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I am curious (and saddened) why this forum has effectively died.
Of course people go through phases of posting/contributing enthusiastically and lurking or losing interest in a subject but it’s hard to believe that the sorry state of the forum for the last few years can be blamed on the normal ebb and flow of individual interest. Nor do I believe the property bust can be blamed as many topics had little to do with new building projects and I recall the forum remaining quite active for a few years after 2008. It’s sad, considering what a vibrant source of news and interesting debate this place was a few years ago.
I don’t like to be critical – as I don’t spend time or money maintaining the forum even if I did post regularly – but I believe that the multiple changes of forum software have been a significant factor in the decline. Any UI change imposes a significant re-learning cost on users – particularly regular users who are more likely to be contributors. This is on top of the inevitable teething issues any new software deployment will experience. Also older links to posts and threads from 3rd party websites are now broken cutting off a source of potential new members. (Even links within older forum posts are broken damaging the forum’s utility.)
@wearnicehats wrote:
oh dear. here we go again
Let’s all rubbish the current ESB building while clamouring for some kind of carbon copy or limp pastiche of the past. We need to get over ourselves and accept that the georgians are gone. Georgian architecture is gone. Any attempt to fill the gap using sepia tinted spectacles will result in an infil – and a poor one at that. Just take a look at anything that Robert Adam has done – it’s a short step to Quinlan Terry
The IGS should be reponsible for the conservation and protection of existing buildings. They should in fact be totally against any attempt to copy the past and I am surprised that they have not objected to DCC’s misguided amendment to the development plan
…
There is a real opportunity here and this kind of lazy backward looking thinking is only going to serve the status quo. …Here we go again indeed. The usual narrow provincial orthodoxy regarding reconstruction. I know of nowhere outside of the UK and Ireland where the idea of reconstruction is viewed by professional architects and planners with the sort of disgust and contempt normally reserved for pedophiles, bankers and The X-factor. All over the rest of the planet reconstruction is considered a perfectly valid option in situations like this. But what would continental Europeans, for example, know about maintaining vibrant cities? (Now where is that sarcastic/rolling eyes smiley I had my hand on…)
In this particular context, it’s an option which deserves very serious consideration in my opinion, not sneering dismissal.
I wasn’t there but also have received a mixed report of the new stadium from a friend who was. The fear that sight-lines on the upper decks would be compromised by the trusses has been vindicated; depending on where you are sitting (obviously), the ball certainly can be obscured during flight. In my opinion, this is an inexcusable design flaw for such an expensive modern rugby stadium.
@publicrealm wrote:
I’m biased, but I don’t really understand the constant carping about the stadium.
I don’t know why you’d be perplexed. There’s is nothing unreasonable about most of the criticism.
It has an obvious functional flaws; the sightlines for spectators in the upper seats are obstructed by the steelwork and the capacity is too low (admittedly a condition imposed by the planning process we assume).
It has aesthetic flaws – again this bulky “meccano model” internal steelwork and the fact that roof curves are not curvey enough. The northern “dip” looked like an interesting undulation in the sleek computer generated design images but in reality it looks like the design compromise that it is.
By my calculations it would make it into the top 10 list of most expensive stadiums in the world on a per-seat basis. That top 10 list includes the likes of Wembley, Madison Sq Garden (which admittedly blows the rest out of the water in terms of cost per seat), the Emerates and complete fiascoes like the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. It should be damn near perfect for this sort of money; producing a stadium which is “good but not great” must be considered something of a failure when you’ve spent 8000 euro per-seat.
The discussion regarding protection from the elements is a red herring. The Croke Park design is 20 years old and just because it is arguably flawed in this regard does not mean that stadium designs have to compromise between sight-lines and providing cover for spectators. Nearly all the large stadia designed/built in the last 10 years and many built previously have uninterrupted sight-lines from everywhere and offer almost complete protection from the elements.
