GrahamH
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Loads of photos have ‘ghosts’ as a result of the long exposure time, but there’s absolutely nothing in this pic. Indeed in the first set of photos ever taken in Dublin in, I think 1848 (could have been 45), there are quite a few ghosts in the Hardwicke St pic.
This Sackville photo was definitely taken in the morning anyway, depending on winter or summer between 9.00 and 11.00am (I know the sun patterns here only too well from hanging around for the sun sun to fall on buildings!)
The Lumiere Brother’s footage of ‘People walking in Sackville Street’ and the bridge from around 1897, the first footage ever recorded in this country, is very spooky to watch.I like the cobbles around Parnell too, they used to be so common as a quick-fix solution in the 70s, but they still have appeal here, on an island of their own.
The Great Debate – is the Spike’s base intentional.
Still yet to come across someone who likes it.But just on the public opinion issue, late last year on RTE’s ‘Best and Worst’ aspects of 2003 programme, where 5000 householders were interviewed, the divide on the Spike was literally 50-50, it was voted the 10th worst thing about 2003 and the 10th best!
I’m surprised more people weren’t in favour of it, certainly my experience of it would be at least 70-80% in favour of it. Perhaps that’s just Dublin though, support probably falls through the floor outside Dublin/Leinster – what’s the difference…Interesting, never heard about that. Well to cut the quay lights would indeed have been ridiculous, perhaps desirable for a one-off event but entirely impractical to happen daily!
I’ve read that while Philips designed it, it was executed on site by the CC Lighting Division – so something of a contrast between their initiative to have the magnificent O’Cll Bridge lanterns restored and their lighting of the bridge itself.
A street on axis with the GPO…
Ah but you gotta love the whole Edwardian thing, the deep woods, early electric fittings, those heavy net curtains, the Georgian revival, the Castle Season, 20,000 families living in one room…
Dublin’s, indeed Ireland’s forgotton era.I suppose – it just seems like a mammoth task, esp when the service laying is taken into account. It’s just that the Lower St works began before Christmas last year and are to be completed by Christmas of this year – lasting at least 13 months.
If they can fit the upper half into 8 – great 🙂Does the remainder refer to the lower section or the northern end? Surely upper O’ Cll St cannot be totally done in just 8 months, would it not take about 2 years or so?
Thanks JL for those links – I’m surprised at how durable the aluminium is above all else, then again it always appears to be in good condition, even in 60s houses.
On PVC, clearly it’s toxic stuff to manufacture, but I think that the wood lobby aren’t telling the full truth when comparing. If you dumped all of the waste products of maintaining your timber windows over the course of the life of PVC into a pile on the floor, not to mention the stain or varnish products themselves, and white spirit, all of which have extremely high VOCs, and presumably are equally toxic to manufacture, and the tins and tubs and bottles (which are rarely recycled), plus brushes, I think the damage begins to add up here too – a point that the paper acknowledges is difficult to quantify. Although yes, if you use simple paint, the impact is reduced.
Saying that, I wouldn’t touch PVC with a barge-pole, the very idea of having plastic coated fittings is horrible, let alone the environmental impact. It’s a disgrace that so many 30’s schools are having their steel windows replaced with PVC, likewise small 19th & early 20th century schoolhouses having sashes chucked in the skip in favour of the squeaky clean, supposedly child friendly material.
The Irish Home Builders Accociation took out a big ad in one of the property supplements last week entitled ‘Plastic is Actually Fantastic’ – and amongst other things recommeded that unless your property is listed, there is no reason why you shouldn’t install PVC sashes as replacements, which apparently from a short distance are indistinguishable from their timber equivilants, enabling you to have ‘the period look of classic timber sashes with all the added benefits of low-maintainance PVC’.
Yeah – I think people noticing PVC on Leinster House from the far side of Kildare St answers that one, let alone the conservation issues. And the horns inevitably attached deteriorate quite fast, with the joins becoming evident as a result of the brittleness of the product.I think the best place in the whole of Dublin to see sashes at their best, where uniformity of design and slender profiles truly shine is Dartmouth Square just off the Grand canal. Every single one of the 70 or so Victorian houses surrounding the large green have their original windows, with unusual arched windows on the upper floors. It is an extraordinary sight, marching lines of matching sashes – a remarkable feat of conservation, it has to be unique in the city. Suffice to say, every one of them is protected!
