Sue
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How do you rate it as a building Graham? Strikes me as being a bit of a hospital from some angles. The portico is impressive
apart from that, what’s wrong with it? This is like the “what did the Romans ever do for us” Monty Python sketch.
So, ok, apart from the fact that the bridge is an eyesore and in the wrong place, what’s wrong with it? Er, well, that’s about it actually. Oh and it’s a big hulk of horrible metal that is about as “designed” as a Bertie Ahern interview
The point is, it shouldn’t be there. The shortest distance between Pearse Street and Connolly station is just below the Custom House. Then there’d be no Loop at all…good grief – look at the bridges in cities like San Francisco, New York, even Newcastle, we’ve to make do with the Loop Line and then we’re told, sure, it has its own charm. This is more nonsensical nostalgia – the only reason why people like it is because it’s been there so bloody long. 😡
“The Loop Line is part of the city’s charm”
Suffering Mother of the Divinity, I’ve heard it all now 😀
My OPW sources say they have excluded two of the three shortlisted sites (Colaiste Mhuire and docklands) and are concentrating on Hawkins House. They need to buy some properties in the vicinity in order to extend the footprint, and are sussing that out. Neighbouring landowners are, as we speak, adding noughts to the value of their buildings…..
“canteen style food”: RoryW, that’s an inspired description of the fare on offer in Bewley’s. And it didn’t come cheap.
I’d love to see a bookshop there, but given that the rent is likely to be the most expensive on Grafton Street (newly negotitated rents will always cost more) I can’t see even a highly-successful bookshop turning a profit there. Isn’t the Dublin bookshop across the street gone, or doth mine eyes deceive me?I hear that the OPW aren’t happy with any of the three sites. Whichever they chose will be a compromise.
What I’d love to know, though, is if the judge in the Carlton Cinema site is aware of the fact that the length of time he has taken to give the judgement (about six months now) has meant that one of the state’s most important cultural institutions has to go elsewhere….
No, Graham, the city council made it official policy to move the Abbey to O’Connell Street. Not much they can do about it really – the council doesn’t have the readies.
I think Hawkins House has to be the favourite. The docklands now is full – Terry Devey got the contract for their artistic site, which had been looked at for the Abbey before. I’ve heard Colaiste Mhuire is on the shortlist of three too. Logical enough in that you have other cultural institutions nearby e.g. the municipal art gallery, the garden of remembrance, the Gate and, er, the wax museum!
Course the GPO is where it should be, and pelt An Post the hell out of there. But the building is too shallow, I’m told.
How about Fingal county council’s hq on O’Connell Street – it’s the old Dublin county council hq. I mean what are Fingal doing there given that (a) O’Connell Street is not in Fingal and (b) they have their own spanking new hq in Swords
Last time I asked – and I think I put this on another thread – Iarnrod Eireann said they had five year deals with a lot of the advertisers, and need those contracts to expire in order to start their clean-up. So they promise great things in the near future.
Stunning picture, though, Graham. Whoever approved the Loopline bridge was a moron. Obscuring the view of Custom House from O’Connell Bridge is one of the greatest sacrileges ever perpetrated in Dublin. The bridge should be ripped down and the trains put in a tunnel under the Liffey.
Devin, this is exactly what I am thinking about – a pic of O’Connell Street, even from the 1920s, showing the colours of the horse and carts, the Pillar, and those people with their capeens and curiously quick walking styles!
They’re are no genuinely homeless people left in Dublin. There is a bed for everyone – be it in a hostel, B&b or whatever
And who the hell wants to win medals in the Olympics? Does it put butter on anyone’s bread in ireland that Cian Whatsisface got a gold for jumping a few fences?
The thought of losing out on the Spire to pay for more of that is moronic. I hope it wins the Stirling prize, but I guess the Gherkin is unbeatable
Of course, no one reads Roddy Doyle any more. So the only way he has of interrupting our consciousness is by saying something controversial whenever he is plugging a book. And the fewer books he sells (the dreadful Rory and Ita, anyone?) the more controversial he is likely to become. So we go from cracks at Bloomsday to describing Dublin as a dreary little town etc.
Doyle’s best days are behind him. No more Booker prizes for him. If we ignore him, he will soon lapse back into obscurity.
