GrahamH

Some pictures of the new development – to be titled ‘Joyce’s Walk’. The entrance buildings are yet more identikit offsprings of Dunnes of Henry Street™, but in a slightly more palatable context methinks…

Simple and elegant nonetheless. The brick further down has a more pleasant quality. The new street is more of a passageway really. Some more tree planting wouldn’t go amiss, and the pavement could be wider.

As BTH and notjim have mentioned, the treatment of the previously concealed bridge piers has been horrific. Left as they are they’re just plain ugly, and if to be painted (likely) they’re crying out to be graffitied. Really, such appalling treatment of the public domain. I cannot believe this, the most obvious element of the entire project to get right, has been so clumsily butchered. It pulls down the entire street. Some simple yellow brick cladding is all that was required as even a basic solution, matching that of the elevations further down the street.

The new shopfront fronting Talbot Street is elegant.

Which is more than can be said of those of Billy and his friend – what ridiculously scaled and detailed concoctions.

Was Planning so bowled over by the generous concept of a new thoroughfare that they just waved through all these details? Nonetheless the upper facades look very well, but their new faux Georgian makeover is dubious and poorly considered. For a start surely these buildings had plate glass sashes originally? (before the 70s aluminium went in). Equally the new glazing bars are too thin relative to the chunky sash frames, while the lovely deep orange of these machine-made Victorian bricks has been replaced with a pink colourwash more suited to dodgy Georgian townhouse restorations in the Midlands. Personally I find this a growing problem with Victorian brick – it’s one thing to clean it, but to colourwash it and thus lose its original character is not on. Going by their appearance you could now date these buildings more accurately to 1997 than 1887.

There are however some other decent jobs going on on Talbot Street. If ever there was an example of the transformation that can be effected on a city just by getting modest facades and fenestration right, this is it. It really cannot be said enough.

Beautiful job (whatever of the old shopfront). And the ever-increasing scourge of cumbersome double-glazed sashes has been resisted here. In fact I’d say this is now a rarity relative to the popularity of factory-churned clunky tmber sashes flooding the market now.

What a difference. And look at the elegant simplicity of the lightly cleaned orangey brick.

Another recent decent job further down – the colour’s a tad dodgy, but passable.

And again the retention of original sashes (if not quite a restoration of them).

Great to see good solid improving jobs like these on a secondary street like Talbot Street.

You see, this is what is so frustrating about this city – the RPA are given free rein to carve up the city centre according to their lines on a map and notional nodal hubs and what have you, with external regard limited solely to the competing aims of Dublin Bus and other traffic. What about the requirements of the built environment and the special character of the city’s main thoroughfares? Is this not a further major element worthy of consideration? Is this not as important, if not indeed more important, as a long term and unchangeable constant, than the flexible operational needs of competing transport modes? I find a parallel with the billboards debacle – the city authorities, the guardians of the city, are willing to allow the very essence of what is recognisably Dublin, what forms the image and character of the city in the mind of its people and visitors – i.e. its main streets and spaces – to effectively be handed over to another authority with no urban design planning background, to play with at will in a manner not unlike passing them a giant box of Duplo bricks and a few base boards and telling them: “here you go, make us proud”. Only in this case the miniature town has already been built, and they’re being allowed at it with a giant bale of Chinese granite, a mountain of silver poles and 20 kilometres of suspended cabling.

This has been the nub of the issue for me from day one as regards passing Luas through College Green, Westmoreland Street, O’Connell Bridge and along O’Connell Street, and apologies for reiterating it at length, but sometimes you do wonder if you’re going ever so slightly cracked rather than the authorities being the ones beating the wrong drum – the scoffing attitude of some of the staff of the RPA towards such prissy issues as dignified public space, uninterrupted views and vistas, and coherent and sensitively designed thoroughfares merely contributing to this snowballing popular opinion that Luas = wholesome goodness. Rather than DCC leading the way on this with a set and determined vision for the historic core of the city, they’ll shortly be running around cleaning up the mess and dusting around the edges of the trail of Urbanism by Engineer the RPA has left in its wake.

Very simply, any ambitious plans for the College Green, College Street and indeed O’Connell Bridge centres will be turned to watered-down dishwater should these spaces be subject to the extent of cabling, poles, platforms and all other attendant paraphernalia that the Luas travels with. It is utterly inexcusable on College Green, offensive crossing the Liffey and O’Connell Street, and at best highly undesirable along the other major thoroughfares. One need only look at the disaster of Middle Abbey Street to observe what is in store for the coherence of Westmoreland Street. And what’s more, I suspect this entire issue will only rear its head in typical Irish planning Taraesque style, once the project has begun (if ever). Now is the time to make these critical decisions.