Mountpleasant Square in Rathmines is another gem – aside from feeling like walking back in time, what is immediately apparent are the sashes, I think there’s but one house on the whole square that has replacements.They’re lovely aren’t they – the best part of the building!
Unfortunately we’re not exactly renowned for our feature chimneys over here.What a positive move. I know it is percieved as snobbery to criticise PVC, but in historic buildings it is totally unacceptable.
But by far the worst use of the material, where it is so damaging, is in the small, unassuming vernacular buildings that line the county’s small town streets. Simple classical architecture is destroyed with bulky profiles, shiny finishes and the lack of depth in the plastic grid designs. And as for when they are opened, hinged from the top, they are just woeful. Windows are the primary feature, not to mention the eyes of these buildings, and sashes are being ripped out by the hundred. And because they’re on streets with shops, where no one supposedly looks above 12 feet, local authorities completely ignore what’s going on – as long as there’s a window box with pretty flowers infront they’re grand.
And PVC is now used in a whopping 80% of new houses, and comprises some 90% of the replacement market (surprising it’s not higher)
Someone I know was considering having PVC installed for replacement windows (but wood was still a contender) and so called out the country’s leading PVC company (let’s just say the one with the annoying jingle). I was asked to sit in on the visit apparently ‘being into that sort of thing’, but the ignorance of the rep was truly extraordinary, trying to compose a window unit with opening parts that fitted the standard tall rectangle (sash shape) opening – amongst other things he proposed that the aperture be split in two with a vertical bar, then a crossbar be placed across mid-way, and then one of those feckity 70s picture window openings be popped up in the corner!
His whole attitude was ‘well that’s what everyone else is doing’, over and over again, with no consideration whatsoever to the house or the individual circumstance. Nor did he propose that matching windows have co-ordinating opening parts – ‘oh I suppose yeah’It is no wonder that window design has literally gone out the window in this country, with bulky, standardised, awkward lumps being shoved into every opening concievable.
Not all PVC is bad, it can work well in offices, or plain white with casements in homes with pebbledashed facades. But the majority looks terrible, esp what can only be described as that diarrhoea coloured stuff that’s supposed to look like beech, or the lastest trick – wood-effect front doors in ‘the shade of your choice’, which ironically cost more than a top-quality hardwood version.
The sales brochure for the PVC company was the most repulsive yoke I have ever seen – nearly had a nervous breakdown with the pictures of one-off ‘executive’ piles plastered in the stuff, mock-Palladian lumps with conservatories tacked on the side, and as for the sales pitch for their beautiful ‘Regency’ stained glass doors!Nonetheless, I don’t accept the usual arguement put forward against PVC by the wood ‘n sash lobby – that the material is toxic to make, damages the environment, and is short lasting. The material is recyclable, emmission controls are enforced, and should continue to lessen with technology (I think the EU PVC lobby has set next year as a date for 40% of windows to be recycled), and considering the amount of paint or varnish, and putty needed to maintain wood for 200 years, not to mention the PVC tubs and metal cans the stuff comes in, as well as the amount of brushes and tools required over the years, the resources and energy consumed soon piles up for wood too.
Quality, visually appealing windows are desperately needed now, most of our buildings depend on them as their primary feature of interest and deserve better treatment.
The very idea is spine-tingling!
The Abbey’s definitely in storage – I think a private individual has/had it but with a public interest in mind.
Remember when Nelson’s head was nicked by students from a Corpo yard – surely there must be a couple of yards like that with lots of goodies. Where did all the city’s small gas lamposts go – I know I asked it before, and naturally they were all replaced with good reason, but did they all just go into landfill or are some still kicking about? We didn’t have to melt anything down for the War like the UK.
And Iarnrod Eireann must have a bucket load of similar things too.There must be loads of railings and bits of balustrades and stuff somewhere that once graced the city streets – perhaps it’s all the content that now graces the country’s salvage yards…
It looks bizzare from Pearse Station, like a London Eye capsule floating over the city!
