-dimensional way, in both space and time.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I think they squandered a very, very valuable opportunity in the IIlac, not to remove some of the shopping centre altogether, and just devote a square of land, for open space urban use. Mr. G. Mitchell Architect, in his recent talk at Wood Quay highlighted just how many of the new open spaces in existing urban centres, are being created this way in the continent,… the roof for an underground car park, becoming the surface of a new urban plaza or square. It would have been a very interesting approach to take with the IIlac shopping centre site. A decent public area, should have been considered a ‘must’ in the original scheme all those years ago,.. because Parnell Street at the present, with all the development along its length, now has no breathing space whatsoever,… just a narrow strip of ‘land’ running down its centre where pedestrian have to get to, to sort of ‘cross-the-road’ on a two-step strategy. The only trouble with underground parking, is it costs many times more than multi-storey, and considerably more money than surface ground car-parking does.
A decent new urban space, instead of what they are now building, facing onto Parnell Street, was a really squandered opportunity, even if you had to go higher on the surrounds to that new urban square,… than just doing this single-storey shopping centre design, which is more at home in the suburbs, and even there, the Dundrum Shopping Centre now manages to have three storeys of shopping space, with underground parking also. I must say, the idea of entering the shopping centre at Dundrum from the roof of the underground car park at the rear, though having its problems in the final execution, was centainly an inspired route to actually take. If my memory of Blanchardstown Shopping Centre serves me right, they have made us of multiple levels there too. It all makes me wonder how these city centre shopping centres like the IIlac are so ‘short-sighted’ in their whole approach. When you are doing a public Library for the city,… it is just not good enough, to arrive and depart from that public library experience, through a fake indoor pond with pebbles, where the main attraction is an ice-cream stall. You really want a good public library to become a part of a high quality urban space, or park, or something if you can at all. Then at least the Mom’s pushing their kids around, can feel as if they ‘got something’ from the trip to the Library too,… instead of needing to ‘wade’ through commercialism to get to and from the Library proper.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
If that weren’t enough the structure is also as a result of that function a public right of way, this public right of way takes absolute precedence over ownership.
I think in your response, you have probably reinforced my point,… that some non-spatial-designing person or member of DCC came up with the concept to use Council owned land to and see what alternative uses can be made with that land – such as retail uses etc. My point was, that somewhere between that idea emerging and the ‘spatial designers’ getting their grubby like claws on the notion,… it all fell apart. It is a shame to knock down the original concept, even if the execution of it was all warped. DCC like any other public body, is full of very many non-spatially thinking but nonetheless creative people, who want to try out ideas,… but as always, you are dependent upon the designer to implement the verbal idea, or expression, into something in reality.
I mean, lets just not throw the baby out with the bath water, that is all I can say. Lets encourage, the spark of creativity, that someone had to put retail boxes on bridges in the first place. Lets not dis-courage that creativity,… as I have mentioned, it is a non-spatial-thinking kind of creativity, and for the most part deserves to be encouraged. Especially as this young nation strives to define itself in terms of visual expression and spatially in the environment – you are talking about centuries of repression here – and slowly it might be softening out a little bit. I wish DCC would screw up on a regular basis and attempt to learn from their mistakes. Where we really do have a problem, is in how our creativity and more ‘spatially-minded’ public servants, interpret what is handed to them as a brief from DCC. There are tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of sites around Dublin, where this exact kind of retail space is badly needed. And for some unearthly reason, all four of these retail boxes managed to find themselves stacked on a bridge in the middle of Dublin like it was a container warehouse or something. That is a spatial ‘mis-interpretation’ of what was a decent and sound enough idea to begin with day one. But that often happens – good ideas can lose their original impetus during the design process – Strange it make seem, but happen, yes, unfortunately it does. Compare this story to that of another young emergent nation during the 1960s, the Sydney Opera house which might have bankrupt the whole city for years afterwards. Architecture has always operated in this ‘space’ from the dawn of civilisation onwards.
I am merely worried that the board here, is just seeing the problem in this case, in isolation, and missing the whole wider issue, that is a much, much, much more serious challenge facing the city and its public servants. One reason, I wanted to twist the discussion into the theme of ‘Land’, was something mentioned in the affordable housing, government land swapping scheme for Dublin City Centre. It was mentioned, that flooding the market with land swaps, would be dodgy,… Well, going way back into this whole deep and murky ‘Land Issue’ that has been an issue in Ireland for centuries,… well, what are the religious orders doing now out in the fashionable suburbs of Dublin,.. I would say they are dumping land on the market for all they are worth. It is funny how even the religious orders have noticed how ‘prime’ the market is right now, and sell off their prime sites, so that developers can build astonishingly expensive apartments. I wonder exactly how the religious orders got this way – wasn’t there something always about underpriveleged benefitting from the Church? Wasn’t the Church and Religion, and Land Issues, and all of that ‘Irish History’ stuff,… all kind of inter-related,… or was that just some sentimental historian, writting the Irish history, from his/her own perspective? I would be greatly appreciative of anyones’ views on that matter – I think there is a much larger crime being committed by the Church presently, than DCC could possibly match with their retail boxes on Capel Street bridge. How many poor devils paid for the land, the Church is off-loading to private speculators now?
