GrahamH
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The median has once again been cleared of lampposts to make way for the crane.
The article suggests the Spire was last cleaned in 2005 – it was of course only cleaned last year, though with the erection of the crane it makes sense to do it now also.
June 2007
Also it was erected in January 2003, not April…
As an aside, the Ulster Bank scaffolding is creeping up.
12/7/2008
And so the trowel merchants strike again, this time on the most prestigious antique granite pavement in the city – outside City Hall.
Over the past year/18 months the subject area on the footpath just outside the west portico has been variously dug up and cordoned off, dug up and filled with tarmac, and even on one occasion about to be filled with concrete slabs until clearly someone higher up the chain decided that perhaps plugging a hole outside City Hall and Dublin Castle with concrete just may not be appropriate – but rather leaving it for yet another six months filled with more tarmac would be. And so it was.
Over a year since digging this hole first ensued, the city has now been left with this masterpiece of masonry work.
Given the surrounding joints are already too large as seen at the top, this image gives some idea as to the thickness of the ‘pointing’ employed.
In places there’s actually more mortar than granite substrate.
While ridiculous scrappy little pieces of stone have been chopped up to fill a gap, which makes about as much sense in the wider expanse of paving as employing a patch of mosaic in a tiled floor.
I absolutely dispair at what is happening to the supposedly protected pavements in this city. A major report on the city’s street paving including inventory, recommendations for protection and conservation, and international best practice has just been comissioned by DCC – the only scrap of hope out there at the moment. Whether there will be anything left by the time it comes to be published and implemented is another matter…
Also the ravishing state of affairs to the Dame Street side of City Hall. The junction further up is particularly poor.
Also there is an obsession with maintenance staff for power-hosing the side steps, as well as the balustrading fronting Parliament Street. Not only does it look awful and completely ridiculous, it’s causing irreparable damage to the soft Portland stone in the case of the latter. They never stop cleaning around here, and it’s completely unsustainable.
Do they’ve nothing better to be doing, such as painting the windows of City Hall that haven’t been touched since the restoration eight years ago and are peeling like a troup of Brits on a sun holiday to Marbella.
Priorities, priorities…
Yeah Morlan – get with it! First people are talking down the economy, and now they’re talking our towers out of extinction. It’s simply unacceptable. All hail the tower.
Defo. The latter two famously are a century older than the warehouse that hosts them, having been salvaged from James Gandon’s Carlisle – now O’Connell – Bridge upon reconstruction in 1880. They’re also much more accomplished than their replacements, being vigorously carved by Edward Smyth.
They look magnificent in their new setting nonetheless.
Ah ctesiphon has saved me having to post the same images. Even on a pedestrian street where space is plentiful, the overwhelming sense of the whoring out the public domain hits you like a sack of spuds. It’s extraordinary just how offensive these units are in the flesh – you really have to observe them in real life to garner the true sense of outrage felt by their blocking of your path and taking advantage of public amenity for grubby commercial interests.
I agree with Stephen that the design of the units is smart and elegant, but as Smithfield Resi has noted the sharp edges are lethal should one have a tumble against one. Even on a busy street like Henry Street (the mayhem of Christmas anyone…), the potential for some bad knocks and scrapes is considerable. Indeed on that point, Henry Street is horrific as it to navigate in December – this are going to make it a nightmare.
Also what’s with the hokey generic skyline – it’s not even informed by its host city.
But a minor detail in a thoroughly dismal saga.
:p
Clearly it was chucked off to the printers in an e-mail, who just churned it out. The skirting along the bottom evidently wasn’t anticipated either 🙂
Another massive CAD, also on blue, is being used to advertise the big Victorian being restored opposite the Provost’s House, to elegant effect.
🙂
Just a quick update on Ulster Bank. The Brutalist units are being slotted out while the upper facade is supported with steel sections. Douglas Wallace are the architects – as with the 1920s neoclassical mothership further up the street.
Trusty breeze blocks always come in handy.
The big CAD drawing on the hoarding is more than just a little flattering in the number of properties it encompasses 😉
It’s also backwards.
It’s a shame institutions like this don’t make a bit more effort in informing the public what they’re up to with regard to bells and whistles schemes such as these. A simple board with basic history and mock-up of what’s being proposed would be as much an effective PR move as it would be a civic-minded gesture. And perfectly located for the ranks queuing at the adjacent ATMs.
lol – I can just hear the guffaws in Wood Quay as it does the rounds from desk to desk like an office e-mail (at least I hope so :eek:)
This was designed by qualified architect/s, Ciaran og Mac Mathuna Architects of Nassau Street.
A beauty salon, ‘personal training centre’ and hairdressers were granted for the site a few months ago across part of the ground floor and all of the first floor, extending into the Lafayette building. The hairdressers will overlook O’Connell Bridge from first floor level.
However the ground floor development only affects about half the frontage of the former Man Utd shop on Westmoreland Street, where an entrance hall, waiting area and small beauty retail element is proposed. The left-hand part is still vacant, as is the expansive frontage to D’Olier Street which is a separate unit also.
As in by-now time-honoured tradition, a proposal has been withdrawn and resubmitted much-inflated a couple of years later on account of the current climate of ‘maximising site potential’. I think that’s the developer target, whatever of the planning one.
I was exposed to this proposal a while ago, Stephen, hence perhaps the reticence. I’m still somewhat reflective on it insofar as the extended height cannot be seen from nearly all of O’Connell Street, ought not to impact to any great degree on other major vistas, and is barely visible at all from the head-on view of the hotel from across the street, nor is the penthouse storey in front. I just wonder if the asset such a room may give to the city (difficult to determine) just may outweigh the negatives as seen above.