I thought it would be best to continue the College Green discussion here rather than the Westmoreland/D’Olier Street thread.

@gunter wrote:

No notjim, I have not misunderstood your point.

You have an emotional attachment to the lawns and that’s fine, there’s no shame in that.

The urban condition can be gritty and hard and little bits of lawn are a comfort blanket ; )

The point I’m trying to illustrate is that, in urban realm terms, we’ve gone backwards. The College Green of the Joseph Tudor print and Rocque’s map (both 1750s), was clearly a more urbane space, and one more in line with comparable central urban spaces in comparable (mainland) European cities, than the College Green of today.

Rocque shows the new (not yet completed) front of Trinity with the same ring of stone obelisks linked by simple chains that Tudor depicts. While we may not be able to compare the traffic loading of a couple of sedan chairs to a constant string of double decker buses, there’s no question that College Green originally read as an civic space and now it reads as a traffic junction. The transition of the Trinity forecourt, from a being a simply demarcated arc across a single paved space, to the defensive zone with ‘Don’t walk on the grass’ lawns we have today, has played a part in this transition.

As magnificent as those Victorian railings are, and as manicured the lawns, the fact remains that these later 18th & 19th century additions negate some of the original urban qualities of the space.

How do you not see this?

On your belief that ‘main university buildings almost always have grass in front of them’, no they don’t. You’re thinking of English influenced, or the slightly out of town universities, I’m thinking of inner city, old school, universities (Edinburg, Bonn, Freiburg, Heidelburg, anything in Italy etc. etc.) and, in any case, it’s the urban space I’m talking about, whether or not there’s a college on one side.

gunter, as much as I understand your reasoning regarding Trinity’s lawns, I think it is misdirected. The problem of College Green – as we have talked about for years on this site (and acknowledging it takes a while to read through 20,000+ posts) – is how this once grand civic space, as you highlight, has essentially been appropriated to vehicular traffic and effectively vanished from the popular mindset.

What is probably the grandest expression of urban space in Ireland, by virtue of the importance – past and present – of the institutions that flank it, the international quality of its architecture, its grandly-scaled spatial qualities, and the convergence of the main arteries of the city, is completely lost through:

1) The devotion of so much physical space to traffic.
2) The complete dominance of traffic in the spatial and atmospheric character of the ‘room’, to the detriment of the appreciation of all other elements.
3) The obscuring of both buildings and their interrelationships by inconsiderately planted trees and random street furniture.
4) General mindless and uncoordinated clutter, particularly abounding on the central ‘island’.
5) The fact that there even is an ‘island’ – when roadways should be islands amongst pavements.
6) A shoddy and ever-degenerating public domain.

Thus the vitriol towards Trinity’s lawns I think would be more usefully directed to the area outside its railings, rather than within. It can of course be appreciated that the West Front could introduce a new quality to College Green if it directly addressed a new plaza unhindered, but I don’t think this facade is particularly approachable in that respect. It was clearly never designed to be a civic building in the true sense of the word – rather, in the manner of a modern-day shopping centre or department store, it presents a largely blank frontage that is decorated as a token civic gesture, whilst really only aiming to do one thing – cloak a megastructure and draw the patron inside. The West Front has nothing of the arcaded or multi-entranced ground floor typical of most European plaza-licking piles – indeed even compared to its colleague across the road – similarly there is no grandiose portico or full-scale verticality which acknowledges a hypothetical flanking space. Jacobson clearly designed this facade with some form of frontal enclosure (and admittedly budget) in mind. The entire facade effectively floats above a heavy base of rustication which is pleasant when on show, but is equally dispensable behind a shroud of railings.

(Incidentally note how grubby the facade has become in 13-15 years)

Pretty much since the foundation of Trinity College the complex has been bounded to the west by some form of wall or railing – this tradition continued with the West Front, albeit broken by the obelisk episode which appears to be more influenced by the contemporaneous Gardiner’s Mall than any real consideration of the site. It’s possible they even pre-date the West Front given so many of Tudor’s prints date to the early 1750s. Certainly by 1761 the front had been railed in with full-scale Georgian railings.

