gunter
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@Devin wrote:
. . one view of the city I’ve never seen is the view of Cornmarket in the opposite direction pre-demolition, with those two houses at the junction of Back Lane and High Street. Would love to see that,
That has proven to be an illusive view.
A slightly older Aerofilm shot than your one shows the corner house (no. 25 High Street) still intact, but again it’s taken from the rear.
The following shots are as close as I got, they were published (for the want of a better word) in a little Fas pamphlet called ‘Aspects of Saint Audoen’s, the parish with three beginnings’ in 1993. From what I recall, it took a year to track down any decent photographs of High Street and in the end, it was G. A. Duncan on the Cabra Road who turned up trumps with those shots of the buses and the billboard.
This is a copy from the booklet with the 1960s Duncan photograph superimposed on a 1952 photograph from the same direction, which shows the corner onto Cornmarket with those ellusive building still there. The lamp post is the same in each picture.
25, 26 and 27 High Street in 1952
A detail of that picture with a glimpse of old Cornmarket beyond the corner of no. 25. Substantial four storey brick buildings with Victorian gabled facades!The 1952 photographs were tracked down to a photographic archive in RTE of all places. Not sure who the photographer was, could have been G. A. Duncan again.
Here’s a few more photographs from the 1960s.
This view looks east from Cornmarket. The vacant edge in the foreground would have been the site of the two corner properties shown on Devin’s 1909 map which defined the east edge of Cornmarket, with High Street to the left and Back Lane to the right. Taylors Hall peeping up to the right of the billboard.
A detail of the shops on High street. Murphy’s is behind the bus with The Magnet’ newsagents next door and the ‘Yankee Bookshop’ next to it.
St. Audoen’s Church from Back Lane, seen through a gap in the streetscape caused by the demolition of houses on High Street.
A clearer photograph of the east end of High Street with Fitsgerald’s shop at no. 1 & 2 beside the Synod Hall. Fitzgeralds also had a shop on Thomas Street, recently a Chinese grocery, and presently under threat of demolition as part of the Frawleys proposal. Fitzgerald’s were reputed to be the only shop in Dublin to hang their clothes outside the shop.@ctesiphon wrote:
Hint?
The things I do for you people…
Picking up your vapour trail on Ranelagh Road, across the canal to Charlemont Street, left at Harcourt Road, right to Camden St., Wexford Street, Aungier St., South Great Georges St., right onto Dame St. College Green, Westmoreland St., O’Connell Bridge, right to Eden Quay, left to Malbourough Street, Right to Lower Abbey Street, right (against traffic) to Beresford Place, right to Eden Quay, Left to O’Connell Bridge, D’Olier St. right to College St. College Green, Nassau St., South Leinster St. Clare St. Merrion Square (full circuit, takes photograph of shapely companion), Upper Mount St, around Pepper Canister, Right onto canal at Warrington Pl., stayed on canal until Harrold’s Cross Bridge, right to Clanbrassil St., left at Malpas St., right at Blackpitts, left to Mill St. right to Mill Lane, left to Newmarket, Chamber St. into Weaver Square (poked around) right to Ormond St., right onto Cork St., (took photo of possible Billy), left up Ardee St., Pimlico, right onto Marrowbone Lane, right to Earl St. South, left onto Meath St., right onto Thomas St., Cornmarket, High St., right at Christchurch to Nicholas St., Patrick St., left to St. Patrick’s Close, left to Kevin St., right to New Bride St., Heytesbury St. (crossing outward route), left onto Grantham St. around Bleeding Horse to Harcourt St., right to Charlemont St. and across canal to leafy surburbia.
So where’s the bloody 1903 building?
Can you clarify the prize fund? Hutton is offering cyber sweeties, I didn’t catch what ctesiphon and manifest were offering.
I don’t know about other posters, but gunter doesn’t get out of bed for less than virtual candy.
Can we assume that all legal boundaries have been observed (Rules & Procedures, Vols. 1 – 17, 2008 amended edition) and that the 1903 is within the canals?
Maybe the soft arty watercolours are helping sell this, but this just looks outstanding to me. The massing around the entrance at Broadstone, the great split level urban space spilling across Constitution Hill to the King’s Inn park, this is great stuff, and look you don’t need 32 storey high rise clusters!
It’s not until you see someone get one of these right that you realize how stiff and sterile proposals like the Markets Area regeneration are, or how greedy, over-scaled and insensitive are proposals like Dunne’s in Ballsbridge.
This is urban planning as we haven’t seen it is some time. Now a ‘Knowledge Axis’ that links the Digital Hub to Grangegorman, is starting to look like a much more interesting concept.
