gunter
Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
gunterParticipant
@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.gunterParticipant@johnglas wrote:
gunter: I disturbingly have to agree with you.
gunter has some stuff from his recent trip to Blighty that you’re not going to agree with.
i’d give this union a day, two days at the most!
gunterParticipant@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.
gunterParticipantBriain: If I might stick in another uninvited comment here.
This is an impressive scheme, that’s not in doubt. I queried the eco qualities of this complex because they seemed to be accepted as a given in all discussions of the project and they looked slightly superficial to me.
You seem well convinced that the eco credentials are sound here, so I’m happy to concede that one, for the moment.
I suppose the bigger issue here is similar to the issue we’ve been discussing on the Ballsbridge thread:
If a new quarter is suddenly parachuted into a existing context, how do you go about setting out it’s parameters. Do you say, ‘This is different, different rules will apply’? do you say slab blocks, carpet bombed across a site didn’t work in the sixties, but that was because of the cheap materials, the wrong social component, or the absence of services, it wasn’t the architecture and they didn’t have winter gardens.
Whatever way you go about creating a justification for this, at the back of the mind is the niggling doubt that we’re only impressed with this now, because it’s shiny and new and soon it will be familiar and it won’t be new and maybe the timber will start to look faded and sad and we’ll forget that it’s cutting edge eco-friendly because eco knowledge will have moved on and we’ll start to associate this scheme with the Tara Towers hotel and the nurses home at St. Vincents and we’ll start to say when are they going to knock this eyesore down and who was minding the door when this strolled in.
In my opinion, when you walk around a city you should be able to read the logic of how it was put together and how it has evolved after it was first put together. If you come to a place that doesn’t quite seem to fit, a place where the logic breaks down, or where the story is no longer legible, you may be able to wander down a new ‘route’ and appreciate the office park scale in isolation from the surrounding context, but are you not left with the feeling that none of this is actually planned, none of the lessons of 20th century planning failures have actually been learned, we just convinced ourselves again that it would be better this time.
gunterParticipantThanks 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?
gunterParticipantMillennium: Sorry no, i didn’t see it, I was away for three days.
I’m not paying for the IT on line when I can pick it up half price most days. What is the gist of his article yesterday do you mind me asking you. I take it those mounds at Bremore are very important. The only mention of the Bremore / Gormanstown mounds in George’s book is one sentence on p. 93:
‘On the sea coast near the mouth of the River Devlin at Gormanstown (Knockinger) were four tombs, while a group of five mounds is at Bremore a few km further down the coast’.
I hope that piece came across as a bit of fun, I don’t need any solicitors letters in the box tomorrow.
gunterParticipantArticle 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.Prof. George Eogan has expressed concern about plans by the Drogheda Port Company to build a new deepwater port, at an estimated cost of €300 million, at Bremore on the north Dublin coast.
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:
Is there any archareology at all near Bremore?St. Patrick came from Britain, he would have landed on the east coast, right?
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!
gunterParticipant@Briain wrote:
Which ‘lengths of wood’ are you on about? The lattice-like structure supporting the glazing for the winter garden, or the natural ventilation panels? Either or, they’re doing more than being slapped on the facade.
I’ve been waiting for a discussion about this scheme for a while now, should be interesting if it gets going!
Briain, you seem to know a lot more about this development than I do. Maybe you’d expand on your understanding of the environmental aspects of the scheme and how they might mitigate or justify the parallel block design approach that a lot of people sincerely hoped we’d left behind.
On the lengths of timber clamped to the front, I hadn’t noticed that they appear to relate, in some way, to a secondary glazing system. Perhaps you could give the eco-rational presentation on this also, and do not tell me that this is a ‘winter garden’.
gunterParticipantCan 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?
gunterParticipantI’m with alonso and notjim on this.
These things are poles, they’re red and white, if we take them down now, what message is that sending out to our largest immigrant community?
I wish DCC would would think these things through.
gunterParticipantGreat. 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?
gunterParticipantJust to back up BTH on his explanation of the disembodied gables argument, sorry if I caused confussion before.
I hadn’t realized that the new glass mega-box spilled out over the western elevation of the old Point Depot, or did I understand you to say that this side wall is gone completely!
Either way,I don’t think this one is going to win conservation project of the year!
What happened to ‘Protected Structure’ status, or was the ‘exceptional circumstances’ clause invoked? If a structure is ‘Protected’ under the DCC Development Plan, but the planning authority is now DDDA, does that mean the structure is now not ‘Protected’ or, would we be able to tell the difference anyway? Where was that nice DCC conservation lady who savaged the Lord Norman scheme for the Clarence Hotel?