So if the railings were taken away today, you’d pretty much be walking by people’s bedroom windows, or at best catch glimpses of a storeroom piled high with lavatory rolls or an administrator’s dingy office layer with suspended ceilings. As is, the decorous but spare Victorian railings do much to add dignity and graciousness to the West Front with their curved sweeps, and if ever fully exposed through the removal of clutter would actually help delineate and orientate the facade which in reality is off-centre and concealed at both ends in most views.

What could however be achieved (ever the compromiser) is the widening of the hard surfaced space within the railings which is unduly narrow and fails to acknowledge the breadth of the central breakfront of the building. Thus what is currently this:

…could be something more like this:

Also bearing in mind that it would be beautifully paved in Irish granite, detailed with Portland stone, and lined with seating and feature a distinguished lamp or two. A world away from the current dingy asphalt and poorly articulated entranceway.

However to prove I do have time for plazafying notions, I would concede that should College Green eventually be subject to a radical masterplan, and I mean an all-encompassing plan that addresses the space as an ideal world scenario, there would be some validity in the removal of the Bank of Ireland railings should the building as a result directly address a wider plaza space unhindered by traffic.

This would return the BoI complex to that originally envisaged by Pearce with a radical European colonnaded piazza opening out onto a wider civic arena. At present the columns and wider dignity of the structure are curtailed by the horizontal band of railings crossing the site, essentially concealing the weight and grandeur of the building as it hits the ground, as much as it also rises from it. The exposure of the original views of the building from Grafton Street, Dame Street and College Green itself would benefit greatly from this, but moreover the approachability and public interaction with the building – essentially becoming the essence of College Green rather than the stage set function it is currently reduced to. (Aerial pictures cannot of course explain such a concept).

What this area is also crying out for, and this was originally meant to be the point of this post, is a re-evaluation of one of the city’s signature buildings, a structure which has effectively been lost more so than the College Green fronts of Trinity and the Bank combined. It is part of the bank, yet to all other purposes it is a separate – if begrudgingly associated – building, as was its intention – the House of Lords portico.

Utterly lost in a bewildering sea of modern urban distractions, this once-dominant feature of the city can only be appreciated as a series of disparate elements: a rank of disengaged column bases you pass by at street level, a fleeting raking view you might encounter standing at the pedestrian lights opposite, the flash of a statue over the trees from the top of a double-decker. The wider appreciation of this compact Gandon building, encompassing portico, substantial projecting wings and flanking later monumental doorcase is lost in a sea of passing buses, trees, mindless clutter, more trees, and of course disused public toilets and their associated paraphernalia. It is nothing short of extraordinary how one of the landmark buildings of the city, with a once-striking vista down College Street, has all but disappeared, both from public consciousness as well as actual street view.

As part of the College Green ‘reordering’, when and if it ever gets underway, central to this ought to be nothing short of the creation of a piazza space that addresses this building. Many of the same spatial problems affect this structure as once did the GPO – primarily the harsh curtailment of its columns by the roadway immediately adjacent. Similarly views of that building were once compromised by trees, as here, while the wider space fronting it did not acknowledge the building in a manner commensurate with its status, as also at the Lords.

In any other city a project of this type would be given top priority (or moreover would never have got into this state in the first place), yet what do we do here? – only commission a set of all-singing public toilets with entrance pavilions to be plonked above ground right on an island in the midst of a sea of traffic right in front of one of the major classical buildings in the city. It simply beggars belief. As things stand, if things were done properly here, there would very simply, be nothing left standing except Moore on his pedestal and a properly landscaped civic space covering the majority of this important triangle.

I won’t even attempt to suggest traffic plans for this area, but as far as I’m concerned, traffic, including the majority of buses, need to get out out out of the College Green-College Street zone, and both transformed into attractive civic spaces as well as suitable launch pads for their attendant major streets. The College Street area in particular has been unresolved for the past 200 years and someone really needs to take the bull by the horns here and make some decision about what really matters in this city – traffic islands and public conveniences or a stately sense of presence, civic pride, and urban design status befitting of a capital city. The ceremonial heart of urban centres may very well be token public relations gestures, but they more than anything represent the standards and ethos of a city in its entirety, as well as shape the lingering impression of a city in the mind of the visitor. If we can get these spaces right – properly and ambitiously – we could make major headway in the transformation of the image of Dublin from a provincial city to that of European capital.