@jimg wrote:
To have at least one Irish university which could conceivably compete internationally in terms of research?
Separate colleges under the University of Dublin makes sense assuming the departments are also amalgamated.
Like much of our infrastructure, it is spread too thinly which is inefficient and uncompetitive.
Surely it is inefficient and uncompetitive only in respect of a small number of uber-technical r + d cyber spooks, for everone else, having four universities of broadly similar scale spread across the city increases the level of competition, no?
I’ll admit I don’t understand the Oxbridge system where each university seems to be composed of half a dozen separate colleges. I’d assumed it was some kind of Harry Potter thing to do with stripy ties, is there more to it than that?
@notjim wrote:
You’ll note elsewhere my belief that it would be in TCD interests to persuade DIT to merge into the University of Dublin, I guess this is part of why; it looks like a great plan. However, you will also note how trinity it is like, playing fields at one end, the rest made up of linked courts, courts and avenues are the secret to good university design.
I love this plan. You’re quite right there notjim, the similarity with the layout of Trinity struck me instantly. One great oval ‘green’ of planning fields does give the whole scheme a great university feel and a pattern of ‘streets’ and squares will keep it tight and real. Great urban scale without resorting to clusters of high rises, one focal campanile, jesus this is perfect.
A lot of fledgeling colleges with image issues, when given an old asylum to inhabit, fall into the trap of trying to ape the imagery of the historic campus model, but this scheme doesn’t seem to do that, it goes all out for a contemporary expression, but one that has learned how to do it from the traditional models.
On DIT becoming a wing of Trinity, you’re barking up the wrong tree there notjim. I know there is a relationship, I think I may even have some half-assed certificate here somewhere from Trinity that goes with my Dip. Arch from Bolton St., but I think DIT are on a different trajectory and this kind of masterplan will give them great impetus.
The best part of a DIT masterplan like this, combined with a great city centre location, is that it has the potential to push UCD into third place, which is exactly where they deserve to be after making one bad decision after another over the course of the last thirty years.
That makes up for everything else you’ve posted in the last few weeks.
This is going to make Trinity look like a mausoleum!
@PVC King wrote:
I would join a group on Henrietta Street if one existed.
I believe notjim recently pointed out that no. 7 was up for sale and, if I’m not mistaken, suggested we all club together to find the €1.85M asking price!
archiseek all living together as one big disfunctional family, in delapidated splendour, is surely a vision with fate written all over it.
@spoil_sport wrote:
I’m afraid I can’t take anyone seriously who defends this project. It is genuninely offencive to suggent that this…. thing as any architectural merit.
The NCC may not appeal to you, I’m not too crazy about it myself, but to suggest that it has no architectural merit is not a tenable position, IMO.
As far as I can tell, the NCC is an exercise in civic monumentalism that attempts to connect with a very serious, two thousand year old, tradition. The juxtaposition of the square and the drum is a recurring theme in monumental architecture from the Pantheon through Palladio, the Renaissance, our own Four Courts, and into the 20th century with Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Library.
If that attempt to connect with this tradition, and add a contemporary monument to the list, were to work, the NCC would be a very significant building indeed. If it doesn’t come off, in my opinion, it was still worth trying.
Whatever else you can say about it, the NCC appears to be an original work (as far as I Know), which straight away, sets it apart from the generic derivitive stuff that predominates everywhere else in the city.
Like a lot of people, I have my doubts about the tilted drum, for a start and assuming that there is a compelling reason that it had to be tilted, I think it’s tilted a few degrees too far. I also think the glass drum’s connection with a curved entrance lobby is going to weaken the clarity of the two shapes. Another thing that I don’t know is, how they’re proposing to stop the glare of the sun beating in, assuming the rain clouds ever part, and lastly, I don’t like the add-on bits on the roof that seem to change shape with every new render. These and the fact that building always looks like the profile of a hunkered down gorilla to me are my only real concerns.
On balance, notwithstanding the reservations noted above, I think I would be prepared to place a small wager, (possibly another bar of virtual chocolate), that this one may stand the test of time, though how I’m goin’ to live long enough to collect my winnings, I haven’t worked out.
There are a couple of interesting things said about the winning scheme in the competition citation. One thing that strikes me is the praise rightly given to the simple devise of the recessed or ‘negative corner’ that articulates the reconstructed front facade from the new creation that is the side elevation onto Henrietta Place.
If this is the moment that contemporary architecture redescovers the power of subtlety, this will have been a good day’s work.
‘Reconstruction’ ! that was another forbidden word.
