johnglas

What I can’t understand here is why they can’t leave the Carlton alone; they could have their pedestrian ‘streets’ on either side and use the volume of the cinema imaginatively (I’ve no idea what state the interior’s in). Facadism should be resisted; the design and cladding of the new intervention looks pedestrian (pardon the pun) and enveloping and oversailing historic buildings with plate glass is so yesterday. The ‘street’ looks busy, busy, busy (until 6pm?), but what would keep it alive would be something like a cinema (what am I saying!?). If they want a roof terrace, there’s no need to go into fantasyland as they have done and there must be a considerable acreage behind street level to do just about anything they want without going on steroids the way they propose.

gunter: I will accept your criticism and ‘crap’ was a singularly ill-chosen word; you do have a knowledge of where we’re coming from and I believe that does make a real difference. We are not slaves to the past, but the paradox is that if we are to design a historic city we cannot ignore it and indeed we should draw inspiration from it (not copy it). There are plenty of historical precedents for designing near water and my main critique of this design is that, apart from the orthogonal discipline of the square itself, there is not a shred of evidence that anybody has bothered to discuss the relationship of one building to another or indeed of any of them to the square. How ‘professional’ is that?
PS Good point about Sean O’Laoire; my experience of academic discussions is that they can be quite visceral, but we need a much wider discussion of what civic architecture is about. We need to understand that criticism is not ‘ad personam’ and that just because someone is not ‘on message’ doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

BostonorBerlin: glad to hear some sense – it is crap and was always going to be crap. I’m thinking of bowing out of making any posts (awwwww!) because the extent of architectural establishment wishful thinking, lack of any concept of context (spatial or temporal), and just plain mutually-congratulatory masturbation on these threads is truly breathtaking.
Add to that a worship of starchitects and it just makes any comments from someone not part of the club superfluous.

alonso: absolutely nothing personal; I’ve got a cold so I was in fiercely prudish mould – you should hear my normal animated conversation and try to extract the text from the expletives.
jdivision: I think you have – don’t take capitalist manoeuverings at face value. Did they have any intention of developing?
gunter: just a teeny hint of patronising? I’ve been patronised by better people than this!

If you give over urban planning to roads engineers, that’s what you get. (Remember all the ‘road widening’ that blighted city centres for years?) In my view, they should all be locked in a dark room and only let out when there’s a full moon (and then only when there’s a Z in the month).

CC105: sorry, but you can’t get away with that! ‘The planners’ respond to what is in front of them – developers will always overstate the benfits of any scheme and downplay the disbenefits. If these include overdevelopment and an affront to the townscape, what do they care? If these sites stack up in money terms, they will be developed, albeit on a smaller scale than the developers’ optimum.
The planning system can be constipated, but the Carlton site could have been developed at any time during the boom, but wasn’t. That was not the fault of the planners, but of greedy developers. If the times are not right for it to be developed properly now, perhaps it’s better to wait a few more years than get something we would all regret.

[For what it’s worth, I think the present manifestation of the scheme, as illustrated in the published renders, is a giftless shambles, with bits of ‘Libeskind’ mixed in with bits of the Bejing bird cage. My guess is that, when it’s finished and it joins the chequer board hotel (which, in no way, looks like it was ‘carved out of a single block’ of anything, except maybe a crate of mono-tone Battenburg cake) and the slanty red poles on the slanty red carpet, it will be an eloquent statement of exactly how directionless civic architecture has become in the first decade of the 21st century, but I could be completely wrong.[/QUOTE]

I know we can’t go on agreeing like this, but you have put the ‘case against’ very elegantly here. Old cynical me wondered what ‘carved out of a single block’ had to do with a commercial hotel, but I guess that’s just Johnglas…

The danger with this whole civic space now is that it looks like it is being reduced almost to the level of an architectural freak show: no coherence, no dominant design ethos, neither formal open space nor particularly useable ‘play area’, the potential of its relationship to the canal basin wasted. Of the buildings, the office block is decent and well mannered, the hotel is a joke and the DL is… well, what is it? Perhaps you can stand in the middle of it and go ‘Wow!’, but if you can’t, what was the point?

jdivision: unwarranted? Not at the time, but that time is well past and the blog has moved on.

I think we’re now in the position of hoping the bldg may be partly hidden! I’m sure you’ll agree that is unsatisfactory for anything claiming any kind of architectural integrity. Perhaps if the facade had more interplay between void and solid rather than being – in effect – all void; of course, we’ll need to see how it ‘reads’ once built and whether or not your prediction comes true; I’d have thought that the only reflection of Mercer St would be on the side away from Sth King St.

Yes, but if it had ‘copied’ the Gaiety that would have seemed too much like context or even been denounced by the modernistas as ‘pastiche’ (the ultimate shibboleth). Of course it will look ‘corporatey’; the ultimate intention of this development is too generate income, not contribute to townscape, and glass cladding is just flavour of the month. But it will reflect – ahem – the Stephens Green Centre. We can all look forward (or should it be backwards?) to that.