I think Brian hit the nail on the head this is a direct result of people having too much time ‘to come up with original ideas’ This concept has gone too far and the number of checks and balances that have been ignored is breathtaking.
I think the original idea, if you go back far enough, to find the verbal equivalent of this idea,… was in truth,… just fine. Because the orginal verbal expression of this particular kind of project, wouldn’t have any specific site in mind,… just a master strategy,… to look around Dublin city and try and see, if DCC owned territory could be put to some sort of use, we had never thought of before. Where DCC officials were really badly let down in this case, is in the lack of counterparts, in the spatial-thinking end of it,… to translate the original idea properly. It is these ‘spatial-thinking’ translators, who have too much time on their hands I think,… not necessarily the original idea-makers. I feel sympathy for the original idea-makers now, that they could not find the kinds of spatial-fluent public servants capable to making something better of that original strategy. I know the sort of design talent that is in our public service nowadays, and it is considerable, but for one reason or another, it underperformed in this case.
Agreed also Brian with a lot you have to say about pedestrian activity, but on the central issue of the fridges, surely you are not suggesting that they/some of these would be more appropriate outside the Custom House – turning a petty crime into a full-scale criminal offence?!
Lets just call a spade a spade here, … the Custom House area, is a rough enough area, and it would be useful to have something bulletproof, if you are going to do any sort of retail down there. Another thing, is how dis-used the space in front of the Custom’s house is. It is a magnificent space with absolutely no people using it, and at nightime, is could get pretty rough too. I don’t know exactly where all of the pedestrian traffic, that should be coming from the IFSC living quarters has evaporated into… one would imagine, if the IFSC is such a thriving hub of inner city, classy, European-style, apartment living, then, you would find the space in front of the Custom’s house irrigated with many more pedestrian users no? DCC put nice designer-looking dustbins all along the Canal in Portobello and the local kids had them wrecked in no time at all – and these were made of toughened stainless steel with heavy-duty rivets and all.
It is ironic that the explictly pedestrian-serving structures on this bridge are the very items in the way as a result of the units, i.e the benches.
Well this is the whole reason, that pedestrian behaviour and its study for architects should be enshrined much more than it currently is, in the curriculum of the architectural schools in this city. You can easily pass through and qualify as an Architect, a spatial designer par excellence,… without even dealing with the kinds of issues that relate to pedestrians and their movement. Remember, a regular human being though being modest in scale, covers an enormous amount of ground everyday, every week of their lifes. Even the youngest kids,… so to view people, like they usually appear in architectural drawings, as static creatures, as opposed to dynamic ones, is a fatal mistake in the countries architectural school curriculum I believe. Most architectural colleges encourage the student to sit in a ‘studio’ for vast amounts of hours, and then go home and spend more and more hours in the evenings and at weekends, bank holidays and church holidays,.. slavishly bent over a drawing board, drawing mostly static objects, and people as static installations in those static objects. The whole design concept of a lot of students work, is therefore mostly informed by static motionless objects – the same kinds of ones visible to all, now on Capel Street bridge. So it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. As an architectural student, you are never asked to ‘walk about’ in case you would wast one hour’s drafting and designing time on a drawing board. Bear in mind, that students who enter architectural school at 17, as I did are very impressionable at that stage, and may never have explored that much further than home-school-home-school-home-school, all their short and pathetic little lives. To emerge into the working scene, with bad skin and very stiff limbs from doing all the late-night drawing and graphical designing. I got enormously satisfaction this year, when Herman Hertzberger expressed the opposite to that which you normally expect from Architects, when he attempted to re-define young people in different terms – as dynamic, as skateboarders, as in other words, young people.
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3933
If you are interested in these issues, take a look at Herman, it is worth it.
Yes, fundamentally it seems the scheme simply was not thought through – rather a supposedly ‘innovative’, idealised concept was conjured up that simply did not confrom with the reality of the context – in every respect.
What you really, really have to understand, in this whole Capel Street Bridge debate, is how good a job that DCC managed to do over in O’ Connell Street. With O’Connell Street there was a major incentive not to screw it up, and that motivated DCC to do a very good job indeed. What it highlights, is that when DCC have less incentive to do it well – how easily they drop back into an older, hopeless and loose kind of style that doesn’t get the results at the end of the day. More than likely you had huge man hours too, being poured into getting O’ Connell Street and LUAS through the pipeline… we will not always be doing LUAS and O’Connell Street,… so I imagine that Capel Street bridge messes will not happen too often. I think it is still crucial to highlight the problems with Capel Street bridge though, in some way,… feedback should be viewed as positive.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
