gunter

A J.J. McCarthy church in Newfoundland ! . . . . . as if he didn’t have enough work here.

It’s refreshing to find out that it didn’t always go his way

. . . . the handwritten note says:

🙂

. . . . we just have to follow proper proceedures photopoll, or the whole system breaks down 😉

having said that, is the last one [Z] the Gilbert Library on pearse St. ?

Is this one Walton’s music store on South Great Georges St.?

It’s interesting that the more we attempt to regulate conservation, the less good we seem to be at it.

In the past, the repair and conservation of buildings of the scale of Cobh Cathedral was entrusted to the hands of a dedicated workshop, a small band of craftsmen with masonry, carpentry and roofing skills, who were based on-site and who were permanently employed on a building that they each knew intimately.

The last time I saw anything remotely like this was as a kid watching the slow methodical restoration of the facade of Bank of Ireland, College Green. From memory, what appeared to have happened here is that some enlightened accountant type in the bank took on two or three experienced stone masons, organized a supply of Portland stone and a few sticks of scaffolding and let them loose in Foster’s Place. After much tapping and chiselling and several years later, the little motley crew had reached Westmoreland Street and the job was done. I have a recollection that the cost was published some time later and it was a shockingly small figure, even for those days.

Now we operate a different system. We’ve stopped seeing conservation as an on-going process, part of the life-story of the building, now we want to see conservation as a defined action that we can ring-fence, package, get done and walk away from.

Sometimes there may be no alternative to this approach, but think of the resources that must be diverted away from actually conserving the building and into the preparation of planning application submissions, statutory notices, method statements, risk assessment analysis and health and safety plans, just to let a bunch of contractors loose on a building that they probably have never seen before, have no inherent understanding of, or perhaps even empathy for.

I don’t think this is just a matter of competence, I think it’s a matter of looking again at the whole approach we take to the conservation of great buildings, like Cobh Cathedral.

@GrahamH wrote:

16/11/2009
Also a beautiful narrow house here with roof profile intact and
Wyatt windows, one of the very last of its kind in the city.

You’re building up quite a collection of these slim, bordering on skinny, elegant beauties there Graham.;)

I remember when this one had a superb simple shopfront to go with it’s beatifully graduated Wyatt windows and then one day it was gone, replaced by a sheet of ply, and I have no picture of it.

As Graham says, these three houses [nos. 76, 77 + 78] offer a virtual glossary of Dublin Georgian in a single tableau, 10m from the corner of O’Connell Street . . . . . or could if they were carefully conserved.

The next four houses in the terrace are perhaps marginally less interesting, in that they have less variation, but again I would totally agree with Graham that a city sponsored programme of facade conservation would do wonders for the streetscape, the public realm, and perhaps give the whole north end of the O’Connell Street zone a much needed lift.

I meant to post these shots of Bruchsal earlier when you were dealing with great baroque and rococo altars and pulpits, but, in typical gunter fashion, I couldn’t find them.

I think the altar at Bruchsal is by Balthsar Neumann who used this combination of gilded capitals and black marble in the Schonbornkapelle in Wurzburg, pictures and drawings of which I can’t find at the moment.

This is a sketch of the outside of another of Neumann’s Wurzburg churches, the Kappele which is perched on a hillside over-looking the river and the city.

This stuff is virtually impossible to draw, how they built it, God only knows.

@GrahamH wrote:

What I find interesting is that the effort was made to reface the entire facade in brick, rather than just shift the odd ope, build up the parapet and smother the whole lot in Victorian icing.

In some ways it almost looks like an insurance job!

The rebuilding is virtually like-for-like, but with the windows now, almost unconsciously, spaced equally, and the roof now pitched at the prevailing lower angle, but otherwise no significant change at all and certainly no real ambition to take advantage of what would have been an exceptionally high profile commercial location. It all looks like as if some fire insurace company inspector was standing over it with a clipboard making sure that no expenditure on ‘enhancement’ was slipping through.

I wonder if we checked the newspapers for the years between Peter walsh’s photograph (1850?) and say 1880, would we find a report that a fire took down the corner of Henry St. and O’Connell St.?

gunter thinks Praxiteles has access to insider information 🙂

@Praxiteles wrote:

Erfurth Cathedral:

Gunter! is this what you are looking for?

Perfect 🙂

I could have got the same view myself, but it would have involved climbing to the top of a bungee-jump crane and that was never goin’ to happen.

Erfurt is very interesting from an urban intervention point of view, because apparently there was a serious fire in the 19th century which took out the city block below the building with the red tiled roof and the city authorities decided to use the opportunity to amalgamate two smaller city squares into the one vast square that exists today.

This created a huge space for festivals (and bungee-jump cranes) but the Dom and the other church, with the three little spires, are now a bit lost on the edge of the vast space and they don’t dominate in the way that they must have done originally.

I must try to get more information on this, could be useful when considering the qualities that make for great urban spaces. Probanly a bit OT for this thread.

Bolton Street, should use their immersion in gritty urbanism to their advantage instead of following UCD into starchitect gazing.

There might be token zany shapes, but is this not 1970s planning?

Do we want Church Street to go underground at Constitution Hill?
Is there someone out there who thinks tunnel portals are not one of the most damaging things you can put in an urban context?
Do we need more grass in the city centre?

All of this stuff has been tried before and it’s incredibly destructive of real urbanism. We need to learn how to mend the city, not replace it with Sandyford.

I don’t want to be discouraging.

@Blacktop wrote:

My understanding is that, due to load restrictions, the outer lanes cannot take the strain of a bus lane.

You’re joking, right?