There could be a lot to take from this. Even that side elevation with it’s, initially strange, Hanseatic brick arcading is starting to make sense to me. These early Georgian houses were all about their heavy brick solidity, they were the sober anti-dote to the fantastic, precarious, Dutch Billys that predominated in the Dublin urban scene in the 1720s. This winning design takes the sober brick solidity and has a bit of dark fun with it.
Ryan W. Kennihan might have a strange bastardized spelling to his name, but hats off to him, the boy’s done well.
@GrahamH wrote:
. . . the stark and stoical, respectful yet individual, grim and foreboding brick number does it for me, . . . it has a tenement quality . . . that if built, will be sustained long after the thoroughfare (if ever) becomes a smug tuckpointed enclave of charcoal and lavender doorcases.
You are a seriously dark individual!
The street numbers appear to have been up-dated in the 19th century, but from what I can make out, there were no more than 65 or 66 houses on High Street in the 18th century, which would mean that Mr. Wilson’s Shoemakers premises at no. 64 would have been one of the four High Street houses that we can see in Malton’s view of the Tholsel.
Excepting the corner house on Nicholas Street, these houses were clearly Georgian masked ‘Dutch Billys’ which would accord with the auctioneer’s description of three room on a floor, i.e. front room, back room and return room. Malton incidentally refers to High Street as ‘a very ancient commercial street’.
Of course, somebody has to park a bloody carriage in the way.It’s one thing to try and get a physical picture of a street like High Street before it became a windswept duel carriageway, but it’s also possible (just) to get some feel for the street as a faded hub of the commercial / social life of the city. We know from sources like ‘Whalley’s News Letter’ and ‘The Dublin Post Man’ that there were a good number of pubs and inns in the High Street area in the early 18th Century. ‘The Sign of the Parrot’ in High Street has a nice pirate feel to it and there was ‘The Sign of The Sugar Loaf” in Back Lane, near Taylors’ Hall. They were a bit more up-market in Skinners’ Row (Christchurch Place) where their equivalent of Starbucks was ‘Darley’s Coffee House’ in 1715.
At random, I looked up the ‘Freeman’s Journal’ for a date in may 1780 to search for references to High Street, and a couple of snippets turned up:
Leasehold interest for sale:The house and concerns in High Street at no. 64, opposite St Michael’s Church (i-e the derelict site in front of the Synod Hall in Paddy Healy photograph), formerly occupied by Mr Wilson, Shoemaker. The house is one of the best situations for business in the city, comodious and extensive having three large rooms on a floor, with brass locks and grates and every other necessary fixture. There are also good vaults and cellerage in excellent order. The purchaser or tennant will not have the least turn of money to expend; and there cannot be a better standing for the linen, wollen or haberdashery business.
Apply at no. 3 High Street. (i-e. the local auctioneer in the big three bay house with the dodgy scaffolding on the opposite side of the street).
Mr. Wilson Shoemaker! There was also a James Molloy, Shoemaker advertising for business at no. 62 High Street. How’s that for continuity, remember all the medieval shoes and soles dug up in the High Street excavations.
The same edition of the newspaper (27th May 1780) had notice of the forthcoming meeting, at 48 High Street, of ‘The Universal Free Debating Society’. In this case ‘free’ didn’t extend to the admittance charge, which was listed as ‘a British sixpence’.
The topic for discussion:
‘Whether man or woman discovers more weakness under the dominion of love’and, if time permits:
‘Whether the British Parliament is authorised to exercise a legislative power to bind the people of Ireland’.Obviously time didn’t permit, because the latter topic was up again for discussion on 12th June, with the reserve motion a provocative: ‘Whether the Divine or the Physician is of more utility to mankind?’.
Debates started at 8.00 pm and were to be concluded by 10.00.
I do realize that this is totally useless information.
@Devin wrote:
Fine Wide Streets Commissioners terrace. The existence today of Murphy’s Prams on the same building line shows that there was no need to demolish it at all.
That’s a good point Devin. Three of these houses had some rough repairs to their upper facades with some pretty dodgy window replacements, but, in general, the photographs show that they were in sound condition with not a hint of settlement to the roofs or back walls.
The loss of this terrace removes any definition to the north side of the space that once was Cornmarket. Tinkering around with the traffic islands is not going to restore a sense of place here. I keep hearing that DCC have a plan to ‘improve’ Cornmarket, but until the Bridge Street junction is reduced to maybe a third of it’s present sweeping width and a building line restored from here to the forecourt of St. Audoen’s (R.C.), I think they’re wasting their time (and our money).
This is a copy of Brownrigg’s map of 1799 with medieval Cornmarket still clearly defined as an urban space.
