gunter
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@notjim wrote:
I have to say I will be sorry to see the Dublin Bus building go: don’t get me wrong, I can see that it must go in the context of a redevelopment of this area and I am not arguing with that, but I will be sad, it is the sort of logical building I have always had a fondness for, respecting building line and grain while being unashamedly contemporary to its own period and willing to sacrifice meretricious beauty for a modest charm on the edge of ugliness.
It would be regrettable to lose the Dublin Bus building and the Garda station pair, but it would be unforgiveble to lose the last original house on the street, no. 42, especially since it somehow survived 1916, 1922 and the 70s, if that is what they’re proposing.
Maybe I was just expecting worse, or I’ve gotten used to seeing ridiculously out of scale mega-schemes like the early Digital Hub proposals and Ballsbridge etc., but this seems almost modest to me. It too early to jump to conclusions, but I think there could be some merit in this scheme yet.
The renders hint at sheltering canopies rather than enclosed ‘malls’, that’s a step in the right direction. There’s talk of three new squares, linked by two new streets! That the kind of thing that a lot of people have criticised them for not doing. What I can see of the architecture, looks like they’ve attempted to address the grain issue, unlike the repetitive ‘Markets’ scheme.
If you’re going to do some radical urban surgery here, which IMO, Upper O’Connell Street could use, moving a set piece facade, like the Carlton, could be justified in ‘exceptional’ circumstances and provided that it’s not all framed out in glass and treated like a stage set.
I don’t understand the motivation behind the ski slope. There doesn’t seem to be all that much actual floor area under it, for it to be worth annoying everybody like this, but maybe we’re not seeing the bigger picture.
The way I understood it, this scheme is the product of DCC’s cpo on the site, I didn’t think the original owners, who had land banked the site for years and run the buildings down, are still involved.
Evil Kinevil would have loved this!
If you took off at 120km/h up this, where would you land? I’m guessing SuperValu on Aston Quay! I suppose time will tell.
I’d like to see the other side of the ski slope, it looks, from the render, to be slick glazing, when you might have expected something a bit more rugged in the circumstances (a nice bit of old fashioned ‘Brutalism’ would do me).
Apart from the glass framing around the Carlton, this doesn’t look too bad! I presume there’s loads of horrific bits they’re not showing us.
@TLM wrote:
The original design was meant to echo the Burren landscape and I think if it had been built as drawn in the original design (as posted by JoePublic) it would have looked interesting. Unfortunately looks pretty pathetic from the photos above though..
TLM:
‘meant to echo the Burren landscape’? I’m not having that!
The last time I was in the Burren, the words ‘chequerboard block’ never came into my head. The echos of the Burren that come immediatly to mind are ‘wild’, ‘rugged’, undulating’, ‘layered’, this building is a ‘block’. They couldn’t have made it anymore block like if they had built it out of Lego.
I do recall clearly the ‘hewn out of a single something’ comment, which I filed away in the back of the head with a post-it note (can’t wait to see this) on it, but I don’t recall any ‘echos of the Burren’ comment. Surely that would be an abuse of language!
Joe Public’s pic.On the issue of the top storey: I don’t think we need worry too much, there’s no way they’re not going to come along now and clamp on some ‘three dimensional’ version of the facing panels here, you know, to retain the integrity.
@d_d_dallas wrote:
That Manuel Aires Mateus hotel when first proposed was always described in terms of it being “geological” as if hewn from a massive piece of rock – the renders suggest as much. So when I saw it flying up and saw the white panels I assumed it was some Kingspan isulation panels or something similar.
Imagine my surprise last week when I saw the finished product was just that! The whole “hewn from rock” design looks ridiculous when the foyer now looks like a smooth plastic cave. Hewn from formica!
That’s the point exactly, although, I don’t know if I’d even go as far as saying that it has slipped since the original renders. I think it’s probably being slipping since it was first sketched on the back of an envelope. These are the kind of ideas that hit you like a lightning bolt, usually at 3 in the morning and often with drink taken, but you try and translate them into an actual building, especially that most commercial and superficial of building types, the designer hotel, it just can’t be done. In fairness to them, it’s almost surprising that they even did this well.
I’m not sure that 1m deep window reveals would have saved this building, or that the concept has been dragged down, because the facade looks veneer_eal. I’m inclined to think that the concept was daft in the first place, and should never have gotten beyond napkin sketch.
From what I saw of the construction, there was a mess of steel frames internally presumably corresponding to the room modules. Hotel room specifications change every twenty years or so, and this one doesn’t look like it has a shread of flexibility in it to accommodate a re-fit, if and when a re-fit is called for.
