Tighin
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Thuggish approaches are everywhere; in the military chapel in Arbour Hill a beautiful frilly white marble altar was replaced with a brutalist butcher’s block in grey stone and a tabernacle like a wall safe. I’m told that the frilly white altars around the country (some of them made by the Pearses) are commonly broken up into chips for grave coverings, which has a certain horrid appropriateness.
Is this really going to be so wonderful?
I really don’t like Dundrum Town Centre (I think it’s called), the main sample of the proposers’ work. Walking through it feels like being inside a Barbie doll’s intestines – it’s all beige plastic.
Surely we want more for our main street than this temple of commerce full of multinational chain stores?
Here’s Brian Lenihan a few weeks ago on a tour of the part of the site that’s the retreat from the GPO in 1916:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoqwBZnfUqM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSOGmbpWICs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE6L3kcya_0(There’s a few comments in there about the architectural interest of the Moore Street houses, mainly in part 3, if I remember right.)
Hmm, bit difficult. I’m not a soldier, but go to a ceremony in Arbour Hill once a year.
Apparently – I find when searching online – it’s also the chapel for Arbour Hill Prison. Maybe this is the reason for the wall safe; perhaps it makes some of the prisoners feel at home.
The windows are by the Harry Clarke Studio, I read. Wonder what they’ll replace those with?
Has Dublin Corporation – oh, sorry, they copycatted London and now call themselves Dublin ‘City Council’ – taken ugly pills or something? Ewww!
How on earth can anyone think that a building whose whole alignment is vertical, with tall, gracious windows, will look like anything other than a cartoon character with his hat shooting up from his head, when you graft on horizontal steel-and-glass or wood-and-glass…. stuff?
Heavens (as it were), what a huge thread!
I haven’t read all 180 pages, so I’m not sure if this has been discussed, but one of the horrors is the way the delicious frilly white marble altars are being booted out.
In Arbour Hill military chapel there was a particularly lovely one, which has been torn out by the roots a couple of years ago and replaced by a brutalist wall-safe in granite.
