gunter
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@rumpelstiltskin wrote:
Can i just ask by what stretch of the imagination that Cork Street building is one of the ugliest in Dublin? I mean, ffs, you could pick a million buildings, including half the quays and most of the docklands, that are uglier than that.
I think if you read back, you find that nobody was saying that this was Dublin’s ugliest building, I introduced it to get the discussion away from pilloring again all the usual suspects and move it onto a debate about aesthetic progression / regression in the architecture of the Dublin streetscape.
Yea! that’s what I was doing
. . . . and I may have wanted to have a go at a project that I knew was about to be laden with architectural honours🙂
@rumpelstiltskin wrote:
That’s the point, your condemnation includes the phrase “what other city”. What vulgarity would compel somebody to put a FERRIS WHEEL next to the most famous parliament building in the world, ruining the panorama? Might as well just stick a giant red nose on big ben. What insanity caused somebody to plonk a BIG SPIKE right in the centre of the main street in Dublin? Doesn’t it just look like a syringe? What UTTER MADNESS caused somebody to put, of all things, a GLASS PYRAMID in the middle of one of the most historic buildings in Paris? Why not put a glass sphynx on top of the Arc de Triomphe while they’re at it! And how uncivilised must have been all those who ruined the historic low rise streetscape of New York by plonking monstrosities like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building right in the middle of them? BARBARIANS!!!!!!!!
My analogy might have been dubious, but yours are off the wall completely:)
You made a good point about the originality of the cable-car idea.
I do agree with you on that point. It would be better to have an original attraction, even if a bit flawed, rather that go for pale copy of someone else’s attraction.
Unfortunately, the visual impact of the giant, ungainly, supports looks (to me anyway) to be too big of a price to pay. I don’t think Dublin needs a new attraction that badly.
Maybe if the supports were sculpted up a bit, or set behind the North Quays, it would have less negative impact of the primary Liffey vistas.
If you check back, you’ll see that I’ve actually never said a bad word about this proposal, and that ‘clothes line’ jibe could have been interpreted either way;)
@rumpelstiltskin wrote:
Well if they can avoid ruining vistas or making this whole thing unsightly, I don’t see why people are so opposed to it. People always complain that Dublin just copies other cities. Well this is pretty original.
That is a good point, this would be original!
. . . what other city has a clothes line running down it’s front lawn?
@what? wrote:
Timberyard’
. . . . one of the best buildings built in dublin in the past ten years . . . .The timberyard block does more for Cork street than any other development on it by a country mile.
I think you should be fucking ashamed of yourselves attacking this project.
I’m sorry what? but that’s just sycophantic nonsense!
For a start, I wasn’t attacking this project, I was questioning it’s aesthetics, it’s value as streetscape, and whether it’s design was driven by architectural zeal at the expense of creating somewhere that might be a pleasant to live in, and live near.
I don’t like the harshness of this design, the cheerlessness of the brick facades, the deep, eyeless socket, openings, the inhuman, aquarium tank, balconies, the low, garage door, proportions of the street level openings, the blocky massing, the institutional severity, but most of all I don’t like what I see as the abandonment of the principles that, by our buildings, we can make a street.
I also don’t buy that bullshit that this is a dual-carriageway, there is nothing they could do!
Lower Baggot Street is a dual-carriageway if you choose to see it as such.
@GrahamH wrote:
Re: Timberyard:
. . . definitely a thumbs up from me. Balancing public grandeur fronting a dual carriageway with residential intimacy is no mean feat. I think it’s been pulled off admirably.OK Graham, it doesn’t deserve to be dealt with on a thread of this title, but you put the Timberyard (by O’Donnell/Toomey) together with that school extension by McCullough/Mulvin, down the end of the road, and you have two of the heavy weights from Group 91, yes!
. . . . now, how do you compare this cold, defensive, architecture with all those aspiration in ‘Making a Modern Street’ ?
Surely the Coombe by-pass should have been exactly that; the making of a modern street?
@Praxiteles wrote:
I think that we shall have to devote some more time along the way to the aesthetic question.
Here’s a quotation attributed to Berthold Lubetkin:
”A society that openly professes that the present is expendable and the future unintelligible begets artists who have to scream to be noticed and remembered for a quarter of an hour”
from a letter to the (London) Times last Monday on the subject of the Prince vs Rogers in Chelsea.@rumpelstiltskin wrote:
I mean if you think about it, Dame Street . . . . . it could rival the Royal Mile in Edinburgh for grandeur. That’s a depressing thought.