When CP was redeveloped – the motivation primarily was to increase capacity. LR was redeveloped primarily to improve facilities for spectators. While the upper tier of the old West stand had pillars (I seem to recall), the effect on sight-lines was minor compared to that of the roof-trusses in the new LR if that picture is accurate. This is disappointing given that the per-seat cost of the LR redevelopment must be one of the highest in the world.
I’m hoping the view I posted above is only typical for a very small minority of the seats but even if this is the case, it is a design flaw in my opinion. And a nice shiney curvey exterior does not fully redeem the design for me.
That video is actually pretty damning in my opinion – these sight lines might be ok for soccer but are poor for rugby. Even for soccer, it won’t be as good as in the best stadiums, where you can have uninterrupted sight of the other spectators. A pity. For me function is more important than form with stadiums and while I like the exterior form, it should be secondary; for example, who knows or cares what the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff looks like from the outside? And yet it is one of the most highly regarded in Europe for the quality of the view from practically everywhere and its incredible atmosphere.
[ATTACH]10224[/ATTACH]@Junior wrote:
The 300 anniversary 1691 map was draughted by a local historian Richard Ahern, whilst working as an archaeological researcher for the Limerick Civic Trust I decided to go one further and use the information from the Civil Survey together with all the cartographic information available in the Limerick Museum to draught a new map which is far more accurate(not just a pretty picture).
The map and accompanying booklet on the extant medieval fabric of Limerick is due to be published in September.In reference to the dutch billy thread, I fear that the only ones to be found in Limerick are the two gables at the rear of St John’s Square however the boundary plots and walls of many other billy’s remain.Sounds excellent. I’m really looking forward to it.
@marmajam wrote:
The big irony is this: The stadium at Abbotstown was costed at 350 million (iirc).
The Abbotstown idea was daft. Nobody thinks green-field, car accessible, out-of-town stadia are a good idea these days; even the Americans realised this 10 years or more ago. Except Bertie of course, who I guess being a socialist wanted to leave a 70s Eastern block style monument to himself.
EIA340600, when I used the expression “makey uppy bollox” I wasn’t referring to the semantics or grammar of the expression; I was referring to it’s cultural hollowness.
There were more Yola and Fingalian speakers in Ireland at one stage than there are currently Irish speakers. There is a Scandinavian/Viking origin to many of our place names. Hiberno-English itself is a remarkable cultural artifact as it combines English vocabulary with Irish grammar. You will never hear a non-Irish English speaker say something like “I am after going to the shops”; instead the standard English perfect tense is used – “I have gone to the shops”. The former is almost a word for word translation of how the missing perfect tense is approximated in Irish (“Tá mé tar eis dul go dti na siopaÔ); similarly the lack of Irish words for “yes” or “no” is reflected by the way we generally answer questions by repeating the verb back. We may even see the Poles leave an impact if enough of them hang around. We also had a significant number of French speakers at various times. Unfortunately all this linguistic culture and richness has been destroyed by politicisation (the shinner’s behavior with this sign being a typical example) and the attempt to portray the linguistic history of the country in simplistic childish terms as a war between good native Irish and evil imperial English. Trying to Hibernicise places which never had a culture of Irish is no more admirable than the attempts to eradicate Irish in earlier centuries. I’m not a great fan but Heaney’s introduction to his translation of Beowolf is worth a read as it describes how he suddenly realised that thinking in terms of Irish v. English was bollox.
Don’t get your hopes up too high – I may have overstated the case for the back lane in my excitement. The birdseye view on maps.live.com is useful when you’re stuck:
[ATTACH]9748[/ATTACH]gunter wrote:I don’t know, maybe we should just put back the 16 Georgian houses ]
A reasonable summary I’d say, all things considered.While I also would prefer to see a Powerscourt Centre or IFI/Temple Bar Square (for all its faults) type of development here, it has to be acknowledged that this is a big advance on what was being proposed previously (which you could say would not be hard). It certainly is not perfect but the restoration and preservation of such a large number of historic buildings and facades and more importantly ensuring that a significant proportion of units are street facing rather than inward facing is a huge improvement.
