GrahamH

The most recent addition being more of these ghastly yokes.

While unregulated private operators merely contribute to the mayhem at one of the narrowest points on the street.

On the western side, a drainage channel runs right down the centre of the most congested pavement in the city, a death-trap for pedestrians as anyone who has tripped in it will know, while turning into a river of water to negotiate when it rains, and overall making for an uncomfortable experience in trying to avoid in what is an already challenging pedestrian area.

While further space is consumed with bicycle parking along the kerb!

Not to mention the ranks of bus stops and hoards of waiting patrons blocking the footpath. These were taken at a quiet time of the day.

And more mindless clutter and lack of coordination at the bridge corner.

Contributing to the hostile pedestrian/vehicle divide are these decrepit railings mounted along the sides of the pavements.

While at O’Connell Bridge the attention to detail is ever-refreshing.

And the road surface generally is also appalling.

One of the biggest problems with Westmoreland Street, and its most dangerous, is the lack of pedestrian crossing provision at its centre – thousands of pedestrians every day make the treacherous journey across from one side of Fleet Street to the other. Call it indiscipline, or call it inability to plan, or even take note on the part of authorities.

An example of a double-glaze retrofit in Ireland is the former Dunlop factory on Upper Stephen Street in Dublin, recently refurbished as Dunnes Stores’ new headquarters.

It has a magnificent array of industrial steel frames from when the building was built around 1930.

As can be seen, its elegant glazing bars have been fitted with double-glazed panels to make them more efficient.

They appear to be 14-16mm units.

And not notable from even a moderate distance.

A job exceptionally well done. One would wonder if these were refurbished in this country at all…
Even the Department of Environment’s Architectural Heritage Protection Guidelines make but a passing reference to steel windows in a small paragraph, and with a single clichéd photograph of the former Department of Industry and Commerce building on Kildare Street as an example, out of the hundreds of timber window pictures in the document.

So it is possible to restore and/or cast replicas of steel windows, as well as update many to modern-day requirements. The two biggest UK firms, Crittall and Clements still make and restore them, and have excellent websites, amonst others.

http://www.clementwg.co.uk/home/
http://www.crittall-windows.co.uk/menu.html
http://www.re-view.biz/restoration-steel.html

Crittall sent over their brochure to me, and they make some really beautiful stuff. A pity they’ve no distributer in Ireland. It would appear they have since absorbed Hope’s too.

If there are restorers in Ireland, it’s a pity they wouldn’t make themselves a little more known. Our steel window heritage doesn’t have that much time left.

Indeed here is one of Hope’s advertisements from 1958, extolling their experience through their fit-out of a major state office building outside Birmingham.

Presumably most steel frames were imported to Ireland.

The casements extend outwards so beautifully – strong but light, they allow almost uninterrupted views and a flood of light into the room.

They are supported on trademark external hinges that protrude to the sides of the frame, here seen on a bay window.

Top-opening lights also feature external hinges, however all opening parts are remarkably discreet as a result.

A charming feature of these windows is the consideration of the 1950’s housewife and her net curtains – you can see these studs have been provided to support the lines 🙂

Of course steel windows are not without their problems – indeed these frames suffer from various structural problems that essentially make them unusable anymore. As one might imagine, the armatures have seized up in places, while the casements and top lights are now so tight as to make opening or closing them a near impossibility. It took two hands and half my body weight to open the above casement, and about five minutes to close it again! Ironically they offer fantastic security as they ‘mature’! There’s also substantial degrading paintwork, and extensive rusting to the interior due to condensation. These windows were not galvanized. The joys of period steel frames.

In their most recent planning application, the Grssham proposed the reinstatement of all original steel frames to the O’Connell Street elevation – what a dramatic lift it would make for. Here it is in all its original steel-windowed glory in the 1940s, with balcony still intact.

It looks stunning with the windows painted black too.

In the mid-1930s, the Pearl Insurance building that’s now part of the Westin Hotel on Westmoreland Street also made use of steel frames in its elegant neoclassical elevations, probably the starkest contrast in architecture and window design yet used in the capital.

It appears these were restored in the c.2000 conversion with weather-stripping and new handles, while secondary white aluminum glazing was inserted to the interior.

A contemporaneous use of the material would also be the Dr. Quirkey’s building on Upper O’Connell Street.

A typical light industrial use would be this building on Great Strand Street, near the Lotts, with a highly curious timber shingle façade.

The steel frames add an elegant lightness of touch even to a surly building such as this.

© Devin

As we’ve seen through this thread, the steel window is a part of our built heritage that is not being given the attention deserving of it, and is disappearing at a worrying rate from our urban and suburban streetscapes. Within the next decade it’s most likely that the steel frame will be all but extinct in Ireland, with nothing other than incidental fragments surviving to the odd rear elevation, in modern movement houses with considerate owners on the south side of Dublin, or retained in flagship commercial conservation projects in the occasional urban centre. Although steel is making a comeback in a chunkier form for office developments, the vast majority of our dwindling period stock is surviving purely through neglect – indeed not dissimilar to the timber sash in rural areas – where owners simply don’t have the will or the money, or have lived all their lives with the same windows, to have them replaced with something else.

Period steel windows are of course not without their faults, especially ones made pre-1955 or thereabouts when galvanising was finally introduced to protect from rust. They suffer from various problems including frame distortion, jamming, rusting, and poor sound and heat insulation. Up until recently they also needed to be painted, with decades of once-fashionable thick, gloopy gloss paint contributing to snagging, and detracting from the frames’ smooth, slim line profiles. It’s no wonder people want rid of these windows.

