gunter
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
You were probably able to see it out your penthouse window!
What’s the view on this kind of solid Edwardian fare? Centenary coming up next year, will it beat the wrecking ball? Should they slap five more storeys on top and get another hundred years out of it? Is it a Protected Structure, or should it be?
@Rusty Cogs wrote:
Down the South Quays, Sir John Rogersons way ? Irish & British Steam Package Co or summit ?
The ‘British and Irish Steam Packet Company’ building on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay indeed!
I’m in a black mood at the moment, but seeing that sedan chair in Graham’s print is cheering me up. I suppose, however bad things get, at least I’m not sinking in the mud and dung hauling some portly gent down O’Connell Street. How did they ever get away with this? The sedan chair has to have been the stupidist form of transport ever invented. The weight of the chair alone! and then factor in the two poles. Nowadays, it takes six guys to carry you in a coffin and that’s without the glass cockpit and the poles.
It must have been social death if one of your porters collapsed and died on the way to the club!
Bike shops have form in the signage department.
This is the old Paddy Whelan Cycles shop at 119 – 120 Cork Street. It’s been closed for some time, but the signage endures. No. 120 is a probable former twin gabled, three storey, ‘Dutch Billy’, with a pair of very deep perpendicular roof volumes subsequently lowered and hipped behind a flat parapet.
@jdivision wrote:
Dublin castle?
Well done!
I thought the colour and obvious OPW involvement might have been the clues.
@johnglas wrote:
If you really want to see how not to do a municipal square, look at George Square here; an elegant if dull late-Georgian square trashed with cheap red tarmac in the interests of commercialism.
That’s the one where the statues are all painted black and they wear traffic cones on their heads, or is that just after matches?
And gunter will not be ‘fecking off” thank you.
@BTH wrote:
Instead of having the public spaces and main circulation at the extremities, have it in the middle.
Instead of placing a landmark (and useless) tower where it has the most possible negative impact on existing streetscapes, place it at the core of the site where it becomes a destination and focal point.
Most importantly instead of a bizarre hybrid of boring glass box / ugly sub deconstructivist wallpaper plastered over every available facade, how about actually designing some buildings to sit in these new streets and spaces? They can be exciting, contemporary, they can relate to each other, they can be linked together and accommodate the sky-ways and balconies. But variety is what will make this scheme work, not the language of the shopping mall where all you do is create a frame for shopfronts to fit into. This site is providing an opportunity to create something of real urban quality, where the bottom line should not be maximizing retail space. There is a chance to create a proper piece of city here not just a glorified mall. I hope the officials of Dublin see sense (despite whatever vested interests that they may have) and demand something of much higher quality than what we have been presented with.
That is a very well argued assessment, with little to disagree with. You would hope that a similar level of analysis is going on within the bowels of the Planning Dept. at the moment, but you suspect instead that a gushing and convoluted justification is being composed as we speak.
Blisterman was making a similar point about putting one decent space in the the middle of the scheme instead of three formless half hearted efforts at the edges.
The one thing that I might take issue with, is the near sacred status being accorded to Henry Street. I would regret the loss of the well proportioned three bay property in the middle of the affected stretch, but Henry Street, as a whole, could use a bit of urban animation. I presume that the ski slope has been designed and located where it is to provide this animation and I imagine that a viewing platform, close to O’Connell St. and of about the height of Nelson’s Pillar, is intended to have some resonance for Dubliners.
I agree totally with you and johnglas that an open architectural competition, like the one for theTemple Bar Framework Plan back in the early 90s, would have been the best way to ‘maximise the site’s potential’ to paraphrase the current jargon.
Glasgow University is located in a Regency / Victorian suburb. Which is again the point I was making. I’ll stop this now. We can always revisit it on a slow day.
@notjim wrote:
Well gosh that was easy, first German university I thought of (Göttingen) and what, oh! mown grass in front of the main university hall, with twee topiary no less.
You’re not calling that a urban Square?
Behold Gottingen Market Square: I rest my case!
@notjim wrote:
Ah you are trying the west-brit trick but the bit of grass, apart from setting off the grey stone, is part of the traditional look and feel of the great university we could be: some American examples
I felt sure you would take umbrage at that attack on your hallowed ground.
