gunter

@Zap wrote:

Its been 4 years since I posted this. I am most interested in the Cork St. Relief Road and also I guess the related Newmarket area beside it. I note this from the ‘Dutch Billy’ thread:

If McCullough Mulvin have their way Newmarket will look quite different in the future (go to ‘view all projects’ and ‘masterplanning’): http://www.mcculloughmulvin.com/pages/moviepg.html

I guess there is no central plan for this street – though the Liberties area here is undergoing a lot of change with the site on other side of the national school on the corner of the Coombe and Cork St. Relief Road recently cleared (I refuse to name this street by its official St Lukes Avenue until such a time that this is actually an avenue – living in Madrid, there are not too many avenues fronted by burnt out churches, derelict sites, blank walls dividing the street off from other local housing streets etc.).

So, is there a plan? I guess not. There should be! Its with great disappointment that I see one storey structures going up at the Coombe end of this street – I guess an extension for the school. Craziness! Also, this new developed excludes the very lower corner of the relief road – where there remains just the corner wall (with fine corner stones) of the previous building with fireplace still intact. What is happening here?

I go by Cork Street most days I’ll try and post up a few photographs in the next day or two. There’s a new residential scheme by O’D +T under way just through the Ardee Street junction that could be interesting, although it doesn’t appear to match very well the billboard poster, from what I can see.

I have some stuff on Townsend Street that may reflect a point you were making, some years ago, about developments jostling for attention, rather than settling down beside each other in an orderly fashion.

Townsend Street is a old street, but it has been made-over to such an extent that it might be worth including it here.

Looking west towards the junction with College St. / D’olier St. with the new IT building on the right and the new Fire Station on the left, together with assorted apartment blocks. Probably nothing special here, but decent urban scale throughout!

The other end of Townsend St. looking east from just under the railway bridge.

The scale here is slightly lower but is still appropriate, in my opinion, with respect of the width of the street. There is an emerging, almost civic, respectfulness towards the street and almost a harmony between the two office developments on the left (the back of the older Georges Quay development in the foreground, and the new ‘Georges Court’ development by KMD in the distance). The context on the opposite side of the street, further down, is the fine 1930s Markievicz Flats scheme.

Into this emerging harmony, on the corner site occupied by the pub, is now proposed a ‘Landmark headquarters office building’ of 4 – 10 storeys (reg. no. 1175/08)

Quite why the junction of Townsend Street and Moss Street deserves a landmark corner building is not clear, but I would suggest that the swirling glass creation, depicted in the model, is not going to contribute much to the emerging harmony in the urban streetscale.

@Briain wrote:

. . . the scheme shows that high density can work alongside a human scale and doesn’t just result in faceless slabs squeezed onto a site.

. . . the project could have just been blocks thrown onto the site, with none of the approaches seen in here evident; no reduced energy usage, no sensitivity to the surface of the site.

Now, the planning of the site in relation to the surrounding urban fabric is another discussion. . . now let me ask you something; could you give me a suggestion as to how the site could have been more successfully planned in relation to the layout of Dublin?

I’ve just picked out a couple of phrases from your post, just to focus on, I’m not necessarily conceding the other points.

Let’s get one thing straight from the start, this was (literally) a green field site. It’s not about how else you could get one million sq. feet (or whatever it is) of development floor area on the site, it’s about whether you’re entitled to pitch for that scale of development in the first place.

My scepticism about this scheme starts from the point that it was reported that the developers pitched the job out to a number of firms with a brief of ‘which of you can get the most past the planners’, or words to that effect.

It’s not that we didn’t know that developers thought this way, it’s just that it’s still a little shocking to hear the winning practice appear to boast about it so openly (IT 14 Feb.)

My second reason for scepticism is that the scheme is being flogged repeatedly as the ‘Low energy, high density’ blueprint for the future, and I’m looking at the pictures and thinking, I’ve seen all of this before!

Is the western block based on the notorious Berlaymont building (c. 1968), EU headquarters in Brussels? The blank end gable treatment has been given a bit of the perpendicular timber treatment, an example surely of the ‘Dead-end decoration’ identified by Bruce Allsopp in ‘Towards a Humane Architecture’ as long ago as 1974!

