gunter
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@lostexpectation wrote:
if people could gather within the grass area there’d be alot more pedestrian freeflow on the green (thus car flow)
The cars are supposed to be gone from next April.
After that it’s just buses, bikes and taxis, and (hopefully) the luas.
Speaking of taxis, is that the College Green taxi rank (1750s style)?
notjim, the smiley face was intended to signal humour. You’re goin’ to make a grumpy provost.
We won’t speak of these matters again
@notjim wrote:
gunter . . you have, again, misunderstood my stand on the grass in front of Trinity,
my point regarding Trinity is that main university buildings almost always have grass in front of them
No notjim, I have not misunderstood your point.
You have an emotional attachment to the lawns and that’s fine, there’s no shame in that.
The urban condition can be gritty and hard and little bits of lawn are a comfort blanket 😉
The point I’m trying to illustrate is that, in urban realm terms, we’ve gone backwards. The College Green of the Joseph Tudor print and Rocque’s map (both 1750s), was clearly a more urbane space, and one more in line with comparable central urban spaces in comparable (mainland) European cities, than the College Green of today.
Rocque shows the new (not yet completed) front of Trinity with the same ring of stone obelisks linked by simple chains that Tudor depicts. While we may not be able to compare the traffic loading of a couple of sedan chairs to a constant string of double decker buses, there’s no question that College Green originally read as an civic space and now it reads as a traffic junction. The transition of the Trinity forecourt, from a being a simply demarcated arc across a single paved space, to the defensive zone with ‘Don’t walk on the grass’ lawns we have today, has played a part in this transition.
As magnificent as those Victorian railings are, and as manicured the lawns, the fact remains that these later 18th & 19th century additions negate some of the original urban qualities of the space.
How do you not see this?
On your belief that ‘main university buildings almost always have grass in front of them’, no they don’t. You’re thinking of English influenced, or the slightly out of town universities, I’m thinking of inner city, old school, universities (Edinburg, Bonn, Freiburg, Heidelburg, anything in Italy etc. etc.) and, in any case, it’s the urban space I’m talking about, whether or not there’s a college on one side.
@GrahamH wrote:
. . the entire Westmoreland Street/D’Olier Street/College Green/Dame Street axis is continuously deteriorating; the very places that should be the beating heart of the city.
I’m inclined to believe that, in Dublin, streets have to hit rock bottom before they start to come back up. I think Parliament Street would be an example of this and arguably Parnell Street could be another example. The problem with Westmoreland Street /D’Olier Street/College Green/Dame Street is that they have been on the slide for two hundred years, so we can’t tell whether we’re three months, or eighty years, away from rock bottom.
On a slightly related topic, there’s a couple of interesting passages, as always, in the president’s column of the current (July/August) edition of the RIAI journal.
They’re hard to find because It does ramble all over the place stumbling from one name drop reference to the next, but the theme seems to be a discourse on whether we are essentially Euoropean in mind-set, or whether Ireland is a ‘state of mind between Nashville and Old Trafford’ [Tony Parsons, English critic and pundit], which, in fairness, is a great quote.
I don’t want to antagonize people, but those lawns behind the railings at the front of Trinity are a potent symbol that we’re not really ready to embrace European urbanism fully again. I say again, because we were full members of the European urban club once, but somewhere in the 18th century we lost it, we imported the anglo-saxon obsession with controlled nature.
English landscape gardening in the 18th century is rightly regarded as revolutionary, but it had a dark side. The campaign to perfect nature proved too successful to be left out in the sticks. The guys with the Palladian country houses, set in Capability Brown designed rolling estates couldn’t resist the temptation to deck out their town houses with tiny patches of controlled nature as well and so the Georgian square, as miniature country estate, was born.
This notion still pervades our thinking. It may be a stretch to say that the current state of Westmoreland Street, for example, has anything to do with the importation of the ideas behind English landscape gardening, but I think that our absorption of those ideas blunted our urban sensibilities to the extent that we don’t really notice when our urban realm has been damaged, in the same way that it would be noticed in a comparable mainland European city.
Do we really notice that there’s a grassy hill beside Christchurch Cathedral? This is at the very heart of our medieval core, between the cathedral and the first port, where the urban grain should be at it’s tightest, we have a grassy hill!
It’s bad enough that the Christchurch Place side of the cathedral was turned into a English style, lawned-up, ‘cathedral close’ in the 19th cuntury, where once there was a warren of lanes and taverns side by side with the old law courts, but to compound this by sticking in a north facing grassy hill (as the good part of the Civic Offices development) would have been laughed out of the planning office in any other (mainland) European city.
notjim will now find some obscure Romanian city with an identical feature.
BTW, the other interesting passage in the president’s column: ‘. . if . . WW2 was not the spark under the cauldron of Modernism, it was the catalyst for it’s diffusion – for good, bad and ugly’.
Assuming that he’s talking about architecture, which may be a rash assumption, it could be an interesting exercise to imagine what the course of ‘modernism’ might have been had it been allowed to develop in a even curve from WW1 to WWW without the intervention of WW2.
Would modernism have become discredited, if it hadn’t been forced into an obligation to provide quick and cheap post war housing, and had it not been pushed into an uncomfortable comparison with the urban qualities of the bombed out cities it had suddenly to replace?
We’re going to need johnglas for this one.
Somebody here will know the answer to this.
I had always understood that Gandon designed the Four Courts incorporating a slightly earlier L-shaped ‘Public Office’ building designed by Thomas Cooley. Excepting the earlier Cooley wing, the building period has always been given as 1786 to 1802 and there was an implication that the dome was one of the last piece of the structure to be finished. Is that what everyone else understood? That’s the picture you get from reading Maurice Craig’s ‘Dublin 1660 – 1860′ I’ve even heard it said that some vagueness on the exact profile of the drum and dome in Malton’s print of the Four Courts arose from the fact that, like the Blue Coat School spire, the Four Courts’ dome wasn’t actually built, or at least finished, when Malton drew his view.