I think so but doesn’t it depend on the capitalisation?
I generally find you can’t lose an argument after peppering its expression with terms like “modernism”, “post-modernism” or even more effectively, the likes of “constructivism”, “realism”, etc.
Whether recreation is justified depends to a degree on whether you value what will have to be destroyed to accommodate it. It is easier to argue the case for recreations to be built on a site currently being used as a surface car park for example than for one containing some genuinely interesting building.
I’ve never admired the current facade. It is repetitive suggesting a weak attempt to respect the rhythm of the Georgian Terrace but missing the point entirely without any vital variation. It’s boring and bland – neither rudely functional nor brashly modern. It’s all staid semi-state comfort; it looks like the sort of place that is going to have carpet tiles covering everything. The frontage onto the lane behind is far better and worth a look. Across the lane, you have the great Bank of Ireland block – an exciting expression of modern architecture. In comparison, the ESB frontage onto Fitzwilliam Street feels to me like a badly executed compromise probably as a result of well-meaning objections to developing on this site.
Because of this I’d have no problem seeing it ripped down and replaced with something better whether reproductions or something overtly modern. The problem for me while there is a small chance that an overtly modern replacement could work – particularly in the long term, the likelyhood is that the replacement would be similar or worse. The public understandably see this as a high risk strategy given past experience and are a bit jaundiced of being told by the professionals that this option is the only one which has “integrity” and “honesty”.
In contrast, the risk with reproductions is much less, assuming both were executed with the same attention to materials and detail. There may be some theological bickering initially about integrity and honesty but in 50 years time, you know that most observers will not give a damn and it will be seen as irrelevant that a section of the terrace had been missing for a few decades in the 20th century. At that stage, the terrace can be considered restored. And hopefully the main Bank of Ireland block will be still standing behind it as an example of Irish international modern architecture which has integrity and excitement.
I’m not sure Graham. I could be wrong but my impression was that the intention of “bus gate” was to allow the more efficient passage of buses through this area of the city not to funnel extra buses through there. (Actually when you think about it, where would they come from? There there are no other South to North routes in the city centre. In addition, Dublin Bus is actually cutting it’s fleet I believe.) So I don’t view it as a “foot in the door” sort of thing and it’s hard to take city centre traders’ sky-will-fall-down concerns seriously after they made similar noises about the Luas which proved to be completely unfounded. Anything which gets buses out of that area quickly and efficiently is to be welcomed. I think if the flow was smooth and efficient, the “bus depot” effect created by buses stuck in traffic, buses stopped for pick up, buses queuing for a place to stop, etc. would be minimised. Anyway, whatever about buses traveling through large WSC streets, theres is no justification ever for sending buses down small intimate streets like Suffolk St.
Like it or not we are stuck with buses as the prime public transport mode for a few years yet. I don’t see where else buses could go through the city without seriously compromising the utility of their routes. Restrict the number of buses and you’d murder the city commercially; it might look nice for a year or two but there’d be tumbleweed in the city if you stopped buses from crossing the centre. The only option is to try and mitigate their damage and Bus Gate does that to a degree. No it’s not perfect but I think it is a small positive step.
Yes this should be the perfect time to show that the city has a bit of pride in its centre of gravity and it could be done relatively cheaply. Particularly I’d be 100% in favour of taking a chainsaw to every single tree in College Green, Westmoreland St and the East end of Pearse St. These are some of the most important buildings and vistas in Dublin and obscuring and masking them with a hodge podge of irregularly laid out and in some cases deformed trees is disgraceful.
I love the Irish language but I dislike the semi-jingoistic and historically illiterate way it is often promoted. In this case, I have no sympathy for this sign placement. Irish has simply never been a working language of Dublin city during its history. Artificially imposing Irish names with dubious or no provenance on geographical features represents a somewhat pathetically futile attempt at linguistic imperialism. Why not just accept that this Island has had many languages (not just English and Irish) each of which has it’s own culture, history and value?
