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Arghh! All the housing is away from the river! Worse – the aerial views show that the grain and scale of the proposed blocks are even cruder Scott Tallon Walker’s nearby office blocks and anything else built to date in the area. Utter deadsville. . . See how tiny and jewel-like Clarion Quay looks by comparison?
Richard Rogers likes to relate a conversation he had not so long ago with the man in charge of the Madrid underground. Rogers is building the city’s new airport and the two men had met to discuss the extension of the subway system to serve the airport. “The meeting,” he says, “went something like this:
‘We need to link the airport to the tube.’
‘How many kilometres?’
‘Ten kilometres.’
‘Ten kilometres? We guarantee one kilometre per month – 10 months.’
‘We need two new stations.’
‘One month each – 12 months. If you want to be kind, give me 14 months.’ “
Rogers talks a lot about Spain these days. It’s Europe’s architectural hothouse, he says, what France was in the 80s. . . Just take his airport in Madrid: “It is the biggest infrastructure project in Europe. It’s three times the size of [Heathrow’s] Terminal Five which is our biggest airport in Britain. We won T5 as a competition 14 years ago and work hasn’t started yet; we won Madrid four years ago and it’s halfway up.”
It is hard not to find the comparisons a little depressing.
Full story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4534221,00.html
The names Liam Boyle and Seamus Delaney come to mind. They were in the Corpo’s housing section in the mid-to-late 1950s. Talented designers, they left the Corpo after winning the competition for the Sugar Company building on Earlsfort Terrace.
You’re right about Drogheda, Paul.
The national spatial strategy was never any such thing. It couldn’t be when Dublin was so bloated, hoovering in any investment going. The only game in town was how to encourage foreigner investors (and their key managers) to relocate anywhere else, other than the greater Dublin region. It’s not just tax rates (common to all locations in the republic), telecoms, schools, arts and social facilities, clubs, restaurants and so on that are critical to such investment decisions, but international airport connections. Poxy and all as they are from Dublin, they are hopeless from anywhere else.
Does anyone remotely believe that any little town or so-called city anywhere else in Ireland can, on its own, become a counter-attraction (to outsiders) to Dublin’s destructive ‘magnet’?
If the aim is – and it is, at least aspirationally – to spread investment (which is not in the government’s giving, but rather depends on the decisions of foreign multi-nationals) around, the best we could ever hope for is the choice between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee. If Dublin is the former, the latter can only be a Cork-Limerick development corridor, later extended as far as Galway.
Anything else is selling the pass. The local constituents can be placated, but nothing will stop the sclerotic growth of the capital.
Rather tame, with just the clouds passing overhead (is rain on the aperature an issue?). In Edinburgh, the 19th-century camera obscura has a rooftop viewing terrace but the real fun is inside, where the revolving lenses and mirrors project a moving image of the city into a darkened room – try picking up a bus in the palm of your hand, as the publicity goes.
The late Hugo Duffy attempted in his 1999 book, James Gandon and His Times, to reconstruct Gandon’s lost design for the Royal Exchange. Duffy based his attempted reconstruction (plan, section, elevation) on surviving contemporary written descriptions of Gandon’s design, which are quoted at length in the book.
(Incidentally, James Hoban, who went on to design the White House in Washington, once worked as an assistant to Thomas Cooley.)
Duchas has produced a 200-page pocket book listing 500 events, county-by-county, during September 1st-8th. For information about Heritage Week CALLSAVE 1850 600 601 or 01 647 2466.
The market was restored in the late ’90s by Belfast City Council and Consarc Conservation. According to the RSUA Design Award citation, 2000, the work involved “the precise restoration of all extternal detailing.” Consarc must have the info you are seeking. Why not contact them directly?
Used to be at http://www.corkcorp.ie/docklands/pdf/thevision.pdf. Seems to be gone?!?
It’s been said before, but can anyone really have any objections to building the stadium at the Glass Bottle plant in Irishtown? A bit further to stroll from town than to Lansdowne, but apart from that…?
Pardon my scepticism, but this competition smells rotten and bears all the hallmarks of a pre-election stunt for the benefit of the minister in charge of the OPW, Martin Cullen, local TD. By the time the results are out, Cullen will (almost certainly) no longer be in his current office. Conveniently, the OPW Commissioner, Barry Murphy, will also be moving on in the Autumn, clearing the way for the project to be cancelled by their successors in a tidy fashion by blaming the competition system for not producing a good enough / affordable (strike out as required) result. I’m only surpised the OPW hasn’t covered its back by getting the RIAI to organise the competition on its behalf. Maybe they wouldn’t? Is the huge prize money intended to buy off disappointed competitors when the winning scheme is abandoned? Cullen’s empty, vainglorious gesture will end up costing taxpayers an arm and a leg. Will we have a PAC enquiry when the shit eventually hits the fan? Will Sean Benton be left holding the baby? Cullen and Murphy shouldn’t escape a grilling, I say.
What Aldo Rossi called his “little blue book” was published by Architectural Design (London) and Gandon Editions (Dublin) in 1983, to coincide with an exhibition of Aldo Rossi’s work in the Blue Studio Gallery – a space within de Blacam and Meagher’s office on Dawson Street. The exhibition had previously been shown at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. Contrary to some reports, Rossi did not visit Dublin, although his former assistant, Christopher Stead, spoke at the associated seminar. The book was edited by John O’Regan (publisher), Paul Keogh, Sheila O’Donnell and Shane O’Toole (President of the AAI). Keogh (“the Teatro del Mondo can be easily imagined as a medieval tower-house floating on a western horizon”) and O’Donnell wrote intos; Niall McCullough and Valerie Mulvin translated one of Rossi’s texts – The Tower of Babel – into English for the first time; John Tuomey selected ‘preface’ texts from Rossi’s writings to lead off each of the published projects; Rachael Chidlow was a collaborator in the venture, as were Dr Andreas Papadakis and Frank Russell of AD.
From today’s Irish Times: http://www.ireland.com/images/2002/0209/1011363159196.html
Mark Bence-Jones’s book, “Burke’s Guide to Country Houses: Volume 1 – Ireland,” published by Burke’s Peerage Ltd of London in 1978, is an alphabetical dictionary of Irish country houses that contains nearly 2,000 entries. There is no entry for Kincora or Dollymount House, presumably because it had been demolished before the book was published. Nor is there mention of either house in the five volumes of The Georgian Society Records, published in Dublin before the First World War.