The old section is beautifully restored, looks especially good at night when the plastered ceilings are lit up in white and can be seen through the big windows from the street.Perhaps the Luas lines are intended to run over two of the traffic lanes, which would make sense as the Luas would in theory be consuming some of the of car traffic.
It’s going to be fantastic for pedestrians – nice and blustery down there too!And no coincidence that the Luas is one of the Irish Rural Dwellers Association’s greatest weapons in stirring up the anti-Dublin frenzy.
Originally posted by Diaspora
as for the early 19th Century you could be right about it being a lesser period of growth than the late 18th century.
Surely not! You’re not usually one for the appeasing all-rounder Diaspora! 😀
True, most people now try to avoid the city centre, for shopping at least – but as asdasd says, the city population has increased substantially in the past 5-7 years, which ought to be recognised – and it’s continuing.
Just on the issue of cycling, one astonishing figure I heard recently, that is confirmed by the Dublin Cycling Campaign (think that’s what they’re called) is that more girls drive to school in this country than cycle! The female drivers amongst the two senior years in school actually surpass all the female cyclists in all the other years!
Now you can’t get more American than that!I think it’s better it be decentralised a bit more than that, but still in concentrated chunks. The current ‘plans’ are ridiculous, fundamentally it is a proposal that hasn’t been thought through, both in terms of the will of the workforces to move, and the framework it should be executed within, i.e. the Spacial Strategy.
The principal is a good one, put planning of a nature other than that for political gain is required.
The plan is nonetheless exciting in terms of the opportunity it brings for some decent modern architecture around the country, and for the progression of the practices of sustainability in development here. Will/would the OPW be acting as architects or are they just involved in the practicalities of the project?It’s interesting that there’s almost no flats or mansion blocks in Dublin at all from the 19th century, Iveagh Trust aside. Suppose there was never the tradition of flat or apartment living in the city that there was on the Continent, esp in Paris, or to the small degree there was in Britain. Land values or a sufficient concentration of then lower-middle class people in Dublin never prevailed to require such structures. And coming into the Edwardian period, the small Victorian streets off the larger suburban ones had firmly set the trend for the 20th century for terraces of houses in favour of blocks, the type of later blocks that dominate so many UK streets.
I dunno Diaspora about the early 19th century, I’m facinated but unsure about this time – esp that people so often make the point that it’s often said that Dublin came to a halt in residential building after 1801, and that really it did continue to develop, eg Fitzwillian Sq etc. But that’s about it! It’s really only Fitwilliam Sq and St and a scattering other developments that went up!
And considering over the course of the next 30 years the northside emptied of the affluent with virtually no new housing compensating on the southside (except the likes of some of the Synge St area) I think indicates a strong residential depression – something that largely didn’t change till 1830, when a lot started to happen – albeit mostly beyond the canals! Of course this then contributed to a big decline in the city centre, with the abscence of the prosperous concentrated residential development that so benefited the small Georgian city.
Suppose there’s two aspects to it, the commercial health of the city, and the residential aspect, both of which offer kind of conflicting signals. In the housing stakes at least, the suburbs could have done with a bit of decentralisaton to the city!Ahh – what dreams are made of…
What side of the – cough – ‘street’ was it on? What an interesting piece of info.
It’s a lovely thing, what a feature for the area – God knows the only flippin feature! It is light and elegant – if anything it could do without the chunky road element altogether to make it even more so!
It’s such a pity, such a shame, that the East Link opens, now Macken St opens, and yet the tall ships fall at the last hurdle that is the Matt Talbot, to enbable them to sit outside the Custom House, recreating that classic 18th century scene. What a shame, probably something that wasn’t even considered when the Matt Talbot, albeit a fine structure, was built.
Suppose the current craze for these ships didn’t exist at the time, and traffic congestion was something of a greater priority than creating postcard scenes 🙂Whereas some aspects of this project are effective, notably the balustrade illumination (were the strips not so evident), as a whole, what we got was not worth the £1.3 million spent on it. The horrible green is the worst element (and it clashes with the orange of the balustrading), and certainly it is seconded by the too-obvious methods used for lighting – surprising considering it was designed by a specialist lighting company, who one would have assumed as having a greater respect for what they were illuminating.