In contrast, having spent some time in a particular part of the country, I would know the Irish names of not only the villages and townlands but even of seemingly random sections of road or collections of fields which had been endowed with names. The Irish names belonged in this case – they were part of the culture, had been in use for centuries at least and in many cases could be sensibly interpreted and meant something. In contrast, “Sraid Ui Connaill Iocht” is just makey-upey bollox and has nothing to do with the the Irish language or its promotion. If this is seen as promoting Irish or this is the sort of thing promoters of Irish spend their time doing, then no wonder it’s in such poor shape.
The whole idea is completely misplaced anyway and represents an ignorance of the factors which allow “small” languages to flourish; there are examples in Europe of such small languages dominating without having a written form at all. Being plastered all over signs in the form of made up names for places is not a necessary condition for a language to be widely used.
The broader exercise is linguistically suspect in the extreme particularly with dictionary translations of English names which often result in incongruous unusable results or the phonetic transcription using Irish spelling which seems completely pointless. What does it achieve to use Irish spelling to badly represent English words and sounds?
It is quite a modest proposal.
I’m disappointed that they didn’t use the opportunity to create a contra-lane on Grafton St. to save buses having to go around-the-block through Suffolk St.. The latter (and most of Andrew Street) could have been pedestrianized extending the Grafton St. pedestrianised area. At least a contra-lane would be better use of precious road-space at this bottleneck than a taxi rank. The bus stops on the other side of this end of Grafton St. should be moved away from here also as they contribute considerably to the stopping and starting and piling up of buses here.
The presence of a considerable number of buses does not contribute positively to the urban environment obviously. Unfortunately, for the moment it is a vital public transport mode particularly given Dublin’s obvious shortcomings in terms of rail. One of the worst aspects is the air pollution and this is exacerbated significantly by the stop/start nature of the current flow of buses through this area of town. If the passage of buses can at least me made smother and more efficient, then the environmental damage they cause will be lessened considerably.
Sadly, being pragmatic, Dublin’s topography means that there are certain streets which will continue to serve the role as arterial routes for motorised traffic for the foreseeable future and unfortunately, I think it’s unavoidable that College Green will have a role in this regard. The aim should be to reduce the amount of motorised traffic on these routes as much as possible (and any sort of restriction helps in this regard) while building largely pedestrianised zones in the urban islands created between them. This would be cheap and easy to achieve and would be a step in the right direction until it is no longer necessary to carry passengers by bus around the city centre and the entire centre can be reclaimed for pedestrians, cyclists and clean/quiet on-street trams. Is it my imagination or did the expansion of pedestrianisation in Dublin slow or stop 5 or 10 years ago?
If I were to be honest I’d have to admit that I hope that this project flounders. What is planned is possibly the worst imaginable. It would, if realised, add another zombie block of faceless dead streetscape to the core of Limerick just as Arthur’s Quay and Sarsfield Dunne’s have. Sorry, I can’t find a redeeming feature in those plans.
Nice to see them restored. It reminds me of calling the fire brigade to report that one of them had caught fire late at night about 10 years ago. From the “late 90s” photos, it looks like it must have been number 84. It was a dramatic situation; the upstairs was rented out as a flat or flats and a woman was screaming on the street that some-one called Jimmy – presumably her son or boyfriend – was still in it. As it turns out, the building was empty. The drama was heightened by the fact that it seemed there was a store of fireworks in the burning flat.
Ah Global Citizen, you’re looking at it the wrong way. It was a vital life lesson on the ephemeral nature of the successes we achieve through our powers of actualization and how our innate idealistic reaction against authoritarianism is triumphed by the the fundamental demands and appetites associated our physical manifestation.
I must admit I was somewhat in the brutalist school when it came to Lego. Form was secondary to function. Then when technics appeared that was the end of my architectural phase. I gave up building houses and other buildings and dedicated myself to mechanical projects. Before that the only way to build stuff with moving parts was with Mechano but jeezus what a frustrating experience that could be.
I’ve a vague memory of GrahamH and a lego model of the Late Late set?