Source: Sunday Times
Issue Date: Sunday December 30, 2001
Byline: John BurnsMOLLY MALONE must be spinning in her grave: her old stomping ground, Dublin’s fish market, is to be demolished.
In its place, Dublin corporation is planning to build a colonnaded square encompassing the nearby fruit-and-vegetable market, which is to be refurbished.
Designed by Donnelly Turpin and MBM, a Barcelona firm, the square will be pedestrianised and will cover an area the size of Mountjoy Square, also on the city’s northside.
The development, due to be unveiled in February, is a dramatic and ambitious scheme, on a par with the overhaul of Smithfield and Temple Bar.
Occupying a 6,000sqmetre site behind the Four Courts, the fruit-and-veg market is one of Dublin’s least known architectural treasures. It first opened for business in December 1892.
The adjacent fish market dates from five years later but is a much less important structure. Many fishmongers have already deserted it and much of the unlisted building is used as a car park.
The fate of the remaining fishmongers has yet to be decided. Several are refusing to leave their stalls and want compensation from the corporation, which is confident of reaching an agreement with them about alternative accommodation soon.
Fishmongering has declined since Molly Malone’s day, with a drop in the catch, co-operatives selling directly to shops and higher prices.
Tommy O’Callaghan, chairman of the Dublin Fish Market Wholesalers’ Association, says he hopes the new market will include the fish traders.
The traders, with Bord Iascaigh Mhara, the sea fisheries agency, had submitted a plan to the corporation that would include a fish market, restaurants, shops and an aquarium in the new development.
“Every capital city in the world has a fish market. The traders want to stay in this area. This market is very traditional and is a part of old Dublin,” said O’Callaghan.
The corporation, which owns the fish market, has refused to spend Pounds 1m refurbishing it and decided instead to demolish the now-dilapidated structure. Corporation chiefs argue that Luas, the light rail scheme, would also disrupt the operation of the market.
Jim Barrett, the city architect, said: “Most of the big operators are already moving out of the market anyway.
“It is a very important quarter and this is an attractive scheme. We want to keep a market here while getting rid of the huge articulated lorries that come into the area. Many residents have complained about refigerated lorries humming through the night.”
Many stalls, some of which have been run by families for up to five generations, will have to be abandoned to make room for the refurbishment.
Derek Leonard, whose great-grandmother was one of the first to set up a stall in 1892, said: “It’s the end of an era.”
Headline: A market square deal;Architecture
Source: Sunday Times
Issue Date: Sunday December 08, 2002
Byline: Shane O’TooleFar from being the end of Molly Malone’s old stomping ground, Dublin council’s plans offer a new lease of life for the markets area, reclaiming it for the public, says Shane O’Toole
Some of Dublin city council’s critics claim that its new plan for the north inner-city markets area will finish off Molly Malone, the fishmonger, once and for all. But the council insists it’s in the business of resuscitation, “reclaiming a part of the city that’s been dead and unknown,” according to Jim Barrett, city architect.
True, the “markets area framework plan”, currently on public display, proposes the demolition of the dilapidated wholesale fish market, located between Capel Street and the Four Courts, to create a new market square – the one Dublin never had – but you’d have to be blinded by nostalgia or prejudice not to lick your lips at the stylish retail fish hall that will be the rejuvenated market’s shop window to the city.
It’s not as if the fishmongers haven’t moved before. An earlier fish market stood on the site of the elegant fruit and vegetable market, which replaced scattered street markets when it was executed in 1889-92 by the city engineer Spencer Harty to the 1884 designs of Paul Merrill.
The sale of fish, meat and vegetables has been carried on within this district since medieval times, when St Mary’s Abbey held fairs on the green, an area now occupied by Green Street courthouse. Later there were markets around Green Street and St Mary’s Lane.
Dublin is lucky to have retained its central food markets, in contrast to London and Paris, where the loss of the old Covent Garden and Les Halles are still lamented. These days, with the markets long in decline, the business is mostly wholesale. Surrounding buildings are used primarily as warehouses.
The supermarket chains have developed their own distribution systems and no longer depend on centralised markets. Urban congestion and the need for distribution centres with direct access to national routes will eventually drive the remainder of the distribution end of the business out of town.
If the area’s future could lie in the combination of local wholesale business with an all-day retail market, where the public could shop and eat, then a radical change of use that would weaken Dubliners’ sense of identity of their city might be avoided.
