gunter
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@lostexpectation wrote:
thats fantastic, as submitted by failte ireland? written by who exactly?
Written by Philip Geoghegan.
It seems like a much sharper summary of the Carlton (Dublin Central) proposal than I’ve been able to find in the Planning Department’s report! . . . . not like us to be agreeing on things:),
I scanned up the rest of it, there’s some other good stuff in there on Henry St., Parnell St. etc. as well.
@jdivision wrote:
Yep, granted around December 17. 32 conditions.
http://www.tribune.ie/article/2008/dec/21/oreillys-1bn-oconnell-street-scheme-gets-green-lig/?q=Chartered%20LandYou’d want half a day free to go through all the stuff on the Corpo website to do with the Carlton site (Reg. no. 2479/08), but from what I can tell, the only design revision directly specified in the Decision to Grant Permission is that the glass canopy roof supports should be removed and replaced by wall brackets basically!
Apart from that, it’s the usual ‘finishes to be agreed in advance with the planning Dept.’ etc. etc.
The Planners report seems to run to over a hundred pages, mostly of padding, but there’s a nice little, two and a half page, report specifically dealing with the Additional Information by an outfit called ‘icon, Architecture, Urban Design, Conservation’ submitted by Fáilte Ireland.
This little report mirrors many of the observation made on Archiseek, only much more concise and bitchy!
Scan of an extract:
The tappered stripes on the Moore Street facade haven’t gone unnoticed, and ‘icon’ are not having that ‘Civic Space’ off O’Connell Street!
@KeepAnEyeOnBob wrote:
. . . a bit less gloomy on a typical Limerick rainy day . . .
@vkid wrote:
. . . even in the best Limerick Summer 😀
Just remember I’m not the one who brought up the subject of rain 😉
. . . but since we’re on the subject of rain, and at the risk of going slightly OT, how exactly did ye in Limerick dispose of your rainfall from the valleys of these double lateral pitched roofed Georgian terraces?
Any ideas?
Or was rainfall so improbable that it didn’t have to be factored in.
@vkid wrote:
..what exactly do ye want..restore georgian buildings to their original format, and be left with buildings that are about useful restored as they are in their current state.
vkid, I think you’re trying to set the urban debate back forty years. The building stock on Ellen St., Rutland St. Patrick St. etc. is part of the collective assets of Limerick City. If you dispose of these assets, you’ve got to be bloody sure that you’ve replaced them with someting of higher value.
I accept that the site could use a regeneration package, but I’d like to see it done in a way that protects and enhances the existing building stock, rather than a 1970s style scorched earth approach. Ok, it can be difficult to find good examples of how this is done well, because, of their nature, the good schemes don’t shout out ‘redevelopment’ in the same way.
This is an example of decent contemporary in-fill on O’Connell Street (by the same Limerick architects who are doing that scheme (with the medieval fireplace) at 36-39 Nicholas Street). There’s no question that the architectural skill are there, what is required, is more hands-on guidance by the Planning authorities to set out the boundaries.Surely an ‘Opera Centre’, with the same long term impact, could be delivered, that has three or four, high quality, contemporary interventions acting as gateways into the complex, through a retained and restored streetscape.
Sometimes, when you push the developer far enough, he realizes, later on, that being forced to address conservation challenges ends up with him creating a unique development, and he goes on to make more money . . . . (and the architects won’t have to worry so much about meeting up with Sam Stephenson on judgement day).
The relative completeness of the ‘Georgian city’ in Limerick, from Bank Place to the Crescent, is quite impressive, but’s it’s a precarious thing, so much has been lost that it’s very dificult to say at what point the legibility and coherence could also be lost.
Look at Bank Place, now reduced to just three 18th Century houses, when it was the glossy dust cover to the whole post-medieval ‘new town’!
[We’ll come back to those tantalizing key stones and skew-backs and the similarities between the Bank Place terrace and the demolished George’s Quay terrace opposite, on another thread.]@Tuborg wrote:
I’m sorry but all this talk about the demolition of one side of Ellen Street being in some way acceptable is absolute rubbish! . . . . I am in favour of the opera centre because I understand how important it is to the viability of the city centre but that dosent mean it should be allowed sweep all before it. I just don’t get why we are so reluctant to retain perfectly good historic buildings in this country,
That really is the point! If the demolition of a complete ‘Georgian’ terrace, like that on Ellen Street, was ruled out, the way it should have been, the developers would have had to work around it, from day one!
The way I understand it, the ‘Opera Centre’ has already been permitted and that what is proposed now are revisions to the approved development, is that the position, does anyone know?
@dave123 wrote:
I like the sky view pic, I think it looks fantastic.
Guy’s would you f**** lay off the pognance for a while. Seroously. Like what are you looking for instead.
It doesn’t always have to be a debate about one extreme or the other, ‘mock Georgians’ or
‘glass prisms’, there’s a whole range of contemporary architectural solutions that could announce the insertion of a new shopping district into a predominantly Georgian streetscape, without reaching for the glass cladding brochures.This is a somewhat similar development situation snapped recently from a hoarding in Lubeck.