But as mentioned, I suspect this proposal has wider implications in terms of impact that haven’t been demonstrated, and above all the concept is an incongruous one. The notion that the only viable way to significantly extend a traditional terrace of buildings or indeed any urban form is to lump a mammoth glazed box on top and term it starkly contemporary and a challenging intervention is incredibly tiresome, predictable, and typical of what the north inner city is being increasingly faced with of late. The skyline of a city is so important – not in a fairytale spires-n-twirly-bits kind of way, but in terms of massing, form, function and materials. By the time the north inner city is finished with in ten years time, we’ll have little more than a series of cubes and boxes hovering over religated, token sop streetscape retentions, with none of the hierarchies that define the coherence and readability of most cities.
As such, the Gresham proposal conveys a fundamental disconnect, not primarily with the heritage and form of the original buildings, but with the area at large. While small-scale hiding of additional storeys, plant, balconies etc works on a local level, surely the wholescale concealment of an enormous extension to a signature building, which in any event bloatedly reveals itself at various significant points, is dishonest, unambitious. and fundamentaly incompatible with the form that is attempting to host it?
As with the Clarence, and other recent plans, this is a proposal that the city may need or desire, but is being applied to the wrong location.
Cantrell & Crowley Architects and Interior Designers.
Two other views.
© Cantrell & Crowley
© Cantrell & CrowleyThe overall proposal is an admirable one and extremely ambitious – essentially building an entirely new hotel behind the 1920s facade and foyer areas. It is generally well-conceived, and the lifting of the Cathal Brugha Street elevation by an extra storey in the idiom of the existing buildings particularly subtle and welcome.
However there are serious concerns about the glazed box and its impact on the wider skyline of O’Connell Street, if not quite the views from the street itself, paticularly from the Rotunda. I get the general impression the photomontages aren’t particularly all-encompassing in demonstrating impact in and around the north inner city.
The inclusion of ‘other proposals considered’ in the application is particularly hilarious, including a glowering Centrepoint tower looming behind the hotel – i.e. our mid-rise so-modest-it’s-cowering-in-a-corner proposal has saved the city from such a travesty! The grandiose floating conference room is an exiting concept, but really and truly, at this location? The views from it are of service roofs and air conditioning plant, whatever of the views of it.
Got it in one, gunter. It terminates the vista from the ILAC looking south. Would have thought that to be one of the easier ones!
Can’t place the outstanding case though…
Thoroughly agreed. Observations are observations, which can be positive, negative, or both.
I find it frustrating that people assume observations are ‘objections’ – indeed newspapers must regularly or indeed consistently misreport planning cases by simply counting submissions and describing them as objections.
This function of the planning system is designed as much for statements of support, factual inclusions, corrections, historical submissions, and other general observations, as it is for objections – latterly for which it has unfortunately earned the dubious title through standard submissions opposing residential extension tributes to polyvinyl chloride.
Indeed anyone who submits on a proposal with nothing but a blinkered view in a single direction is hardly constructive anyway – by definition most rational submissions ought to be observations.
Nit-picky perhaps, but I was just passing watching the tourists scrambling about vieing for space with passing hoards of pedestrians, and observed firstly how utterly ridiculous these yokes look, secondly how ugly they are, thirdly how insensitively positioned they are in a tourist hotspot, and fourthly the obstacle they presented right in the middle of the busiest footpath in the city. Just no thought.
Going back to the title of the thread, having recently heard a speech (though more of a passionate rant) on Irish limestone from one of the two producers left in Kilkenny, the extraordinary fact emerged that at least 50% of their output goes straight onto boats to the Netherlands. They cannot get enough of Irish limestone, and are willing to pay for it in spite of their own native resource – albeit somewhat inferior. Irish limestone is proving particularly popular for sea defences, but also for paving and quite highly engineered interlocking municipal paving systems that are expensive to produce. They spend significant sums on paving in the Netherlands, deeming it to be an improving, cost-eflective, long term investment.
And yet we don’t even use the stuff here! Indeed in Kilkenny there’s a row brewing over proposals to use Chinese granite from the other side of the world to repave the city centre, rather than native limestone from the outskirts of the town. It was noted that too often municpal authorities in Ireland just see figures on a sheet and the bottom line, and nothing of the wider costs – social, economic and environmental – of trucking the alternative half way across the planet from potentially dubious sources. Once these factors are considered, our own little narrow world of penny-pinching dissolves into insignificance.
Apparently there’s also a reluctance to use limestone for paving: it often being deemed to be too slippery and not abrasive enough, whereas it is generally more than adequate in its natural state and especially so if a machine-punched finished is given.
It’d be great to see more native limestone paving the capital’s streets. You see the odd freak blue limestone kerb that stands out beautifully even against concrete, but that’s about the height of it. We really need to take both the longer term and wider view on this issue.
3/6/2008
Is this the latest ‘random’ artistic installation for the city centre?
Or is DCC trying to make a tongue-in-cheek statement adjacent to the most frequented tourist attraction in the city?
The mind boggles…
Oh, and yay – look who’s just arrived on Upper east in place of Bus Stop newsagents. Naturally with trademark regard for the nation’s premier Architectural Conservation Area and Area of Special Planning Control.
As reluctant as I am to contribute to their grubby marketing tactics, I suggest we establish a webcam with a start-up date and countdown – or should that be countup – dial, clocking the days, months and years that this, along with all the other identical tawdry rubbish pasted across countless facades, will be permitted on the capital’s principal thoroughfare.
