Jas
Forum Replies Created
- Posts
I agree with Shane – the Central Bank works because its so strong – creats such a strong horizontal emphasis with the bold stripes of stone and glazing. For the record, one of the best architectural photos I ever saw was of the Central Bank with half demolished Temple Bar buildings in the foreground.
What I really hate is the whole hypocrisy of the Church…. they kept playing the “Sheltered Housing Card” while casually neglecting to mention too loudly the plans to sell the front of the site to a developer for apartment blocks.
Candlelight vigils will be held at the church every night this week and a public meeting has been organised outside the building for 3 p.m. on Saturday. A petition against demolition has been signed by 4,000 people.
A Dublin hotelier and property developer, Mr Noel O’Callaghan, is seeking planning permission to erect a five-storey, L-shaped office block around Archer’s garage on Fenian Street.
The late-1940s garage, occupied until recently by EWL Electric, was demolished illegally over the June bank holiday weekend despite being listed for preservation. It is to be faithfully reconstructed at Dublin Corporation’s insistence.
The planning application for the office building is being treated separately from a submission by Mr O’Callaghan’s architects, Anthony Reddy Associates, of plans to reconstruct the former List 1 garage.
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/1999/0915/hom12.htm
O wait until the locals start complaining about this….. archeire should prempt them and start campaigning for the building
Actually the morgue is the small building behind the Coroners Court which is probably the fine little building you’re thinking of. From The Irish Times:
The old City Morgue was designed by the then City Architect, Charles J. McCarthy, in 1901. Mr McCarthy went on a fact-finding tour of English coroners’ courts with the chairman of the Corporation Finance Committee, Councillor Joseph Nanetti, who is mentioned in Ulysses.
The morgue was built on the site of the old Custom House flour mills. It cost £4,504. The building it replaced became part of the original Abbey Theatre.
The morgue has been featured in a number of novels. Patricia Cornwell, who visited it to research her novel Unnatural Exposure, describes some of the fittings as being suitable for a “medical museum”. It also features in Paul Carson’s novel Scalpel.
Just so we can see what we’re comparing, here is the SOM proposal
Artists impressions can indeed be misleading – buildings never look so clean or have such idyllic lighting in reality. In reality public plazas are normally windswept and littered spaces where no-one want to hang around, in renderings they’re bathed in a mystical halflight with groups of people hanging around having a great time. There is a knack in seeing past all the hype in proposals.
There’s an article in todays Irish Times about the RIAI’s stance on urban sprawl…..
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/1999/0802/hom15.htm
I read somewhere once that for its population, Dublin had the largest square milage of any city in Europe
Stopping it because of a foreign designer is the kind of petty small mindedness that this country has had too much of for too long and could well do without.
I always thought that it was interesting that at the time that the “Free State” was building the Department of Industry in Kildare Street [a more forward looking stripped classicism with deco overtones] that the NI Government was building Stormount – a heavy and ‘traditional’ form of classicism.
At the time, irish ministers used to regularly attend meetings of the AAI because of a general interest in architecture and modernity…… can you imagine a minister with that interest now……
Maybe I’m just getting a little cycnical when i see buildings left open to the elements without even a polythene covering… at this stage weather has done more damage than the fire which was confined to the top floor……..
Could always hit O’Callaghan where it hurts and mount a semi-permanent protest outside his hotels….. tell all his american tourists why he is been picketed – for destroying the heritage of the city
O’Callaghan is definitely a vandal… the Davenport mysteriously burned out just prior to his purchase for an hotel…. in scenarios like this I reckon the architect has to know because otherwise how could they design the development……
…. to stand up and be counted……
I honestly thought that the days of buildings being pulled down illegally over weekends was gone. how wrong I was. I was familiar with Archer’s Garage and often thought what cool offices it would make. Very sad.
Who were the architects and developers on the scheme? Actually who designed Archer’s originally?
And when are we the people of Dublin going to stand up to cowboy developers? Perhaps this is a job for Archeire!