I’m not sure if it’s going to be entirely successful, but at least these guys had enough sense to limit the glass to a few featured openings in a otherwise stone facade, and they also managed to design the scheme with a contemporary reference to the Hanseatic gabled tradition that, in Lubeck, is the predominant architectural characteristic of the city. I also like the fact that their promotional image doesn’t try to cod people that there will always be a Mediteranean sky!
I’m just posting it to demonstrate that there are other options.
To me, the images of the ‘Opera Centre’ ring all kinds of alarm bells that we haven’t actually learned anything after 80 years of the Modern Movement. We still think that retaining any sense of a unified coherence to a city is backward looking, that keeping the odd disembodied facade is enough to retain ‘the character’ of a street, and that shopping centres are so important, and hard to find, that they need four storey, block and a half deep, illuminated glass entrances.
@Paul Clerkin wrote:
And it suffers from the usual lots of glass, which will be covered up by the retailers
Views of the existing Streetscape.Whatever about the individual quality of the 1990s in-fill, and not knowing the condition of the buildings/sites they replaced, at least they left the ‘Georgian’ streetscape repaired and largely intact.
The ‘Opera Centre’ scheme goes for maximum impact by way of maximum contrast. The problem with this approach is that it robs the existing streetscape of it’s recently mended coherence, it dates very quickly, the vast areas of glass never look as impressive in reality as they do in the developers’ brochure, it invites misuse by retailers (as Paul said), and the glitzy new corners, instead of patinating into maturity, inevitably start the slow slide into shabbyness from the first day the scaffolding comes down.
Unfortunately, when the sky is that blue, the glass is that shimmering, and the virtual people look like they just strolled off the plane from Milan, it’s hard not to be captivated by the images!
@jpsartre wrote:
Of the other site on Nicholas street I only know what you’ve already made ref. to viz. the discovery of a mediaeval fireplace held up the project. (the cafe thing is interesting. In 1785 a ‘cafe’ named the Merchant’s Coffee House was opened next door to the Exchange on Nicholas street according to Georgian Limerick Vol II. Just a thought.)
. . . . I believe the future of this city lies in preserving the little we’ve got left. The old neglected laneways and bow-ways in Limerick . . . . .
I hope ye don’t mind an outsider getting involved, but since I spent the New Year in Limerick, I’m going to be like a kid with a new toy for the next few weeks.
That scrolled fireplace is a beauty, but it seems to be just the tip of the iceberg as far as surviving historic fabric on Nicholas Street / Mary Street is concerned. The development of the gallery/coffee shop and offices at 36 – 39 Nicholas Street appears to have been given permission on 14 Dec, but I can’t get any hard information from the Planning Office website, or the architects (Healy & Partners) website.
I don’t know what other people think, but to me there looks to be huge potential in the surviving fabric of Nicholas St. / Mary St. that just needs someone in the City Council to take it by the throat and guide the much needed regeneration towards the kind of contemporary re-expression of the scale and importance of this original medieval Main Street that could bring this great street back from the brink of misery.
Almost every surviving building on the street exhibits some vestige or other of a previous, and much higher status, manifestation. There are finely cut stone dressings behind half the ground floor shopfronts/roller shutters and evidence of early 18th century red brickwork re-facings to numerous (apparently truncated) upper floors. On one of the derelict sites on Mary Street, you can see the broken remains of a barrel vaulted basement peeping through the rubble.
Nicholas Street from the direction of the castle.There’s a big hoarding on a nearby derelict site heralding your entry into Limerick’s ‘Medieval Quarter’ ! I suppose that’s the first step.
Even if this had been carved out of a single block of lard, or whatever, I just don’t get it.. . . but then, I don’t really get the ‘Gerkin’ either, so maybe there’s always going to be great contemporary architectural icons that I just don’t get.
Having said that, if a person had any interest in extravagantly expensive design statements by some of the world’s architectural elite (and let’s face it, who hasn’t) this little quarter square mile of Dublin is the place to take a little wander around at the moment!
The construction of the Libeskind theatre is amazing and it’s taking shape so quickly in comparison to everything else around town that it must be being built by elves,
No matter how fiendishly complicated the steel and concrete details, every day you go down there, there’s a new bit bolted on.
I hope somebody’s put a webcam on this.Another pic from this evening.
and of the hotel.
They are bolting on tapered white blocks to the top storey, as per the original renders.
We should have had more faith!The makings of an urban myth there I think!
I’ve no idea how this picture came out, there’s obviously some fool-proof setting on my camera for near dark situations.@gunter wrote:
Balsa wood models can be very deceptive though, I’d like to see more renders.
There’s a hard lesson in the process of being learned here; not to shoot one’s mouth off, in advance of seeing the pictures.
These are the pictures:
In the model, this looked monumental, almost geological, great solid stone terraces climbing up out of the flat centre of Dublin like a cross between the Acropolis and Temple Mount, (OK, without the actual temples), a true landmark, the Hanging Gardens of Henry Street.
