Lotts

This is an interesting and hugely challenging project. I hope it goes well!

I wonder how the dominance of motor traffic throughout the area will be addressed. In particular the multi-stage crossings required to walk by the river from chq to eden quay.

The other tricky point will be reversing the complete abandonment of this area (also Eden Quay, and Burgh Quay) to the homeless, the addicts, and the mentally ill.

I think the opening up of the grounds of the Custom House would involve unlocking the gates rather than removing the railings…

The report is worth a look…

in a read it and weep kind of way…

[Warning – that’s nearly a full 10 mb of shame.
If you are on a slow connection the low res version is also available]

Penny, Can I suggest that you, (and anyone else contemplating a one off build in the countryside) have a look at the following online document

It explains in detail what is wrong with most one-off designs, and gives very clear guidance on how to get things right. There’s lots of pictures and a lot of the guidelines make good sense throughout the country. Even in Meath.
Good luck!

The area described by ctesiphon as a
“warren of brick vaulted tunnels/chambers running the length of the site that are subdivided arbitrarily and that lack any daylight at all”
would be brilliant for hosting a cabinet of curiosities as mentioned in notjims post.
I’m very in favour if the idea. If located in the vaults it would not even impact on the commercial offerings above.

The extent of the vaults is visible in the plans in the
chq brochure

Although only a portion of the area is open and available at the moment it seems.

Anyway , back on pointing. I think I’ve answered my own question with a bit of research: It was bothering me because it really looks like someone went to a lot of trouble to get it looking the way it does. What I described earlier today as looking wrong 😮 is indeed tuck-pointing and is absolutely correct from a conservation point of view, as it seems the building was originally finished in this way. The
Conservation Plan
says
“The external peripheral walls are built of bonded brickwork with imported brown/yellow stock facings laid in Flemish bond. The original lime mortar pointing is badly weathered but vestiges of old mortar indicate that the brickwork was formerly tuck-pointed. “

It seems that in most cases tuck pointing was used to disguise poor quality, chipped and irregular bricks. This difficult, but essentially deceptive practice was described by J Seddon in the
Civil Engineer and Architects Journal in 1863 as “the lowest depth of the abomination into which modern practice has fallen.”
I’d love to show him how much further it was possible to fall with some of the horror pictures posted by Devin and others elsewhere on this site!

I don’t think the bricks used in stack-a were too bad though, so I wonder was there an aesthetic reason in this case. …?

I don’t have any photos but there are pictures of similar here http://www.bricksandbrass.co.uk/deselem/extwall/point.htm

further history here: http://www.brickmaster.co.uk/tukcpointing.htm

So finally, it seems to me (after a little bit of educating myself), that the DDDA have done an excellent job on this aspect of the restoration too. 🙂 Well done!

Anyone know about the pointing on stack-A? It looks wrong to me, with the joints protruding from the brickwork. Is it meant to be like that?

If anyone want’s to see the other designs, they are at
http://www.irish-architecture.com/unbuilt_ireland/dublin/u2_tower/index.html

The winner imho is not an entirely crap design, but, as Devin points out, it is not worthy of a a major icon for Dublin.
Nobody I know that has looked through the list of entries has picked Craig Henry Architects entry as a favorite.

I’ve been browsing the DDDAwebsite and theres lot’s of new goodies:

Some great aerial shots of the docklands up in pdf form here

Also a detailed mapof area.

@NeilA wrote:

Slightly off topic…. but does anyone have a picture of what Bolands Bakery on Grand Canal Street used to look like i.e. prior to it becoming the Treasury Building?

I’m not sure which is the bakery as oposed to the mill but here’s an example of some of the bolands buildings

taken from the appropriate section on the wonderful fantasyjackpalance.com/, you could look there. If you still don’t find it let me know the exact site, as I took a few pictures down that area myself a few years back, when digital cameras were a novelty…

This has been stuck in my head for a while now, no idea where I put the card. Could be worth a fortune now!. However I did do some digging on the millennium clock:

The official name was the “Millennium Countdown” and it was the winner of a Dublin City Corporation competition held in 1996 for a countdown monument.

It consisted of the digital countdown tethered just below the water in the liffey, surrounded by mechanical reeds intended to emit a sound and light display.

On the bridge a “steel bollard” was to dispense souvenier postcards stamped with the number of seconds till the millennium. I recall the “bollard” was more like a big stainless steel box but I may be wrong. The postcards were real and it did work for a time.

When clock counted down to 000000000 the plan was that it would detatch itself and float off down river like at a viking funeral. The reeds were to combust, no doubt adding to the sense of occasion.

After the recent duck race where the organisers failed to check the tides and had the ducks going the wrong way up the Liffey I wonder would the same thing have happened on the big night?

The reeds in particular always looked messy, the clock looked good for a while. I think it was for a rowboat race or possibly the liffey swim that the clock was “temporarily” removed. Plan at time was to clean the clock and somehow address the slime attaching to it.

I dug most of this info from Angela Brady and Robin Mallalieu’s “Dublin , a guide to recent architecture” published back in 1997 (- well worth a look, don’t know if still in print). Here’s the closing comment from the book:

“The Architects [Hassett Ducatez] list their concepts as ‘a study of time, the immateriality of Time and the forces of Nature….. the most beautiful and astonishing clock in the world’. After such a build-up the reality can only dissapoint.”

Well that dissapoint certaintly came to pass!

I like the clarion one. Well done!
In my google earth it appears to hover about 20 meters over the ground though. Is it supposed to do that?