If this building gets hailed as a triumph, the last word in hotel design, we may have to do a serious bit of back-pedaling, or a quick name change.
Who did that sloping green hotel shocker in Glasgow a few years ago? johnglas. Has that bedded in now, or does it still stick out like a sore thumb?
A lot of architects seem to go out of their way to make simple concepts obscure, to mystify instead of de-mystify at every opportunity, and I would be inclined to put the current occupant of the Presidency of the RIAI in that category. I don’t think he does it deliberately, he just exuberates (probably not a verb) about architecture and the more he exuberates, the more obscure becomes the point he has set out to make.
Knowing this and fearing the worst, I scanned his column in the current issue of the RIAI Journal only to find a couple of daring proclamations, pretty boldly stated, admittedly interspersed with sentences of pure impenetrability.
His second paragraph stood out:
‘I first visited Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish museum in Berlin in 2002 and I still recall being moved at it’s powerful and eloquent silence’. That’s ok, anyone with Leaving Cert English is going to follow that, but then:
‘The Talmundic rhythms of his narrative articulating the relationships of it’s striated fissured skin to the pre-holocaust habitats of Berlin’s Jewish Community seemed appropriately profound.’ See what I mean. He’s talking about the slit windows and how Libeskind sold us the idea that these virtual knife wounds across the zink skin of the building were ‘vectors’ joining points in the geography of Berlin with individual Jewish connections, or something very like that. Then some clarity rerturns:
‘I also naively believed that the building’s theme and intent warrented that it’s expression and language be reserved for this shrine alone. Am I alone in being surprised and not a little shocked and puzzled to see the same fractured language appear in commercial, entertainment and arts buildings throughout the world by its progenitor and pale imitators?’Actually, no, you’re not alone! Here’s what a poster to this thread said on the same subject in 2004:
@MG wrote:
This Libeskind style is starting to look tired and empty of any meaning.
In Berlin’s Jewish Museum, I could see the violence of the building as a reflection of the violence inflincted by the Nazi regime on the Jewish people.
Danny boy, you have completely debased the Berlin Jewish Museum for me. The exterior of the Dublin concert hall looks like one of the corners of the Berlin Jewish Museum turned 90 degrees.
Like many architects, I was stunned by Liebeskind’s Berlin Museum. It was classic competition winning stuff, different, graphic, shiny, it must have stood out a mile from everything else submitted.
For the record, both as a concept and as a building, I think Libeskind’s Berlin Museum it is a masterpiece. Like most masterpieces, I think it is also slightly flawed. I used to think the flaw was the window gashes, but I’ve changed my mind about that. The way I see it now, the startling windows are crucial to the impact of the design and they work on any number of levels, as violent cuts (as identified by MG), as a disorienting device, both internally and externally, as a statement that this building is not an ordinary building and that what it contains/commerates is nothing short of shocking and extraordinary, there must be a dozen reasons why the window gashes are justified and appropriate, without creating a new justification based on ‘vectors’ between contrived locations, to me that is the flaw.
The problem is that when you’ve created one masterpiece, people want you to go on doing it on every project. It must be expected, even demanded. I don’t know to what extent Daniel Libeskind designed the Grand Canal Theatre, I imagine he passed it to a design team who understood that their role was to deliver a ‘Libeskind’.
For what it’s worth, I think the present manifestation of the scheme, as illustrated in the published renders, is a giftless shambles, with bits of ‘Libeskind’ mixed in with bits of the Bejing bird cage. My guess is that, when it’s finished and it joins the chequer board hotel (which, in no way, looks like it was ‘carved out of a single block’ of anything, except maybe a crate of mono-tone Battenburg cake) and the slanty red poles on the slanty red carpet, it will be an eloquent statement of exactly how directionless civic architecture has become in the first decade of the 21st century, but I could be completely wrong.
@Paul Clerkin wrote:
I don’t but I don’t seem to recall the shopfront as having much architectural merit – but then I’m old and my memory is foggy now – and at the time I worked in the area, I was living in kennedy’s
You’re probably right about this, the shopfront probably didn’t have a whole lot of architectural merit. It’s not a good sign that none of us can remember the thing very clearly.
I know it’s a bit pedantic to go on about the decision to retain the victorian fenestration and the plaster quoin details, but we get to see so few brave attempts to actually ‘restore’ buildings instead of just ‘conserve’ them that it just seems a pity to me that they couldn’d bring themselve to go that last ten yards.
