rumpelstiltskin

@GrahamH wrote:

So I think it is agreed amongst pretty much everyone – and from all ends of the architecture and planning spectrum on this website – that this is categorically not what O’Connell Street and this new city quarter warrants or deserves in design terms. Therefore a systems failure has to be identified, either in our planning process or in the architectural profession, or both.

Developers and some architects have often been heard in recent years waxing on about overly-prescriptive planning laws, yet surely the outcome of the above is precisely the result of a lack of clout and clarity in planning policy? Or more pointedly, the erroneous interpretation of planning policy? Alternatively, one can argue that the relative ‘freedom’ offered by planners in this case was to enable architects to come up with imaginative and creative design solutions in accordance with best design practice. Architects, after all, know best when it comes to design – right? Why shouldn’t they be given the rudder on this one? Logic would dictate that they should.

The reality is that we see both professions culpable in this:

In spite of some worthy Additional Information modifications made by Dubln City Council, an effectively illegal interpretation of the O’Connell Street ACA under the 2000 Planning Act led to the initial grant for the scheme by DCC: -1 for planners.

The initial proposal was over-scaled, crudely integrated with its host environment and ignorant of existing building grain and street patterns: -1 to architects, and -1 to planners for granting it.

An Bord Pleanála then gets called in to clean up the mess as usual. They enforce planning policy and civic design character by decree – hardly the best method of producing creative design solutions: both +1 and -1 to the planning system.

Architects come back with a thoroughly dismal redesign that could not express in bricks and mortar the concept of a mean-spirited, begrudging sulk any more if it tried. The O’Connell Street frontage attempts little distinguished sense of urbanity or clarity of expression, never mind anything that approaches a civic-minded outlook for the first major intervention on the capital’s main throughfare in nearly a century: -1 to architects

An Bord Pleanála now reassesses, and grants permission on the basis of a raft of conditional redesign measures that attempt to address the refusal of the promoters to engage in a meaningful manner with the critical planning and design issues at stake. The result is a compromise that does nobody any favours, and where the energy that is expended in the whole arduous process would have been immeasurably better spent concentrated on a thoughtful and engaging urban design proposal – critically, had the guidance been there from the outset.

Well this is hardly only being identified now. It’s a common motif with big projects – something ambitious but crude is rejected, but then something less crude and infinitely more bland is accepted, thus making most stuff built in Dublin bland.

These are some of the problems:
-There is inconsistency in deciding what is appropriate for Dublin’s streetscapes. An Bord Pleanala and DCC are not on the same page, and the latter do not even adhere to their own guidelines.
-Dublin City Council seem content to grant permission to crude projects if they’re exciting enough.
-An Bord Pleanala gets the final say, and it’s more concerned with maintaining the blandness of Dublin, than with ensuring innovative and exciting architecture.

The system doesn’t work. Nobody is ensuring the architectural quality of the buildings granted permission. An Bord Pleanala operates like a damage limitation team, trying desperately to hold on to the limited heritage left in Dublin, rather than creating an innovative fusion of old and new. In my view, the guidelines about building in areas like O’Connell St. need to be less restrictive, both for ABP and DCC, and the counterbalance needs to be that the whole process is overseen by some sort of architectural quality board, which will have a coherent and forward-thinking vision for Dublin. It is, after all, the capital.

In all fairness, let’s be totally honest here, there’s nothing whatsoever “grand” about this town. It’s a run of the mill, ugly, boring, Irish town. It has nothing of any distinction in it. That Riddler’s building can only make the place more interesting. The way you’re talking, you’d think it was constructed next to Leinster House.

What’s interesting is that the Condompower signage is significantly more tasteful than Centra’s.

Yes, but considering the main street status of O’Connell St., even if these retailers suffer in the recession, the last place they’ll close down is O’Connell St. It doesn’t matter what you do to improve everything else, you’ll still have a street swamped with fast food restaurants, and more importantly fast food wrappers and bits of burgers and chips and the smell of grease pervading the main street of the capital. So what I’m suggesting is that fast food retailers should be given a reason to move off the street. Maybe other people have better ideas.

Are you sure the council doesn’t have the power to restrict trading hours of existing businesses?

Obviously that depends on the character of any mayor, doesn’t it. Nobody wants O’Connell St. swamped with fast food restaurants.

It’s in the power of Dublin City Council to restrict the opening hours of fast food restaurants on O’Connell St., to force them to close at, say, 7pm. And would it be sensible for a fast food outlet to remain open on that street when they could decamp to Henry St. and stay open all night?

I’d say something if we were talking about a place with real architectural distinction, but the whole of O’Connell St. is architecturally mediocre, full of the most generic Victorian trash imaginable. It’s grey, it’s drab, it’s soulless, it’s dirty, it’s bland. The best you could hope to do is actually to get more people on the upper half and add a bit of colour.

Will you do everyone a favour and shut the fuck up about tourists. Most of those cities that you want Dublin to copy didn’t end up like they did by catering for tourists, they did it by catering for their own citizens.

We have the noblest line of quays of any city in Europe.

You often hear statements like this. In the nineteenth century were Dublin’s quays really nobler than Paris’, or Venice’s? Or indeed any number of other cities that spring to mind?

It gets a bit barren the further up you go. I think getting some chain to open a big fat department store near the top would be a good idea – Harvey Nichols or John Lewis, or even Brown Thomas. Banish the fast food restaurants and Spars to side streets and give subsidies to fashion retailers and good quality restaurants to set up. Force all owners to maintain their own buildings to a standard appropriate to the dignity of the street, or face closure and huge fines within one month. It’s not that hard if they have the will, and that’s why an elected mayor with real power might do wonders.