The issue has been forced by the imminent arrival of Luas, the light rail system through the heart of the markets area. A framework is needed to steer the inevitable planning applications for office developments to replace underused warehouses.
The council turned to David Mackay, one of the “three wise men” – the others are Sir Richard MacCormac andProfessor John Worthington – who since early last year have been advising the city manager on Dublin’s development explosion. The panel was inspired by the Barcelona authority, which operates a similar scheme.
Mackay has lived in Barcelona since 1958. Through the pioneering work of his firm, MBM, in the reconstruction of Barcelona’s public spaces in the late 1970s, he became a world leader in recovering the architect’s role in the design of cities.
Throughout the 1990s, Mackay had a profound influence on Dublin’s re-emergence as a European city of architectural note. He was a member of the competition juries for Temple Bar and Smithfield, the developments that placed contemporary Irish urban design on the international map.
The Dublin architecture firm Donnelly Turpin and Roger Zogolovitch of AZ Urban Studio, a London-based consultancy specialising in urban regeneration, have been working with MBM since April 2001 to develop the plan for the markets area. Mark Turpin says what impresses him most is Mackay’s insistence on a strategy that is flexible enough to absorb the life of the city.
“He says we must absolutely resist the temptation to descend into architecture,” says Turpin. Instead, what they have come up with a series of urban design principles, facade alignments and building heights. Only the appearance of the square is fixed.
The framework’s big move – the radical idea to carve out the market square Dublin never had – emerged at a meeting in Barcelona between Mackay, his partner Oriol Bohigas and their colleague, Francesc Gual. The image they had in mind was Cracow, Poland, where the arcaded cloth hall stands in the middle of the medieval market square.
At about 130 metres in each direction, the space will be divided in two by the free-standing fruit and vegetable market: to the west, on the site of the fish market, there will be a broad parade; to the east, where the arcaded side of the square deflects to follow the boundary of the old abbey, the form will be that of a tapering promenade. “We had the building, but not the square,” says Paraic Fallon, the city council’s senior planner. “Now we’ll have a new civic space, with the fruit and vegetable market as a focus.”
About 80% of the building will be given over to food retailing. Only its north and west facades are elaborately detailed in terracotta panels and cut stone. New market workshops will screen the blank east facade and a glassy fish market hall will advertise the markets to passers-by.
The fish hall will be serviced from below, and 500 parking spaces will be provided on two levels beneath the square. The six-storey buildings surrounding the square will supply the area’s defining landmark, but there will also be substantial four-storey developments to the north and east, with 550 new dwellings doubling the area’s population of 1,200.
Three-quarters of the land needed for the redevelopment is in private ownership. Planning permission has recently been granted to Begley Brothers, the fruit importers, to kick-start the plan by building the middle third of the east side of Market Square.
Barrett likens the framework to what he calls the “Merrion Square phenomenon”: development is unlikely to happen quickly, as opportunities will be parcelled out into four units here and six units there. “It will creep up on us,” he says. “We’ll end up with kinks and individuality, but within an overall order.
The Markets Area Draft Framework Plan is on display at the Community Resource Centre, North King Street, Monday-Friday 10am-4pm until December 23 http://www.dublincity.ie/planning/city markets/pics titles.htm
Who cares what the plebs think anyway? What do they know? The usual response of Dublin howiyas to a work of this scale is to moan about the cost, complain that it should all have been spent on hospitals instead, and criticise it as the personal work of a politician they don’t like e.g. why is Bertie sticking up this pole in O’Connell Street.
The Spike is wonderful, O’Connell Street is getting there, the city is visibly improvingOn the contrary, Kenny’s is one of the most expensive bookshops in Ireland. The only one I can think of that’s dearer is Cathach books off Grafton Street – unbelievable prices in there. These places are strictly for gullible tourists who want to take back a well-bound bit of the auld sod
I read somewhere that Michael Smith was challenging the accounts of An Taisce and asking that the treasurer’s report be thrown out, or somesuch. Anyone know what happened on that front?
I hate all this criticism of the Stephen’s Green Centre. I think it’s a wonderful building, inside and out. A lot of the sniping comes from snobs. The only legitimate criticism I accept is that the building turns its back to South King Street, and only has one entrance on that side. It should have many more access points, and should have shopfronts that link the street to the building.
Remember what was there before – that grotty old Rice pub? Yuk!