The lean-to framework ‘support’ for some of the ‘winter garden’ secondary glazing has an ancestor in Stephenson’s Bord na Mona building on Baggot Street. C. 1985?)

The collage theme of the overall scheme, where bits and pieces of the modern movement appear to have been taken, almost at random, and assembled on the site, is brought to an extreme in this particular block which appears to host at least four different architectural approaches in a single building. There’s the pilotis (not nice sculptural Corb pilotis, but angular, Marcel Breuer, pilotis; the square cut-away framed atrium corner; the Louis Khan timber panels between concrete bands; and a curved corner version of lansdowne House, all slapped there on one block like a Rubix cube that hasn’t been solved yet.

It’s great if this thing runs on woodchips, and it great that what’s left of the landscape is allowed to flow underneath, or whatever the phrase is, but this is no Glen Murcut shack in the outback, ‘touching the earth lightly’ on three poles and a rock, this is six serious, eight storey, parallel concrete blocks, and there’s nothing particularly light about any of them.

I don’t know anyone in the architectural community who isn’t in favour of progressing the ecological agenda, but, more than ever, we have to watch out for extravagant claims, false trails and green agendas that come piggy-backed on an old-fashioned ‘let’s get the most development on the site we can get away with’ agendas.

I ‘d have a lot more tolerance for the ‘eco’ credentials of this scheme, if they weren’t so obviously welded to the rest of the height/bulk/planning package. It’s like they made some bewildered planner sit there while they explained to him that the naturally ventilated secondary glazed, winter-garden extraction/purification system only worked if the building was eight storey, if it was seven storeys, toxic air would pour into the creche!

This is a huge scheme and obviosly it’s easy to pick holes in anything of this scale, but my biggest concern about the whole thing is the way that it blatantly follows a development model (parallel blocks marching across a landscale) that we found out years ago to be ultimately inhuman, wind swept, and worst of all, destined to be repeated with ever decreasing skill once it has been re-established, re-branded and re-packaged as the eco-friendly future.

As far as alternatives are concerned, a couple of new street might have been nice.

Thanks notjim, I hate to freeload like this.

I don’t like him when he’s this animated, he used to scare the shit out of me in tutorials when I hadn’t a clue which feckin pot was which, him and Caulfield, Herity would know the blank look on the face and let it be.

I’m not entirely sure that this blows my conspiracy theory, it just makes it more devious, doesn’t it?

Article in the Irish Times, Monday 24 March

Expert warns port site is of vast historical importance

‘The site earmarked for a major new port in north Dublin is of hugh archaeological and historical importance and may be where St. Patrick first landed in Ireland, accordingly to one of the country’s most eminent archaeologists.

He says the area contains a unified prehistoric cemetry of mounds that extends for over a mile, from Gormanstown, which is to the north of the Delvin River, to Bremore, located to the south of the river.’ etc.

If a person was of a conspiratorial frame of mind, this report would be inclined to have the antenna twitching.

Does anyone remember the last days of Carrickmines? The save our heritage protestors were well dug in and it was shaping up to be Rourke’s Drift all over again. We thought all we had to do was sit back and watch as the protestors were picked off one by one in a gore fest, and then, without warning, one day, they just melted away! Someone had banged a drum to announce the construction phase of the M3 and, just like that, the showdown with the Zulu hordes of road engineers had suddenly switched to Tara.

If a person was of a conspiratorial frame of mind, he might see this article by Prof. Eogan as a distant drum roll, a subliminal message to the besieged Tara stockade, ‘save yourselves, melt away, there’s a jucy new battle with the evil development doers, and it’s just over those hills’.

If this is the message delivered by Prof. Eogan, it is done so unwittingly. Archaeologists are not devious people (except obviously in matters of career advancement and in the snakes and ladders pit of academic politics, like everyone else).

Although not devious, archaeologists are strange people, it’s not just the dress sense and the mad hair, it’s much deeper than that. These people inhabit a world that is both subterranean and stiflingly academic, most of the time they see no reason to interact with the surface world. Deep down (sorry), they know that their role is to shine a light on prehistory, but they only ever want to use 40watt bulbs, because they don’t like other people seeing the light. Archaeologist are so entrenched (sorry again) in their own little world that an exciting day for one of them is a day when they can run up to a colleague, clutching a miserable shard of broken pot and say ‘look gabriel, this proves conclusively what I already knew!’