As an aside, while fruitlessly searching for a photograph of no. 5 South Leinster Street (the house in question), I came across these pictures (in Pearson) of it’s original neighbour, no. 29 Clare Street, which was demolished for the Nation Gallery extension in 1989. Does anyone know what happened to the excellent cut-stone door case and the great sweeping steps? Did stuff like this go to land fill, or does it now adorn a gazebo in some gallery director’s garden?
Just in case there’s any missunderstanding about this, I love the National Gallery extension (with a few small reservations), and huge credit is due to Benson & Forsyth for the way that they adapted their plans to address the ABP decision in 1998 that required the retention of 5 Clare Street, and to the late lamented Uinseann MacEoin for taking the appeal that forced that decision.
@ctesiphon wrote:
Looking forward to your input there, gunter.
Sorry ctesiphon, that was a pretty scary thread you had going there. I think I may have got hold of a couple of points though, as the rest sailed clean over my head.
1.
All buildings require maintenance and renewal, as time goes by, and frequently this involved replacing actual fabric. To me, and apparently now the Japanese, this is fine.2.
The disgraceful state of much of our urban environment for much of the 20th century, was in part, deemed acceptible to a large section of irish society by virtue of it’s status as a legacy of the Brits.3.
It’s very difficult to communicate ideas of architectural value and the differing concepts of authenticity that apply to the design of a building and to the fabric of a building, without slipping into incomprehensible sentences, like this one.Coming back to the issue of the National Gallery. Has anyone got a photograph of the wretched house?
@GrahamH wrote:
I believe the correct route was taken regarding the National Gallery House. Just because the shopfront was lost/had to be replaced did not mean the entire house had to be altered accordingly. That would be extreme, unnecessary, and wasteful of both money and extensive historic fabric. If the Victorian alterations had been less all-pervading, a better case could be made.
Graham: I would have knocked off that Victorian icing sugar fringe myself with a lump hammer, if cost was the issue.
It may be just a personal thing, but these Georgian houses, including your example from Dundalk, depend so heavily on the proportions of their window fenestration for their aesthetic appeal, that not to reinstate their glazing bars just seem like a slap in the face to the original designer, IMO.
I don’t think that we need to grant equal respect to everyone who’s had a go at any given building over a couple of centuries. In my opinion, the first intention, the original design, should have an assumption of primacy in any hierarchical evaluation of the conservation priorities. No. 10 Mill St. (as we’ve discussed before), a definite case in point.
I believe that the opposite position (which seems, to me, to be the current dominant position), where the various accretions demand as much respect as the original design, is just plain wrong.
There are obvious exceptions like the Rubricks block in Trinity, where the Victorian additions added a whole level of interest and scale that wasn’t really there before, but usually alterations (often by the Victorians) were pretty shallow and usually took away more than they added to the character of the building they altered.
There’s probably an Archiseek thread on conservation that it might be better to continue this discussion on.
On the National Gallery house. I’m going to wait until I find a pre-renovation photograph before I shoot my mouth off any more about this. My gut feeling is, that the Victorian shopfront, the window replacement and the frilly trim, were (or appeared to be) a package deal, and it might have been better to retain this version of the house, or put the clock back to the Georgian original, in full, rather than do a bit of both.
We’ll dig out a photograph and take it from there.
Graham:
I’m 95% certain that the shopfront, as shown in Shaw’s, was replaced by a simple all glass affair with a narrow glass door in the centre, but I could be thinking of somewhere else.
If this was the front I’m thinking of, it could have made a great gallery book shop, but, I suppose they didn’t want to diminish the impact of the actual gallery entrance by having a, more visually open, side way in.
Your photographs show that they’ve done a thorough job on the house, my main issue with it is with the selective retention of bits of Victoriana, when the thrust of the effort seems to have been towards the restoration of the house in it’s original Georgian form. I was pretty much of the view that the strapwork details and the big Victorian shopfront (if it was there) all went together, so if You were getting rid of one, why would you not get rid of the other. The same applies to the glazing bars, are we doing Georgian?, or are we doing Victorian?
I don’t know anyone else who shares this view, but I have this real nagging feeling that this generation has lost it’s way on conservation. We seem terrified of being accused of Disneyfication more than anything else. Every conservation project seems to need to scream out ‘Look I’m not pretending to be original’ when we should all just relax a bit and have a bit of confidence in our ability to restore something that’s obviously valuable, when restoration is the logical option.
There’s nothing to stop an architect from putting a small plaque on the front of a restored building, explaining exactly what bits he’s restored, if he thinks there’s any chance someone in the future will be deceived and offended by the high quality of the work.