Who would have guessed, from the model, that this monumental recreation of central Dublin has actually been given an elevation treatment that places tappered vertical bands of black stone on an orange/red background, like the petrified pelt of the unfortunate Celtic Tiger stretched across the facade of Moore Street?
Jesus Christ
A step in the right direction if no. 12 is to be restored, but I don’t know about that mirror image next door, or the extra dormer storey!
Photograph of an intact no. 12, which appears in Peter Pearson’s ‘The Heart of Dublin’The last thing we need right now is for lazy, early 1980s style, ‘pastiche’ to make a reappearance and taint the debate on the need to consider genuine restoration projects in specific cases.
As with Devin’s post on 62 -65 Thomas Street, I think the need to develop a contemporary architectural language for the individual plot, in-fill, site couldn’t be clearer.
I nearly walked passed this, it looks so inoffensive now!
This Moore Street aspect and the corner with Henry Street have changed the most. Dispite the lavish praise heaped on the original Moore Street treatment by the Planning case officer, Paul Kearns, the whole building over another building that respects the scale of the adjoining building has been quietly dropped to be replaced by an almost Temple of the Mount scale climbing terrace. Personally I’m a sucker for this kind of thing and I also like the fact that the terrace of Protected Structure gabled houses now seem to fit into the scheme, whereas before they looked like little dolls houses retained as a curiousity.
My reservations about the facadism to O’Connell Street, the lowering of the sheltering canopy and the spindly ‘portico’, remain, but I have to say, that centre block with the re-orientated slope and the way it confronts Henry Street are starting to do it for me.
Balsa wood models can be very deceptive though, I like to see more renders.
The planners don’t give a dam, I think we’ve established that, it’s the architect who should have known better.
The way I understand fashion retailing, it’s all about creating an artificial environment where the true value of things is no longer dicernable; a coat, for example that may have €10 worth of material in it and €15 worth of Taiwanese labour, is hung on rail for €200, or a shirt, that was never €50, is 50% off at €25! Places where a person’s very appearance is manipulated by soft lighting and dodgy mirrors to look younger/taller/thinner than they actually are. A place wher plastic payment can be deferred, at a hefty interest rate, to some time in the future.
These are the last places where they’re going to want windows letting reality in!
@GrahamH wrote:
– but the architect’s touch has been firmly kept outside the front door.
Graham, it was the architects who gave them the zig-zag glass box!
What did they expect the retail managers to do? In retail, glass facades above street level are no use to anybody.
@notjim wrote:
The point is, the architecture isn’t enough, your experience of it from street level is not enough to compensate for a lifeless, contrived, streetscape, Not that the upper OCS proposal is necessarily anything special in that regard, but even it if was, mall-like streets are terrible and sad in a city context.
I’m not sure I follow your Stockholm reference, but I certainly share your misgivings about ‘mall-like streets’.
From the posted images, if anything, the ‘streets’ look more ‘mall-like’ than they did in the original version! The canopy looks lower, heavier and more fully enclosing than I was conscious of it in the earlier images.
I also think the O’Connell Street elevation looks more facade-istic now than it did before.
Original version
New versionFor some reason, they’ve changed the proposed new additional storey (on top of the retained red brick, and new red in-fill, elevations) to a uniform glazed band across six or seven individual properties, which only goes to emphasise that the architectural treatment is ‘facade only’, perhaps a lesson learned from the success of the ‘Clarence’
They were asked to tighten up the opening, or ‘new square’, off O’Connell Street and to look at making it more ‘formal’, but instead, they’ve thrown a canopy strip across the entrance, held up by a forest of spindly legs. IMO, this is a weak compromise that, in no way, addresses the issue.
On the positive side, the retention of the granite ‘Garda’ building, is to be welcomed, and I also think that the contextual treatment of the re-located Carlton facade is slightly more successful this time.
The re-orientated ‘ski slope’ has probably gained some measure of practicality as an amenity feature, but it has lost whatever dramatic appeal it had.
The revisions leave me with the feeling that the promoters and designers of the scheme must have had very little actual belief in their original vision, if they were prepared to water it down and compromise it so easily, especially when the final decision was going to be made by the Bord anyway.
If they had so little faith in the original scheme, then it’s a pity they didn’t go back to square one and develop a strong alternative concept based on a little more faith in the tried and trusted ‘real streets and squares’ model that differenciates the authentic urban shopping experience, that city centre Dublin offers, from the imitation ‘shopping mall’ experience available in places like Dundrum and elsewhere.
@thebig C wrote:
. . . since the Watchtower was an integral part of this development, which the DDDA etc spent time and money evaluating before granting permission. . .
What makes you think the DDDA etc. spent time and money evaluating this?
Your other point however, occured to me too. Was the ‘Watchtower’ a stand alone planning permission, or was it an integral element of an overall permission? If the latter, then in theory, the remainder of the development could be held to be unauthorised development, or at least be uncertifyable, until the tower is built. You’re not supposed to be able to pick and choose the bits of a planning permission you feel like building.
It’s interesting that every time one ‘High Rise’ advocate vanishes into the ether, another one stumbles into a clearing.
You realize that johnglas is flexing his typing finger.