When an archaeologist eventually files an excavation report (which many avoid for years), it’s either to fulfil a excavation licence condition, or it’s to debunk the assertions of a colleague, it’s never done to actually inform the public. Archaeologists have no consciousness of the public, nor any consciousness of the benefits that could derive if they would just engage in development discussions and bring an informed heritage perspective to the table.

A particularly troubling aspect of the Irish Times article is the reference to Bremore being the possible landing place of St. Patrick! All due respects to our patron saint, but nobody knows, or will ever know, where he actually set foot on Irish soil. As far as I knew, historians weren’t even prepared to confirm that there ever was a single ‘Patrick’ in a strictly historical sense. Normally, archaeologists wouldn’t touch this stuff with a stripy pole. This is Indiana Jones territory.

All of this makes the article by Prof. Eogan, an intriguing puzzle, and a nice bit of grist to the mill for the dedicated conspiracy theorist.

To be absolutely clear, I am not suggesting that George Eogan is capable of doing anything underhand, or that he has a pet project somewhere that, like Dr. Grant, somebody has come along now and offered to fund for two more years, so he’s off in a helicopter to Jurassic Park. I sat through enough George Eogan lectures to be able to state, with some conviction, that we can rule that out. There has to be another explanation.

For the conspiracy theory to stand up, and given that the article is essentially the product of a discussion between two people, the interviewee and the interviewer, perhaps we’ve been looking in the wrong direction.

Supposing a dodgy politician (is there any other kind?) were to suggest to a hungry journalist (is there any other kind?) that a decent front of paper story could be had by asking a few well chosen questions of an esteemed college professor, questions like:

Could this be the progeny of the Eogan article?

Is the Eogan article the first drum beat in an orchestrated diversionary battle?

If a person was of a conspiratorial frame of mind, he might be inclined to say, possibly!

I’m not making any case for, or against, the Tara moterway, I would just like to point out that, whatever Tara actually is; ceremonial centre, burial ground, jerry-built ring fort, royal enclosure, mythical landscape, the list goes on, the one thing that we can say for sure is, that it is a grassy knoll!

Can you make a concrete and glass office block environmental by clamping a few lengths of wood onto the facade, or is it more complicated than that?

Great. So it’s world class on the inside but it’s B&Q on the outside! I had hoped for more. Is this some kind of Doctor Who thing?

To get around the foolish guidance in the ‘City Quay and Westland Row Action Area Plan‘ which suggests that ‘. . . new development should have regard to the established building heights and to residential amenity in the area‘, there is some facinating logic juggling in the BP inspector’s report.

The inspector found that the, butt ugly, 10 storey mega block, as ammended by AI ‘had much more sensitive, broken down, elevational treatment to Pearse St.’ and he was also was quite relaxed about a plot ratio of 7.5, more than twice the Development Plan maximum.

The pick of the inspector’s justification phrases may be this one, aimed at misguided third party objectors who are now each €200 lighter:

‘In my opinion, people who wish to enjoy the benefits of city living do so in the full knowledge of the nature of their environs and the possibility of large new urban scale developments.’

As a piece of bar stool wisdom, that would seem to supplant the whole need to have tedious planning guidelines or intricately worked out action plans.

I wonder would the planning inspector be brave enough to take the next logical step and pull the door closed, turn off the lights, and just stick a sign up on the window:-

Yez live in a city, yez knew what was coming!

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@BTH wrote:

Im not a huge fan of the externals of either scheme but from what I can tell both will have superb facilities and interiors.

I imagine that the externals weren’t the priority on the Point anyway, but did they have to go for the aesthetics of a loaded container ship?

It ought to have been possible to express a contrast between original fabric and the contemporary additions without resorting to the aesthetic device of polar opposites.

Is there no room for subtlety in today’s architecture.

It would help slightly if the three sad gables weren’t left there like memorials to the lost shed roofs. HKR proposed the same treatment for some two storey warehouses on the Digital Hub (windmill) site, and it didn’t work there either.

Adding height above retained lower layers is absolutely a valid urban intensification approach, but if you’re going to take the roof off a structure and add several new storeys, you have to sacrifice the whole roof, including the gables, otherwise the resultant structure just looks parasitic not symbiotic.