manifesta

‘I think we may be going a bridge too far.’

Cut them some slack. It may offend the eye, but at least Hair Incs approach to punct is admirable, passing this shop front will be a hi-lite for me every day of the week Mon Tue or Wed. They also have ladies special.

And a School of English right next door.

Gunter: always one for the details. From me one may expect, for the correct delivery of answers, and the avoidance of accusations of the dumbing-down of the forum (I’m aghast), a tray of virtual sweets culled from the finest confectioners, intelligently melted, molded, and cooled free of charge, to be e-delivered to the clever recipient at manifesta’s earliest convenience.

I also top them off with instant ego gratification sauce, if you say something nice about the pictures.

@ctesiphon wrote:

So I was walking down the street today in Chicago, looking up at the tall buildings, and before I knew what had happened I bumped into something. When I stopped to check, guess what? It was a JC Decaux Advertising Display Unit! 🙂

Bloody Decaux. Bloody tall buildings. 😀

It’s OK, ctesiphon, it seems the forward-thinking people of the city of Chicago have since installed these in strategic locations. Dublin might be next.

Comic relief . I think.

It doesn’t take a huge investment to make a station something more than a depressing concrete canister of frazzled humanity. Mass transit, left to its own devices, moves people from points A to B, but can feel numbing, frustrating, and soulless. I actually have an extreme distaste for metro/underground stations that are either brutalist bomb shelters or supposedly sleek and über-modern. Some of the most inspiring examples of stations I’ve seen are in the NYC subway, where bright mosaics, bronze sculptures, and stained glass add a unique feel to each individual station.

Most of the NYC installations were added to stations well after the fact, once the MTA realized how totally dreary and bleak their underground stations were looking. Arts for Transit was started in the mid-80’s and has since commissioned about 170 works of permanent public art from a variety of artists, known and unknown. Well worth checking out. And it’s worth noting that each new commissioned work typically eats up about 0.5 to 1 percent of a station’s rehabilitation budget, so it’s not exactly draining the bank.

The renders we’ve seen for O’Connell St and the like are just filling space (granted, in an insultingly bland way) right now, but I hope it doesn’t set a precedent. If we want mass transit to be useful, it has to also be appealing. Yes, by all means, have good security, have good infrastructure. But without the humanizing element of art and design in a train station, it not only makes for a more dismal commute, but it also dulls our senses and diminishes our capacity for curiosity. No thanks.

@Devin wrote:

I think a big reason why DCC reinstated the statue and invested in the makeover is that, at the time of the competition for the Spire, there was a lot of pressure from the catholic hardcore for a religious monument to replace the Pillar. So they had to be looked after in some way.

. . . and there’s no telling where it will end once you start giving in to the catholic hardcore.

Here’s one for the Statistically Improbable Phrases detector: @Sunday Times wrote:

stylish retail fish hall

It will be interesting to see what happens with the redevelopment of this area. The fruit & veg markets are architecturally gorgeous.

I love the alternating patterns of brickwork. . . satisfies both the symmetrical side of my brain and the asymmetrical:

The ornamental embellishments — fruits, fish, and vegetables — at the base of each of the smaller arches are a great detail. No matter what happens to the interior or to the adjacent sites (er. . .’stylish retail fish hall’?), a bit of hidden history remains in the architecture itself. Shame, though, about the upkeep or lack thereof. The graffiti’s made a mess of it.

While the loss of the adjacent fish market marks the end of an era, it seems inevitable. When the storied Fulton Fish Market (immortalized in Joseph Mitchell’s excellent collection of essays Up in the Old Hotel) was finally booted out of lower Manhattan in 2005, the city gained an opportunity for development but lost a bit of its history. I wonder what will happen over time not just to the people who are moved out of the area but also to the stories — or can we ever hope for anything more than one-liner laments over Molly Malone?

What was wrong with the GoR the way it was? The addition of the new north gate makes sense on a certain intuitive level: it opens the square, improves pedestrian accessibility, ushers in a new cultural quarter etc etc, but it seems in doing so the integrity of the original design has been compromised.

So maybe I can save myself half a minute cutting through from the east side of Parnell Square to the Hugh Lane, wonderful, I’ll get my cup of coffee that much quicker, but I’m going to miss the symmetry that was implied in the single entrance at the base of the cross, the ‘IN’ on one side and ‘OUT’ on the other, the Oisin Kelly sculpture as a central fixture. . . Say what you will about improved accessiblity but there was something wonderfully reverent about the original design and concept, suggestive of, say, a stations of the cross. It may be a small, symbolic detail, but an important one nonetheless. Ah well. Changed, changed utterly as the man said.

Having just returned from Brussels, the official home of WTF architecture, I’ve had the chance to see some of these JCDecaux lovelies in person, as well as the ‘free’ bikes scheme (they’re cheap, but they ain’t free). First off, I should state that I’m unsure if any of these designs bear resemblance to the proposed metropoles and hoardings for Dublin; however, it’s a decent look at how JCD has gone about implementing this scheme in one city and may be of some relevance to the debate.

Beginning with the not-so-bad and proceeding, with due sense of dread and foreboding, into the dismal, here we have one of the bicycle stations outside the Ave Louise metro stop:

Not bad. The walkway is wide enough to accomodate the bikes and bike shed, and the design is crisp and relatively unobtrusive. The location of the bicycle stations also makes sense: most are located near major metro stops and few appear to add excessive clutter to the pedestrian paths. The grey ‘Cyclocity’ post to the right is actually a kiosk. People taking or returning bicycles use these kiosks to enter in their pin numbers and unlock the bikes. The system may make sense once you’ve had a tutorial, but it’s quite confusing and frankly off-putting on first (even second) glance.

Meanwhile, outside of Notre-Dame du Sablon, we have actual proof that some of the signs are being used to display ‘civic information’ rather than 100% ad space. Shocked? I was. But it still pains me to see this beast block the view:

Also in (sort of) favor of the scheme, there is a general consistency to the design of the bike sheds and the bus and tram shelters, also scattered throughout the city. The color, shape, and size of the billboards are basically the same and don’t stand out as hideous reminders of capitalism, etc etc. A typical tram stop:

Some dubious attempts have been made to incorporate a kind of Art Nouveau theme into the signage. Here, we have a pretty distasteful example (blocked by some pedestrians– I suppose it was getting a bit, ahem, crowded on the walkway) of a free-standing, internally illuminated metropole. It flips ads every few seconds. I really, really hate these.

And worse, in the time-honored tradition of the free-standing old-fashioned big-fat-get-in-the-way sign, we are invited to behold this ogre which has planted itself outside of the delightfully run-down Sainte-Catherine. Part of a different scheme, perhaps, but the same culprit nevertheless:

Overall, re: the JCDecaux invasion of Brussels, it appeared that many of the the bus shelters and bike stands, as installations, work. I even saw a few people using the bikes. But that is not, in itself, reason enough to assume it’s a good addition to an already chaotic traffic environment :cough cough Dublin cough cough: But those free-standing, internally illuminated gargoyles, those do nothing but obstruct, offend, and distract. Those have got to be stopped.

Does anyone know if the illuminated signage as seen in posts #108 and #110 of this thread are closer to the models proposed for Dublin? I’d be curious.

I was walking up Dame Street when I happened upon this allegory.