I know that the priority here is to deliver the world class concert venue that we haven’t had since Hawkins House replaced the Theatre Royal, but if it doesn’t fit on the Point Depot site, without knocking down half the Point Depot, then you have to find another site. I don’t know, stick it on stilts in the river! No, cross that out, I did not say that.
gunterParticipantTo 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!
gunterParticipantjohnglas, That fine, it’s just you worry me, that’s all I’m saying.
That space in front of the concert hall at the elbow of Suciehall st and Buchanin works as a space, surely, because the steps to the shopping centre function like an outdoor theater and the footfalls are huge, again because of the shopping centre.
If you can guarantee a constant supply of people and throw in a few steps you can probably make any urban space work.
The Fruit Market, like Smithfield, is going to have to face the challenge that, there isn’t really any reason to be there, unless they can make the spaces themselves, and the uses that are accommodated around it, attractive enough.
I just don’t think the architecture is right yet. I know we’re only judging it from one render (sorry photo-montage) but to me it’s just a coat of white paint away from being a dodgy hotel complex on the Costa Brava.
gunterParticipant[HTML]
Devin wrote:The idea of the Victorian market building being situated in the middle of a square has definitely been eroded somewhat in the latest proposal by new buildings.[/HTML]I agree with you there Devin.
Whatever about the architectural quality of the first plan, and you’d have to worry about a square that conforms so closely to the johnglas ideal, at least you would have known that you were in a ‘square’. Furthermore, in the original scheme, the existing markets building was, quite rightly, the focus of the square. I’m not too sure that those seemingly simple objectives are achieved so well in the new scheme.
On the other side of the equation, I quite like the less formal arrangement, simply because most great squares that I can think of, the ones that work really well as great urban spaces, are nearly always the ones that are less obviously planned. (exceptions : St. Marks Sq. Piazza Navona, anything baroque from Italy).
A surprising number of the great European squares are semi-accidental in that they came about after fires destroyed existing city blocks. The great square at Nurnberg, where they hold the christmas markets now, was apparently only created after the citizens of the city burned down the original Jewish quarter (which shows how far back those particular tendencies go), and the huge square at Erfurt was only created in the early 19th century, when a fire destroyed the blocks separating two smaller medieval squares.
Quite a lot of the great formal squares of northern Europen are actually only great architecturally, they’re not great urban spaces, if you you include ‘hubs of activity’ in the criteria. You’d find more life in the courtyard of a nursing home than you’ll find in Robert Adam’s Charlott Square, and Place des Vosges, for all it’s sublime beauty, isn’t all that much livlier. The square in front of the Neu Residenz in Wurzburg is so vast and so formal (on three sides) and so dead, that it can only be used as a giant surface car park.
O.K. Fruit Market Square was never going to be in that league, but it is still, potentially, an important urban space and, as such, it still has to decide what it’s trying to be. Is it trying to be a formal square, as originally envisaged, or a fluid organic space?
If the answer now is the latter, then straight away you’re into a dilemma, how do you design an undesigned space? Do you just contrive it crooked and to hell with issues of logic? Do you try and pick up clues from the surrounding urban patterns and then contrive it, but with answers (Libeskind style) if anyone asks why bits are slanty? Do you divide the development up into parcels and let the contrived result be a ‘Making a Modern Square’ by Group 91 – 08? This would get my vote, if I had one.
Whatever way you go about creating a new fluid informal space, what you don’t do, surely, is go around all the architecture that you’ve carefully contrived not to be formal, and stamp it all with the heaviest square pattern template you can find.
gunterParticipantThe person I feel sorry for here is whoever the guy was in DCC that came up with this idea in the first place, he must be feeling sick right now.
The whole ‘Fruit Market’ project was a really great idea that DCC, to their credit, have followed through on when it can’t have been easy to deal with all the vested interests. Potentially the ‘Fruit Market’ scheme could be as important to the north inner city as Temple Bar is to the south inner city, and, (as has been said before by Frank McDonald, I think), as a link to the under performing Smithfield area, it could be the crucial factor that makes everything else click.
There is no way that this architecture does any justice to any of the these aspirations. If this was designed by three different architectural practices, why does it all look the same?
Why could something of this scale not have been broken down into smaller development parcels to generate some diversity of design approach under an umbrella of a single masterplan.
In the HKR planning submission for the Motor Tax Office scheme next door, they showed a contextual drawing of the ‘Fruit Market’ scheme (with the roof off the market building) that looked genuinely interesting. The rigid geometry and the dodgy colonnades of the preliminary scheme were gone and the new scheme (below) looked almost relaxed and at the same time vibrant.
Some of that is just the difference between the graphics of an artist’s impression and the harsh reality of a photo-montage, but mostly it’s the quality of the design.
Either the design of the elevations changed, or else, the artist doing the line drawing couldn’t bring himself to draw all those repeating squares.
We’ve waited all these years for a decent new urban space in the centre of Dublin, I’d sooner they took another year and got it right, then put up with this.
gunterParticipant@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.
-
AuthorPosts