Praxiteles
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In the absence of a map, this satellite shot will show the general surroundings of St Peter adn Paul’s, visible here in the lower right. The red surfaces above it are the piazze created in the wake of the demolitions of the 1980s to build the Paul’s Street Shopping Centre. That ubly looking thing at the top of the picture is the roof of the car park, while on the top left you can see the lone remaining building -St. Pual’s church- in the middel of the Blitzkrieg rebuilding going on presently in the area.
@johnglas wrote:
My idea for the ‘piazza’ referred only to the immediate area of the junction of the lane and Paul St, not the whole plot.
The thing is that the lane coming up from Parick Street, broadens out into a sort of small piazza when it intersects Paul Street. And then, 10 feet further up Paul Street is a large piazza in front of the Paul Street shopping centre. So, I am not sure there would be any benefit in a further piazza. I was trying to find a decent map of the area to illustrate what I am saying but to no avail.
@ake wrote:
The interior decoration is high quality here, although I’m not sure about the yellow painting on the walls. Well, it doesn’t grab your attention anyway, so not too bad. I shot some photographs of the inside last year, mostly the magnificent woodwork, which, while well enough preserved was missing a few bits and pieces, sadly. you can see the photographs here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/58086761@N00/sets/72157600300054218/Beautiful set of pictures of the interior. Some restoration wrk of the wooodwork should be undertaken.
I was not sure at first but Guy’s shop was demolished and replaced by the present building sometime in the 1960s/70s. Even this development has altered the original prospect of the facade. Douglas Scott Richardson, in his bool on Gothic Revival in Ireland, goes into a minor high on the manner in which the various elements of the facade reveal themselves as you progress up the lane way.
This is a better contemporary view from more or less the sme vantage point as the old photograph above. I believe the opportunity for creatinga piazza on the site of Guy’s shop should be passed over on this occasion. The facade of the church is designed to be seen from a narrow alley way – a reminder taht its predecessor built in 1786 was built off the Kings Highway and out of sight in a back lane. While I am sure taht Peter adn Paul’s could have been built on a much better site in the city, ther was a conscious decison to maitain the old site with all its inconvenience. The churhc design responds to those inconveniences and surmounts them in a superlative fashion. Remove the inconveniences and you you simply wreck the chrch’s setting.
@johnglas wrote:
Yet another gem; a pity the intended spire was never completed. The stonework and the interior stencilling are really quite beautiful.
The main problem with the fine-grain planning required here is that, failing any agreed area plan (at a really quite detailed level) or any design guidelines, planners will judge development on a case-by-case basis. What has been lost is the quaint and the familiar, the ‘organic’ memory of the original street layout, cleverly exploited by P&A. I agree any further erosion needs to be resisted.
Is there no equivalent of an ‘Old Cork Society’? One ray of light is that even if the local planners are acting dumb, I suspect ABP would be much more sympathetic to the ‘local context’ argument should it go to appeal.On this matter, I agree 100% with Johnglas. Paul Street to the North has already been denuded; the area on which the Paul Street garage has been built is gone; now the idea is to plank a great monstrosity outside the door of Petera and Paul’s.
The planning application number is Cork City Council 0732640
All the relevant documentation can be viewed at thie link:
http://planning.corkcity.ie/idocs/listFiles.aspx?catalog=planning&id=0732640
St peter and Paul’s Cork
Here is something of the present street scape. How that junk on the right managed to placed practically up against the church is a greta mystery.
St Peter and Paul’s, Cork City
Here is a photograph of the main facade of St. Peter and Paul’s in Cork City. The photograph was taken in 1960s, before Guy’s shop disappeared. The picture shows exactly the advantage taken of this difficult site by E.W. Pugin and G.C. Ashlin in one of thier first and most important commissions. The facade of the church is designed in reference to this specific context.