It seems clear to me that, in contrast to every other branch of contemporary architectural practice, conservation has become dominated by the international charter codes of conduct, and that these sets of predetermined prescriptions have replaced common sense and informed judgement as the tools of the practice.
I could be wrong, but I think this National Gallery House is another example of conservation idealogy getting in the way of conservation common sense. There are bits here to please everyone, as I think you suggested yourself, but, to me, the stand out feature is the compromise. It suited the client’s requirements to close up the ground floor, so the’ve gone down the restoration road, but then, to keep on-side of the Burra Charter, they’ve stop short of removing a few trinkets of the 19th century revamp.
It is a decent job, the property is renovated and finally back in use, but I don’t see a fine Georgian house restored, I don’t see a Victorian make-over reinvigorated, and I don’t see a contemporary statement made. Any one of the above would have done me.
My memory is that it was a full, wall to wall, glass shop front, with rounded granite steps up to a central door. I think it looked like it was designed to be one big shop, but it had been crudely divided into two shops, one of them an iron mongers called Davis something.
I can’t locate any photographs just now.
@GrahamH wrote:
12/4/2008
Well this is just a note to say ‘the National Gallery House’ as it’s generally become known has finally been unwrapped after years of apparent scrabbling for funds and various delays. Arthur Gibney & Partners, who were appointed as architects to the project years ago now, have pulled off the conservation job with trademark panache.
The building is to serve as the new administrative HQ of the National Gallery of Ireland.
Thankfully Gibneys know better than to get sucked into this current trend for returning Victorian sheet sashes to original Georgian specification (though of course merited in the right circumstances). In this case all Victorian additions, as cumbersome as some may be, have been respectfully preserved. Indeed it’s so much more interesting to observe the panels on the internal shutters revealing all in conforming to the original Georgian glazing pattern, than a batch of repro windows pretending to be something they’re not. Thus the fabric has been retained, and the pernickity conservationist/scholar can rest assured on provenance, basking in the warm glow of smug self-assuredness 😉
You can’t nail your colours to the mast like that and not expect people to take pot shots.
I grant you that the Victorians did some great buildings (although not too many in this country), but why did they have to go round tarting up other peoples buildings?
The whole design philosophy behind these Georgian houses was their strict severity, enlivened only by finely detailed doorcases and the elegant proportions of their windows, further articulated by their obsessive refinement of their glazing bars.
For the National Gallery to ‘conserve’ a Victorian tart up version of the upper facade of this house, complete with plate glass windows and frilly strapwork quoine icing detail, and then install a dubious ‘Georgian’ rusticated render ground floor treatment in place of the Victoria’, fully glazed, shop front and generous granite step at street level, is a gutless fudge IMO.
If you’re going to restore the Georgian facade, restore the Georgian facade, don’t nearly restore it and leave it half restored and half disfigured by retaining half the Victorian alterations!
I don’t know where they got those railings, they look like something Trinity had left over from knocking down something on Westland Row.
@notjim wrote:
Neds is going? How will people drink in the early morning?
Just a quick update on ‘Neds’ for anyone who gets a bit gittery around 7 in the morning.
The Planning application was withdrawn, apparantly four weeks ago, before we even noticed it was in! I only came across it because nobody had bothered to retrieve the scale model from the lobby of the planning office.
For the record, the full horrow of this abandoned development is still available to view at the planning counter. I recomment a viewing of the submitted photo-montage of the proposed development from the opposite corner of Townsend Street, in full colour, for anyone with a passing interest in the growing trend for ‘Iconic’ or ‘landmark’ blocks on random corner sites across the city. In view of the fact that the application was withdrawn, it probably wouldn’t be fair to post it up here.
Again, for the record, there was only one objection to this development, submitted by a local resident, and it was a model of controlled fury.
Merritt Bucholz gave a pretty spirited defense of the Elm Park scheme at the ‘Only way is Up’ discussion in Bolton St. this evening! From the slides, it’s pretty clear that they created enough stick models of this thing, during the design process, to make a village in Bangladesh.
I hate having to back pedal, but there’s no question that they put an enormous amount of work into this scheme and you do have to respect that. I had it in my head that this was a big superficial gimmicky con job based on an failed, modern movement, planning model. Personally, I was put off by the seemingly extravagant claims and the implication (possibly not actually stated) that this was all new, you’ve not seen this before!
It would have been easier to understand this scheme if they had just come out and said that they were going to take Corb, re-work him with some green principles, and give him another go. If you look at it that way, they haven’t done a bad job.