Malton’s original text, that accompanied each of his prints, tells a slightly different story. He suggests that the main block was complete by 1799 and only the eastern wing (to mirror Cooley’s western wing) remained to be completed after that date. Most intriguingly of all, Malton suggests that Cooley’s building wasn’t some isolated L-shaped ‘office building’, but the built wing of an earlier design for the Four Courts!
‘This extensive building was first begun by Mr. Thomas Cooley, arch. in 1776. He lived, however, but to complete the western wing. On his demise the completing of it was given to Mr. James Gandon. It was the intention of Mr. Cooley to have kept back the middle part, containing the Courts; and by only gently breaking the range, to have preserved one entire court-yard of the space that is now divided into two, and the ground covered by the centre pile. It is to be lamented that that idea has been departed from by his successor, a change, which, besides other diadvantages, presents so magnificant a structure being seen to advantage.The foundation stone, of the part containing the courts, was laid, with the usual ceremony, on the 13th March 1786, by his grace Charles the late Duke of Rutland, then Lord Lieutenant, attended by the Lord Chancellor, and great Law officers. From March 1786, to February 1797, by the accounts, there has been expended £77,000 which, added to £16,788 the sum laid out under the direction of Mr. Cooley, makes £93,788 to which, if were added the consumption of the last year, but the most expensive of any, and to the whole were farther, the estimate for building the eastern wing and offices, not yet executed, with allowance foe alterations that are to take place on the Quay before the building, £150,000 will, I imagine, not be found an exagerated estimate for the entire completion.’
Maybe everyone else knew this, or maybe Malton was away with the birds, but I have certainly never seen drawings of a Cooley version of the Four Courts!
Here’s one recent (distant) view from the RHK.
There’s a good view ot it from Victoria Quay, but I don’t have any pictures.
It’s probably at it’s most interesting about now with the raw concrete mass mostly up and before the cladding merchants have got at it.
There’s not a lot of laughs in that planner’s report on the Carlton site.
I’m starting to miss Rose already.
I saw, from a quick back read of the thread, that last year one of the contestants (htd2008 ?) had queried some similarities between his original entry and the new Fosters scheme.
When I was looking for something else, I came across a render of a different entry (Acito & Partiners) which seems to share several of the main components of the Fosters scheme albeit in stumpy infant, rather that elongated adolescent, form.
I suspect we’ll all have plenty of time to chew the fat on this and other stalled prestige projects over the coming years
@kefu wrote:
Gardens at Royal Hospital
Spot on!
The ‘Meadows’ area. I don’t know what the grass looks like now after Leonard and Iggy and Morrissey.
A bit more imagination would be nice, but I think the concept of densification by the addition of taller buildings within the depth of existing city blocks is no bad thing. I don’t think they would necessarily need to be uniform in height either, just carefully positioned where they could add depth to a flat and possibly not particularly inspired streetscape and complement, rather than interupt, the existing lower uniformity. Obviously they would also have to avoid screwing up any vistas.
Personally, I would slightly favour the vertical (as in the Arnott’s tower), over the horizontal, as here with the Gresham proposal, but not in all cases. The ‘Dublin Central’ proposed tower, opposite the Rotunda, would seem to be an example of how not to do it. Here the tower is right on the street edge creating a discordant note in the otherwise decent emerging conformity of Parnell Street.
I take your point that we’ve got to stop believing that glass boxes are the design solution to every planning challenge.
@shed wrote:
Going by the stadium on the Dart the other day i noticed they have built what looks like a mock up of the cladding. Its fixed to a steel structure on the left off the train tracks heading in towards the city. From what i could make out the cladding just looked like large glass louvres but it was half covered and the train passed it quite quickly so i didnt get a good look. In reality it didnt seem as reflective or shiny as its depicted in the 3d images.
Has anyone else seen this or been able to get a better look at it?I haven’t seen the mock up, but I think it’s supposed to resemble the transparent ‘scales’ on the curved outer skin of the Allianz Arena in Munich. http://www.allianz-arena.de/en/fakten/ The translucent skin on the Allianz is illuminated internally by, either red or blue, lighting depending on which of the resident clubs. Bayern, or Munich 1860, are playing.
The Allianz stadium was designed, in 2001, by Herzog & de Meuron (like everything else in Munich), and the renders of the new Lansdowne always looked like a straight copy to me. I imagine the correct term is ‘influenced by’.
Biggest visual difference would be that the Lansdowne skin appeared shinier, as you say. Then there’s the issue that Lansdowne is located in the city, as opposed to out in the back of beyond (which is good), but is dented on one side, as observed by keating, (which is bad).
Apart obviously from the scaly skin, the allianze Arena is the most completely scaleless building I’ve ever seen. There are no visual clues until you get up close and then it manages to be both, hugely impressive and surprisingly intimate, at the same time. It’s a real pity that, in emulating the Allianz Arena, Lansdowne will be compromised by the drop in scale at the Havelock Square end, The shallower dip at the Lansdowne Road end probably doesn’t diminish the unity of the design too much.
I suppose a person’s conservation credentials would be revoked if they were to suggest that one side of Havelock Square (and a bit of O’Connell Gardens) should be sacrificed to facilitate the completion of the circuit of the stadium, on design grounds alone! with the happy consequence of getting the stadium capacity up a bit, towards the 60,000 level of demand! no chance of that happening?
@gunter wrote:
Now back to the Finial!
A clue: It’s centrally located and it’s on the northside, but not by much.
Last clue on the finial:
It’s not older than 1916!