The EBS retail proposal from c. 2004 – knew I had it somewhere 😮

The former EBS HQ at 30/34 Westmoreland St, Dublin 2 which is to be converted into a large retail store. The front central section of the building will be retained while the remainder of the frontage will feature specialised coloured glazing. (paper caption)

To think this might actually have slipped through…

I love the streams of traffic passing by – says it all about the viability of the project.

Incidentally I was talking to someone who hadn’t been walking in the Westmoreland Street area for a year or two, and without any prompting whatever (honest) launched into a diatribe on the state of the place – from retail uses, to public domain, to shopfronts, to traffic. They couldn’t believe how much the place had deteriorated, and were mortified at the number of tourists availing of the thoroughfare. You’d wonder why they bother coming.
It’s the new O’Connell Street of the 1980s and it’s happening right before our eyes.

I’ve never seen drawings either, but apparently there were draft or preliminary plans drawn up by Cooley shortly after the completion of the Public Records wing for a Courts complex at this site also, roughly along the lines of the plan that we have now, but with a single semi-enclosed rectangular courtyard – presumably open to the river – and the central block absorbed into the northern range. The plan of Government Buildings minus its street frontage is probably a reasonably representative expression of such a concept. Agreed the plans would be interesting to get hold of.

As regards the chronology of building the Four Courts, as previously mentioned Cooley’s building was begun in 1776 and seemingly finished by 1784, the year that Cooley died. Notably it was James Gandon that signed one of the final payments for this work in that same year – 1784 – indicating he was on the scene as replacement architect long before 1786 when the foundation stone for the Four Courts was laid. Ground works began in the latter quarter of 1785. What is generally unknown is that the building of the Four Courts was fraught with as much, if not greater, difficulty than that of the Custom House – allbeit for different reasons – with Gandon embroiled in a plethora of vindictive public attacks that were as much political as they were critical of his work. Work was also halted at times, and the entire project constantly under political scrutiny and review. All of this is detailed to illuminating effect in Hugo Duffy’s seminal book on Gandon: James Gandon and his Times, published in 1999.

An extract from Gandon’s diaries gives a precise chronology of the major construction events. In 1794:

“The statues had been placed on the pediment of the portico, and four of the columns, complete with their entablature, were raised and set around the drum of the dome, so that some idea could be formed of what was intended: from this circumstance I was in hopes to secure the completeness of the design whenever it was resumed. The dome, from its eminence was now become the most conspicuous feature of the public of Dublin, and from many adjacent parts of the country was seen with imposing effect.”

Later in 1794:

“…the remaining columns around the dome, with the entablature, were completed and the roof covered; in the meantime the internal scaffold was raised for finishing the vault of the internal dome; all the foliage, with the medallions being cast, and afterwards repaired by carvers, which added greatly to their boldness of relief, and every department went on with the same expedition. The Courts were ready for the reception of the Judges, who held their first term therein on Monday, the 8th November, 1796, being ten years and eight months from the laying of the first stone. But it must be remarked that works were suspended for nearly three years, while the south eastern portion of the offices were being erected. It was not until the year 1798 that the foundations were laid for the east wing of the remaining offices, nor, owing to the political events which then convulsed society, was it until 1802 that the screen arcade, and wings of offices were finally completed.”

The person generally associated with the personal attacks in contemporary newspapers was none other than James Malton, clearly a volatile character with a major chip on his shoulder. He had earlier worked for Gandon as his (highly accomplished) draughtsman for about three years. While the anonymous ‘Malton Letters’ have never been proven conclusively to have been by him – and there are some causes in the letters to attribute them elsewhere – on the whole it is accepted that he is by far the most likely candidate responsible.

The biography of Gandon published by his son in the 19th century observed cuttingly about Malton: “He [Gandon] took him into his office, and kept him employed for nearly three years; but he so frequently betrayed all official confidence, and was guilty of so many irregularities, that it became quite necessary to dismiss him from the employment. He subsequently published views of the public buildings of Dublin, which, so far as delineation went, were certainly accurate, but his letter-press descriptions were envenomed with the most malignant misrepresentations.” 🙂

I’ve never really understood why Malton’s view of the Four Courts – or rather his depiction of the drum and dome – is so unflattering, cartoon-like even, especially relative to his other elegant and proportional drawings, but his string of attacks on this building in particular would suggest that he wasn’t exactly favourably disposed to an accurate, never mind favourable, representation…

Incidentally the plans depicted in Gandon’s famous portrait by Tilly Kettle are none other than…

This cannot possibly go ahead. It will impinge on views of The Clarence.