@rumpelstiltskin wrote:
I wasn’t being harsh on the Royal Mile. I love it. I’m saying that Dublin city council could learn a lot from it when regenerating Dame Street.
Sorry rumpel, I was detecting irony where there wasn’t any.
Archiseek will do that to you!
@rumpelstiltskin wrote:
I mean if you think about it, Dame Street and College Green contain, or are close to: the country’s most prestigious university, the first purpose built parliament building in the world, the City Hall, Dublin Castle, and one of our cathedrals, as well as being next to Temple Bar and Grafton Street. If they simply brought in rules about shop fronts and pedestrianised the whole area, it could rival the Royal Mile in Edinburgh for grandeur. That’s a depressing thought.
That’s a very good assessment, rumple, but you’re too harsh on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. It’s a cracking street and who cares if it sold it’s soul to tourism, at least it didn’t sell it’s soul to Spar.
There’s a current planning application (Reg. no. 3045/09) in for the old Tully’s Tiles premises, 56 – 58 Smithfield and 1 – 6 Haymarket.
pic of model in the planning lobby.Looks like Smithfield will be getting an uncomplicated, seven storey, square, office block, that’ll really liven things up!
Until Tully’s Tiles extended their corner premises in the early 1980s, with a blank concrete warehouse, this was the site of three splendid former ‘Dutch Billys’, including one of the tallest in Dublin, no. 4 Haymarket 😡
a 1950s aerial view from the south with the rear of 4,5 & 6 Haymarket outlined in red.@Gregorius III wrote:
That is an interesting article by Scruton.
Fully agree, wonderful stuff, but totally daft!
The guy is trying to re-write the history of art starting from a premise he seems to have invented that: ”The sacred task of art . . . is to magnify life . . . and to reveal it’s beauty”.
We need to go back to basics here. The goal of the artist, from the first cave painter onwards, was always to produce a representation, a picture, a sculpture, using skills and craft that others didn’t possess. From day one, his skills set the artist apart, the artist was special, a member of an elite.
As in Darwin, natural selection kicked in and the artist who produced a good representation, and/or beauty, did well and prospered. Later on, a handfull of great artists eschewed conventions of beauty to create works that were disturbing, but always the idea was to give graphic representation to an idea, or a commission.
Then everything changed mid 19th century with the invention of photography. But photography was crude and simple and black & white. The artist was skilled and could adapt and he remembered the quick brush strokes of Rembrandt and Hals and Guardi and the artist created impressionist works that photography couldn’t match and, more than anything, his medium was colour.
But sun flowers and water lillies don’t last forever and photography caught up and soon the artist found himself playing third fiddle in the orchestra he used to lead and he got angry and resentful and so he spat vile and tat and squalid bedsits and pickled sharks at a world in which he could make no other mark.
But to his shock and surprise the world made dizzy by the pace of progress bought his art, believing it to have the same value as shares in Lehman Brothers and this encouraged the artist to spit and scowl some more, but anyone can spit and scowl, these are not the attributes of a gifted elite, so now the artist is looking around and diversifying into film and fashion, just in case.
That’s my potted history of art and my explanation for why we are . . where we are!
If art has a future I’ll bet my bottom dollar it’ll be in rediscovering the value of skill and craft, about the artist again doing things that others cannot do, about the craft in the object not just the shock in the concept.
I think Scruton is right about the vacuousness of shock and afront as modern artistic goals, but I think he’s wrong to hark back to perceptions of ‘Beauty’ or ‘Sanctity’ as having any role to play in an artistic revival.
@Contraband wrote:
Why is the thread title ‘reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches’ when from what I can see, whats being discussed is general church buildings/architecture that have nothing to do with Ireland or Irish architects..?
I hope you’re not suggesting the reorganisation and destruction of an archiseek thread!
@johnglas wrote:
I think some of the posts about Smithfield are far too negative . . . . and some people seem wedded to a vision of this area that imbues the previous range of uses – fruit/horse market particularly – with a ridiculous veneer of nostalgia.