But it is also because of these now-resolvable latter-day faults that the beauty and quality of steel frames are so overlooked. As a result, they now carry the same baggage with the public as even the gems of modern architecture – there’s an impenetrable barricade that just flatly refuses to allow people view them in any other way than ‘ugly and modern’. Without question some were better designed than others, but the majority have an unabashed appeal in being slender and elegant, crisp and modern, and with an underlying hint of an admirable desire to open up their host buildings to the world, in a new light-filled, transparent era. How grand, bright and optimistic the great wine-bricked complexes of 1930’s Dublin must have been in their original forms, before being short-sightedly bastardised with cheap plastic frames, merely contributing to perceptions of the second-rate, and down-at-heel environments.

Of course, whatever of their heritage value, there is little question that steel was the PVC of its age: a cheap, mass-produced, quick-fix solution that could be churned out at lightning speed, and be adapted for use in everything from industrial to commercial to residential applications, the latter also encompassing both public and private housing in urban and suburban locations. It was the wonder material of the inter and post-war years, arriving just in time for the explosion in housing building and the wider construction industry in the UK of the early and mid-twentieth century. It also arrived in Ireland in time for the great slum clearances of the 1920s and 1930s, and their replacement with social housing along modernist lines. It was even advertised in a disconcertingly similar way similar to PVC as we saw earlier.

However, unlike PVC, steel is both aesthetically pleasing and relatively environmentally friendly – it is most compatible with the dominant architecture of its age (including today), and is easily recycled and repaired. Like early forms of PVC, period steel was not up to standard in terms of heat and sound insulation, nor longevity or rate of recycling. However it has moved on in leaps and bounds since then, whilst PVC remains as the aesthetically stodgy, environmentally disastrous and historically insensitive product it always has been, from production, through its life cycle, to disposal, in spite of improvements in insulation and security.

Steel, relative to timber is still environmentally damaging to produce – albeit not as much as PVC – due to pollutants emitted and the enormous amounts of energy consumed during production. However once steel has been created, it can be easily recycled over and over again, using only a quarter of the initial energy (this time electricity) consumed to produce it, and with minimal discharges. The steel industry now relies on scrap/recycled steel for a third of all steel in circulation, and increasingly so. Steel windows can be easily recycled, and in theory recycling old units could actually help contribute to the cost of replacement frames were proper procedures in place, such is their value as scrap metal. Construction scrap like steel window frames is also one of the easiest metal products to recycle as there’s little to separate: for example, over 95% of certain types of structural steel like I-beams and plates are recycled in the UK. Hence when period steel frames come to the end of their life, it could be argued that recycling them returns steel back into the lifecycle, to be replaced – in theory – with the same volume of recycled steel. Unfortunately global demand for the metal at the moment is such that twice as much raw steel is created as is recycled annually, so in spite of the principle, a small gesture like replacing domestic window frames with recycled steel makes little difference in the current market.

Steel windows gradually replaced iron window frames, used mainly in industrial buildings and churches, in the early 20th century, but really arrived in Ireland following the destruction of Dublin’s north inner city in 1916 and 1922, and Cork’s city centre in 1920. Their subsequent reconstructions offered the ideal opportunity to put this new material to the test in modern commercial architecture.

One of its first uses was in the rebuilding of what is now the Supermacs building on Lower O’Connell Street in Dublin, completed c.1918.

On initial impression, the traditional leaded lights belies the nature of the modern material. Curiously, it would appear that the bay decorative swags are also of cast metal, probably iron.

Across the road, the current Ulster Bank building made minimal use of the material c.1921-23.

While further down, the Grand Central building also features highly elegant steel frames, complemented with timber sashes.

A lovely tilting specimen.

The same can be said of the Garda station on the Upper street from the mid-20s, relegating the (probably still cheaper) timber sash to the attic storey.

And has been designed by Henry J Lyons according to the Indo. No images on either site however.

“Peter McGovern, director of the firm who won the design contract, said that it was a daunting task for any firm to build in the shadow of James Gandon who designed the Four Courts and Dublin’s Custom House.”

I presume the High Court and Supreme Court will remain sitting in the Four Courts?

Oddly, given the enormous commercial implications of this scheme…

The tower you refer to Fergal is the central tower that was taken down in 1949, for no apparent reason other than it was deemed to be ugly, or at best unorthodox. It had survived 1916 and 1922. Presumably it was also at this time that the turrets were removed from the two side towers. And then about 15 years later the western tower disappeared completely with the construction of the 1960’s curtain-walled extension, however it would appear that only the tower’s facade was demolished, with its substructure including Victorian cast iron columns being retained behind part of the new facade, at ground floor level at least. Indeed it’s possible this is the reason a curtain-walled solution was called into play with the Arnotts extension: to partially clad over the western tower. Though why/if this was done is anyone’s guess…

Btw I recently tentatively ventured deep into the bowels of Arnotts, into the school uniform and baby needs section high up on the second floor in the Victorian block fronting onto Henry Street, and as hoped it’s a hidden enclave of original features that survived the 80’s and 90’s remodellings, with cast iron columns puncturing up through the floor. The floor seems to line up neatly with the windows, but the low columns and capitals, some only at waist level, clearly suggest a much grander plan originally, perhaps with no floor divisions at all, like a double or triple height space over the main entrance behind the red brick facade. There’s also a few simple arches that may or may not be original, clad over if I recall. It’s all very make-do-and-mend, with the shop charmingly muddling around these curious relics of a bygone store 🙂 – an increasingly rare phenomenon in Dublin today.

Of course many of the columns around part the central rotunda are also original, the mezzanine level only installed in the 1980s. That’s why the columns are ridiculously short at that level. So the original store was at the very least a double height space in the red brick block.