Praxiteles is posting the piture because an application is presently before Cork City Council for the demolition of of Guy’s shop and its replacement with a huge glass box extending the whole way back to Paul’s street and immediately in front of the facade of the church. Needless to say, such a radical redordering of the lane-scape here would have enormous visual and other consequences for the positioning of the church -indeed, it would imply the destruction of much of the church’s original architectural context. It is to be noted taht that that context has already been compromised by the removal of the steps on the left hand side, the demolition and replacement of Guy’s, the loss of the corner shop front on the lane way etc. Hopefully, this degradation can be arrested and no further destruction of the church’s architectural siting tolerated by CCC.
@johnglas wrote:
Prax: too ethnicist of you! I’m sure a local creche would love it!
Oh, how nicely put!
Actually, the three legged stool could be sent to Co. Sligo. I understand it is a copy of a Sligo milking stool. They will surely have it.
The Honan Chapel, University College Cork
And here we have a close up of the stuff that needs to be sent to the missions -if they will have it. Since it has the look of having been inspired by the upper reaches of the Limpopo, it will probably look better there.
@johnglas wrote:
The Honan chapel is one building I would really like to see. I agree the ‘modern’ vestments are dire, but the rest of the collection is robust enough.
There are a few things that strike me about the chapel: its seating is not set out ‘chapel-wise’, which detracts from its overall setting; there is absolutely no space for a choir and no organ – could a modern ‘loft’ not be inserted at the West end, designed in sympathy with the rest of the chapel? Also, the contemporary altar sits very unconformably with the sanctuary mosaics, and the new tapestry panels intended for behind the altar are God-awful and would suit only a kindergarten.
However, the building is a real gem.I tend to agree with this. Practically all of the recent additions to the chapel are awful and no match for the quality of the original work. However, I would commend the present chaplain on one thing -the recovery and re-instatment of the sanctuary lamp which had been dumped by a fool of a chaplain in the mid-80s on the grounds that it was liturgically superceded by Vatican II-clearly he had not read the then New Code of Canon, canon 940 of 1983 [ “Can. 940 A special lamp which indicates and honors the presence of Christ is to shine continuously before a tabernacle in which the Most Holy Eucharist is reserved”].
What still needs to happen is to re-instate the art-deco West grille. That too discppeared in 1980s and has not been seen since.
The altar rails need to be rinstated.
There is no need for the modern liturgical clutted scattered around the chapel and it could quite easily be sent to the missions -if they would have it!
The Honan Chapel in Cork has recently put this link to its collection of artifacts on their site:
The modern vestments are just in the worst possible taste imagineable.
St. Colman’s Church, Ballintotis, Midleton, Co. Cork
Readers will remember that the retrosacristy of this small country church built in 1839 by Brother Michael Augustine O’Riordan in a neo-Palladian style, disappeared in the heat of an August night in 2007 without planning permission and without a declaration of exemption. The disappearance was being covered up by a speed building of a replacement for which no planning permission had been sought or obtained until a reluctant Cork County Council intervened and called a halt. Since then, Cork County Council has persisted in an even greater reluctance to do anything to retain, indentify, or reinstate the original material from the demolition.
Now, a planning application has been lodged for “Retention and completion of works to retro-sacristy area to include boiler house, disabled access toilet, alterations to boys and priest’s sacristy layout, removal of old steel storage container and ancillary site works” (Cork County Council Planning Register 085025).
This certainly gives rise to whole series of rather interesting little interpretative points as far as the Planning and Development Act is concerned and this time around we do not have the complicating factor of “liturgical requirements”.
This link certainly hits the liturgical-reform-problem right on the head:
Holy Family, Belfast
Here is the Altar at Holy Family, Belfast. The pecularity for the shape is immediately obvious, it is not raised on a ny step, and the sanctuary does not appear to have been demarcated from the rest of the church.
@ake wrote:
who’s to say they mightn’t be? indeed they could well be porphyry. porphyry or plastic in any case.
plastic porphry……..hmmmm