I’m not letting you away with that johnglas, this is not about nostalgia. Smithfield was laid out and built as a market space and despite all the dereliction and decay it still retained vestiges of this market use until the planning authorities chose, in the late 1990s, to allow the total demolition and redevelopment of the west side. This killed off any connection with the 17th century origins of the urban space and erased all the subsequent layers. Continuity of use and fabric was thrown away. The place is not ‘Smithfield’ any more, now it’s just ‘Sandyford with cobblestones’, (as was stated on one of these threads before).
You’d be familiar with the Grass Market in Edinburgh! Similar size, shape, and origins to Smithfield. For sure it has more that it’s fair share of dodgy late 20th century apartment and hotel developments, but imagine if it was cleansed of any remaining structures from it’s original phase of construction, would it’s essential character survive?
I don’t think it would.
@johnglas wrote:
The glass is actually half (or three-quarters) full. Build it and they will come – eventually. It’s a great urban space waiting to happen, and happen it will. But it won’t happen if people are determined not to go there just to prove a point.
It’s not about letting time take it’s course and eventually it’ll all sort itself out, Smithfield as a legible 17th & 18th century development is gone and it’s soutside contemporary, Newmarket (in the Liberties) will follow it, if we don’t attempt to learn the lessons.
@StephenC wrote:
I think the location of the Chidren’s Court here was also a big mistake in hindsight. The open space in front of it makes it much more likely for people to linger about before and after. I think the Court should be moved (apologies to all those kids who commit crimes).
I understand the reasons for saying that, but it really would be an indictment of planning failure and civic decline if a minor judicial function like a children’s court couldn’t be located on the edge of a significant civic space because the attendants were impairing other uses of the space!
Whatever about the Post-Modern tendancies in the architecture of the Children’s Court, if only the philosophy of ‘urban repair’ had prevailed, Smithfield could have been a showcase for urban regeneration!
On the subject of dodgy planning; what was the idea of letting the new Church St. office block barge into the the vista of St Michan’s tower from Smithfield?
so now instead of being brown and muted, the Pauline Chapel is going to be vivid and startling,
. . . . excellent!
@Praxiteles wrote:
I am not inclined to think that reflection on the conceptual foundation of “beauty” is a useless task – or at least no more so than a reflection on truth (philosophy) or the good (ethics).
I don’t think I was suggesting that, Praxiteles, it’s just that the linking of the three; Balthasar’s ”the good, the beautiful and the true” seems like such an antiquated notion.
Johnglas made the point earlier that perhaps there is a distinction to be made here between the creation of beauty in the form of works of art and architecture, on the one hand, and ‘beauty’ as an occassional human attribute, on the other, but many of the theologians/philosophers you quote don’t seem to make that distinction and if anything there seems to be a conscious effort to bring physical beauty into the mix.
Jesus, for example, is nearly always portrayed as a tall slender unblemished individual with a nobel face and good hair. That’s fine as an artistic convention, an idealized man created in the absence of much descriptive information, but if the implication is that Christ’s attribute of physical ‘beauty’ was somehow pre-ordained, as the third component of some ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ triumvirate, that’s a bit non-PC for these days and a bit indefensible, philosophically, I would have thought.
@Praxiteles wrote:
Saint Thomas Aquinas’ aesthetic theory . . . follows the classical model of Aristotle, but with explicit formulation of beauty as “pulchrum transcendentalis” or convertible with being among the other “transcendentals” such as “truth” and “goodness.”
. . . . integritas, consonantia, and claritas . .Latin a little rusty:), what would be the translations there?
Nobody doubts that Christianity was a huge factor in the creation of much of the world’s great art and architecture, but equally it has to be acknowledged that there have been great works of art and architecture that owe nothing to Christianity.
Beauty is up-lifting, there’s no getting away from that!, but equally, concepts of beauty change over time and whereas beauty as an aspiration is a useful goal in any artistic undertaking, I don’t know if I’d buy the theory that ‘beauty’ has anything approaching the fundamental properties of concepts like ‘truth’ or ‘goodness’, which themselves are hardly the property of any one faith system alone.
For a start, anyone can choose to live a life of truth and goodness, but, short of engaging the services of a plastic surgeon, many of us can’t really choose beauty!
@Praxiteles wrote:
A line from one of those thretises on aesthetics, this time from Hans Urs von Balthsar:
and now, thanks to wikipedia, anyone can know a little bit about even the most obscure 20th century theo-philosopher.