Do you know how careful I was not to use the term West-Brit! However, your American examples just prove my point, although I should have used the term Anglo-Saxon to cover that lot, instead of ‘British’.
I stand by my statement, no self-respecting German square would tolerate a single blade of grass! Go on find some and prove me wrong. I won’t accept any ‘Englischer Gartens’ either.
Thank you johnglas, I knew the Scot in you would recognise the truth.
On College Green, I know it’s out of the question to get rid of the Trinity railings, although the 1750s Tudor image (which I can’t now find) showing the great space cobbled from one side to the other, still appeals to me, but what is the justification for the grass? The need to have grass in the middle of every urban space is a characteristically British thing! Every major public building building in Britain is located within spitting distance of a random piece of suburban lawn, you don’t see this anywhere else.
At the very least Trinity should stick in a couple of nice, student friendly, coffee shops on the ground floor, with a couple of the window opes converted into discreet door opes, openings out onto paved terraces here and get some use (and revenue) out of these spaces, or would digging up the British grass upset north/south relations and jeopardize the peace process?
@BTH wrote:
It’s interesting to compare the Arnott’s scheme with this one in some ways – In the Arnotts proposal access to the central square or “shopping centre” part is via quite narrow, very well defined streets. Whilst I don’t particularly like the facade treatments, the rather 60s looking deck access to upper levels and some other aspects of the Arnotts scheme, it is made look like an exemplary piece of urbanism by this monster.
Here there is zero respect for the concept of street, whether existing or proposed. The new malls intersect with O’Connell St and particularly Henry St. in probably the most brutal and poorly defined way possible. The architecture of the “mall” (for clearly this is all this is notwithstanding the fact that it’s open ended), is allowed to spill out and all over existing streetscapes with a sub-Hadid/Liebskind approach to facade-ism. The tower itself is a joke, the way escalators and staircases become the dominant elements in these new spaces is all wrong and even the plan – this creation of a street roughly paralell and close to Moore St leading to the awkward junction proposed above just doesn’t make sense in urban terms (of course it’s easy to see why in commercial terms).
Again i’ll say there has to be a better way to develop this site than this. And I mean fundamentally. Ditching the “vertical park”, lopping off a few storeys and a few cosmetic changes to facades will do nothing to stop this from being a disaster for Dublin.
Sorry to be harping on and on about this – I feel so strongly about it that it’s hard for me to accept people saying “ah sure it’s something new and shiny and exciting where now there’s nothing – it’ll do…” which seems to be the basic position of a lot of people on the matter.I’ve quoted your whole post here, because it does set out, pretty clearly, the case for throwing this whole thing out. I think all the points you’ve made are valid, however, I think that there is also a case to be made in favour of the concept behind this development.
I think the case is that an uplifting (not talking about the ski lift), open ended shopping centre that integrates with the urban fabric and draws on (rather than just repeats) traditional street patterns, is a concept worth trying. I could go further and say that if this concept is worth trying, the impenetrable block bounded by Upper O’Connell St., Moore St. and Henry St. mightn’t be a bad place to try it.
Every city has a glass roofed mall, many cities have Y and L shaped malls that replicate little street patterns, but I’m not familiar with anything that looks as ambitious as this, or goes as far as this does to substitute an element of light shelter for full glass mall enclosure. I think there is a good chance that this could work and if it did, it could be quite a coup. None of this excuses the tackyness of many of the elevations, the disregard of valuable existing building stock, or the unsatisfactory design and planning of the three openings into the existing streetscape.
I know this is the opposite of what you’ve just said, but I think, if these elements were fixed, together with maybe twenty other deficiencies of lesser importance, we might start to see this thing in a better light.
Maybe there isn’t much chance of this happening, in which case, your suggestion, that it would be better to ‘throw the whole thing out’ might still be the better option.
The glass enclosed hanging greenery, that presumably will turn to withered death after the first couple of sunny days, makes no sense.
@ctesiphon wrote:
I can’t believe that a planner could read all of the documentation and whatever letters will be submitted within the statutory time period- the application documentation is physically huge.
I presume there was pre-planning consultation…
The City Council fought the court case to take this site off the previous owners, they have to be partners in this scheme to some extent. At a guess, I say that what we’re looking at is 50% DCC and 50% property developer, which fits my assessment that it’s half good (the intentions) and half bad (the delivery).