For people like me, who love Corb and hated the fact that his urban legacy seemed to be such a complete failure, the Elm Park scheme is going to be an interesting experiment to observe over the next few years. Will the landscape flourish? will the pedestrian zones be people friendly? Will the trailing vines stop the wind from whistling through the pilotis?
It has everything going for it. It’s in a posh neighbourhood, it’s sandwiched between a golf course and the sea, I don’t imagine there’s going to be too many broken lifts. As with Corb himself, the biggest danger, in going down this road again, lies with all the badly thought out, cheap, imitations that this scheme is liable to spawn.
Just for the record, Bucholz never mentioned the phrase ‘winter garden’ once.
It’s a real shame that they couldn’t have built this on the next site over, and we could have had two decent buildings side by side (a great concert hall and a great exhibition hall) instead of one schizophrenic one.
Dublin City Council don’t have a comprehensive vision for this city, or if they do, they’re not communicating it properly.
Bord Pleanala don’t know what the vision is, or they don’t share it.
Developers are trying to fill in the blanks themselves.
If this was another profession and the patients were dying like this, someone would have their licence to practice revoked.
Nobody’s going to want to go back over the tortuous gestation of this South King Street scheme, it’s a done deal and it’s probably best left alone.
A lot of people seem to be genuinely excited by it, and that fine, but it might still be worth making a couple of observations.
Designing a fully glazed facade to a multi-storey retail centre is a major gamble.
Upper floor glazing to retail space (which is actually quite rare) is invariably abused, sooner or later, for all kinds of reasons.
South facing glazing, as in this case, can be blindingly bright/hot internally, leading to unintended and possibly uncontrolled screening installations.
Retail managers often try to blank areas of glazing to better use the floor space.
Internal, billboard scale, advertising is often applied to make use of the eye-catching window space and/or shield the internal space.
The view out from the, floor to ceiling, glazing on the upper floors of this development, is going to be of the side elevation and roofscape of the Stephen’s Green Centre!
I’m just a little sceptical that all will be as imagined in the prmotional renders, in a couple of years time.
Remember when ‘schuh’ on O’Connell Street was the great white hope for contemporary in-fill, this is schuh last week!
Most of the observation in the back pages of this thread dealt with this issue of the scale of the development (first and second schemes, objections to etc.) and it’s relationship with the Gaiety, (apart obviously from the numerous comments that jumped across the street to take a swipe at the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, GrahamH excepted) but the quality and appropriateness of the design seemed to pass without question.
Perhaps in the intervening years and with big retail developments, like the make-over of Roches Stores on Henry Street, showing that contemporary architecture and retail streetscapes are not mutual exclusion zones, some re-appraisal of this scheme might have been attempted.
Here’s another example of contemporary in-fill on a retail street, this time from Edinburgh. Prince’s Street wouldn’t be known for it’s architectural integrity, or any other kind of integrity, but I think this is a decent scheme, even if it’s showing the early signs of mezzanine level window postering.
@Zap wrote:
I guess there is no central plan for this street – though the Liberties area here is undergoing a lot of change with the site on other side of the national school on the corner of the Coombe and Cork St. Relief Road recently cleared (I refuse to name this street by its official St Lukes Avenue until such a time that this is actually an avenue – living in Madrid, there are not too many avenues fronted by burnt out churches, derelict sites, blank walls dividing the street off from other local housing streets etc.).
So, is there a plan? I guess not. There should be! Its with great disappointment that I see one storey structures going up at the Coombe end of this street – I guess an extension for the school. Craziness! Also, this new developed excludes the very lower corner of the relief road – where there remains just the corner wall (with fine corner stones) of the previous building with fireplace still intact. What is happening here?
I don’t understand what they were at with that school, it can’t be what they had in mind.
As an ‘Avenue’, or even as a street, it has a long way to go.O’D+T are doing a housing scheme near the Ardee Street end of the street that joins up with the yellow brick / green copper curved range completed a couple of years ago.
Further west on widened Cork Street itself towards the Dolphin’s barn end, the Reubens Street scheme, refered to earlier, comes into view.
I think it would be fair to say that the Reuben Street scheme has it’s good angles and it’s not so good angles. That’s a particular characteristic of the slab block high rise, but It certainly raises the bar, and it’s infinitely better than the shapeless mess on the opposite corner. It was also particularly brave of them not to resort to ‘Dolphin’s Barn’ brick.Superior to Cino Zucchi! that might be going a bit far.