Was it not particularly cruel that this guy was called to the pearly gates two days before the pope would have bestowed on him a cardinal’s hat? Some people might conclude that this was pay-back for inflicting a 16 volume treatise on aesthetics on the world.
This isn’t my field, but I getting the sense that the further one travels up a philosophical cul-de-sac, the more florid becomes one’s descriptions of one’s surroundings.
@Praxiteles wrote:
Quote from Balthasar:
“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love” (p. 18).How many more of these guys are there? . . . . I see there really was a guy called R(h)abanus!
@jimg wrote:
Whether recreation is justified depends to a degree on whether you value what will have to be destroyed to accommodate it.
That is a crucial point. There is the issue of the ethics of reconstruction in the first place, and then there is the seperate issue of whether you can justify the demolition of what’s there now to create the reconstruction opportunity.
@jimg wrote:
I’ve never admired the current facade. It is repetitive suggesting a weak attempt to respect the rhythm of the Georgian Terrace but missing the point entirely without any vital variation. It’s boring and bland – neither rudely functional nor brashly modern. It’s all staid semi-state comfort; it looks like the sort of place that is going to have carpet tiles covering everything.
I don’t know if I’d entirely agree with that. I think for the ESB block to have been a really great building, something in the rhythm of the facade needed to vary, but it has a certain power, and it doesn’t actually overwhelm the surrounding Georgian context, which, in fairness to Stephenson/Gibney, can’t have been an easy thing to do.
Nobody now disputes that the original ESB decision was wrong! . . . . It was an urban crime of the highest order, but despite some later attempts by Bord na Móna on Pembroke Street, that model, (the tearing down of Georgian houses to build corporate office blocks), wasn’t permitted again on this scale and the coherence of the ‘South Georgian Core’ at least, largely survives.
@jimg wrote:
Across the lane, you have the great Bank of Ireland block – an exciting expression of modern architecture.
OK, we’ll agree to disagree on that, whatever about the actual architectural merits of the ESB block, at least it was an ‘original’ work and not a scale model, but to take up your point on proximity, there is a case to be made that these two corporate blocks together, (the ESB and the Bank of Ireland), create (or could if they tried) the nucleus of a modern/contemporary cluster here, right in the heart of the ‘South Georgian Core’.
Perhaps in this case, instead of looking to what we’ve lost, and justifyably seeking restitution, there is a case to be made for looking at this modernist cluster as a work in progress and see whether one or two more interventions might make the whole thing work on a really urban level.
Punctuating that monotony in the ESB facade with a laneway terminating in the vista of the narrow facade of the tallest Bank of Ireland block would be one idea that comes to mind. Such a new pedestrian route could open into some kind of shared plaza on James’s Street East, defined by the Miesian Bank blocks on one side and some contemporay towers on the backlands of the ESB site on the other.
I don’t know, maybe we should just put back the 16 Georgian houses;)
@lauder wrote:
Royal Arms is on Royal Victoria Eye & Ear Hospital.
Spot on, lauder . . . the ‘Eye & Ear’ it is, on Adelaide Road. The date seems to be 1897.
@Lauder wrote:
What is the story with the Arch? When was it removed and to where?
I think it was just a temporary structure, pure and simple, put up just for the royal visit!
Wasn’t there a long renaissance tradition of doing this kind of thing?
I recall several paintings in the National Gallery of squares in renaissance Rome filled with elaborate baroque structures, erected for various weddings or festivals etc.
This is a mid 18th century example, drawn by Canaletto, of a huge temporary baroque structure in the Piazzetta in Venice, apparently erected just for the Carnival!@lunasa wrote:
Leeson Street Bridge, 1900. Victoria’s, not secrets, visit to Dublin for the Empire Exhibition in what is now Herbert Park.
The arch is Leeson St. Bridge, but my information is a visit of Edward VII, possibly 1907? not Vic.
@Praxiteles wrote:
An article from the London telegraph on the controversy surrounding the development of Chelsea Barracks, by Andrew Roberts
”The greatest palace of them all, however, was to be Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital, built in 1682 after Nell Gwynne had the idea for a home for veterans . . .”Nell Gwynne had the idea for a home for veterans ! ! !
Not Louis XIV then, or even the Duke of Ormond?
