gunter
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@Smithfield Resi wrote:
I think the braziers should stay, but perhaps have high power low energy LEDs installed to make beams of light shine from them.
like this?
On the matter of The Complex;
There was a piece in one of the papers today about the Tesco store planned for ‘The Complex’, something about not having an off-licence. I couldn’t catch it all, the guy turned the page.
A couple of weeks ago, an acquaintance attended a play in The Complex, it was some harrowing family thing that went on for two and a half hours. Not the kind of thing if you’re looking for cheering up. Apparently it was very well performed and grimly realistic, but there were only six people in the audience, and two of them left at the interval.
. . . . and yes we need a market of some kind in Smithfield, urgently.
two other images of the Eden Quay corner;
from the early 1940s with a no. 3 tram in the foreground
and from the late ’60s or early 70sIn both views, the building retains its original dark painted window frames, as pointed out by Graham, and sports a scripted ‘Player’s Please’ sign at parapet level.
I know I’ll be shot for this, but I quite like well crafted signage at sky line level like this. The dodgy Jacobs Cream Cracker sign next door on the other hand had to go.
@Praxiteles wrote:
THE CULT OF THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE CULTURE OF DEATH
by Jean Clair
‘God without Beauty is more incomprehensible than Beauty without God’.
I had the feeling that the present pope’s obsession with attaching the concept of God to the concept of Beauty would open the pantry door to a lot of fruitcakes.
Maybe that article hung together better in its original language, but it’s a pretty threadbare tapestry in English.
For a start, the Goliards of the 12th and 13th centuries were prone to irreverent and bawdy behaviour, a bit like students of any generation, but there is no suggestion [on wiki anyway] that they ever produced any kind of coherent counter culture in art, so from the off, this article seems to be off-target.
What is beyond dispute is that the Catholic Church has been inextricably bound up with art for much of its existence. The two [Art and the Church] have been fellow travellers throughout the history of modern civilization, tripping through the centuries, having great adventures, achieving astonishing things.
In all that time, art might have dallied with other suitors from time to time, but art never abandoned the church, even when the church turned bad and tortured and killed through inquisition and holy war, art was always there for the church mitigating its excesses and providing a measure of redemption. But now, art has turned psycho and who’s stood at the bus stop trying to get the hell out of there? . . . the church
The wailing and the gnashing of teeth is wondrous to behold.
So forget the bad years, roll up for good art and good church – the reunion.
Tee-shirts available in a baptistry near you.
We need a former nine year old to post now;
. . . . when I were lad . . . read book in braille . . . . with left hand crippled in mine . . .
Buying this book brings back a lot of memories for me.
My copy of Dublin 1660 – 1680 is the 1969 re-print published by Allen Figgis Ltd., now held together with much cellotape, and I’m pretty certain that it was the first book that I ever bought . . . . must have been in the early to mid ‘70s.
I remember having walking around it several times in the Hodges Figgis bookshop on Stephen’s Green and giving it a good thumbing, before deciding that it would be well worth the 80p price tag the next time I came into funds.
I remember that the opportunity to get back into town and buy it came around with the next, always welcome, bunk-off-school eye appointment at the Eye and Ear. I can distinctly remember the consternation when this particular appointment turned out to be one of those rare occasions when the Eye and Ear felt the need not just to shine their little pencil light around the place, but actually load me up with freaky eye drops which made vision impossibly blurry.
I remember doing a passable impression of Mr. Magoo afterwords in trying to get across town from Hatch Street to Stephen’s Green and I remember feeling my way around the bookshop and picking out Dublin 1660 – 1860 with considerable difficulty.
I remember lying on my bed later and waiting with great impatience for the drops to wear off so I could finally start reading my new purchase and I remember hoping to Christ that I hadn’t just bought Wuthering Heights.
Rest in peace Maurice Craig and thank you for many many contented hours reading and re-reading.
Very sorry to hear of the death last week of Maurice Craig.
No words can describe the debt we owe him.
or 
We can resolve this . . .
. . . take Mr. Stroik and the gentlemen from ‘axis mundi’, give them each a nail-studded baseball bat and lock them in a room together
then to paraphrase the Abbot of Citeaux, ‘the Lord will know his own’
Praxiteles, that link is for the period 1851 to 1951, is there an online version of the Rupert Gunnis dictionary as well?
Easter Sunday in Dublin is perhaps a lot less of a religious occasion than it used to be, but there are still glimpses, like the slightly bizarre sight of a dawn procession of the cross down High Street from St. Audoen’s Church, courtesy of the Polish community, policed by a single cop on a push bike. If there had been any old-timers still living on High Street, which there aren’t, they’d probably have thought they were back in the 1950s. Although as Catholic as we were in Ireland in the past, I don’t think we ever did six in the morning.
The Lutherans on Adelaide Road have a largely German congregation and, in defiance of national stereotypes, began Easter Sunday service this year with a completely unrehearsed kinder-pageant, before getting back on message with some serious preaching.
Whether an atheist is a man who hasn’t found God yet, or a believer is a man who hasn’t found out yet, the wealth of heritage that goes with the pageantry and practice of religion is a cultural delight in itself, and without necessarily wishing to treat occasions like Easter without due reverence, or as an unofficial second Open-House-Weekend, it would be a shame to let occasions like Easter pass unobserved, in one form or another.
No offense intended obviously to people who observe Easter as a chocolate fest.
I think there are many issues with Smithfield, several of which we’ve chewed over before, but I think the core issue is that it doesn’t have a function.
Smithfield was conceived and built as a market square, if you take that function away, it’s hardly surprising that what’s left is just a vast emptyness.
Apparently Smithfield originally hosted a live cattle market on Mondays and Thursdays in addition to the horse fair which originally was held weekly on Thursday afternoons. That might be all a bit Dodge City for today, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that a market square needs a market.
I wouldn’t have a problem even with a flea market just to get things going. Half of gunter’s wardrobe was acquired in various flea markets, as well as the actual wardrobe, now that I think of it.
You know the Cathars, Catharists, Albigensians, or whatever, they had an curious take on Christianity which always struck me as a bit doom-laden for southern France. We know what happened to them, but does Praxiteles have a potted theological appraisal of their beliefs?
Wiki would disput that they were based in Albi.
I think Wellington Quay is proof that shopfront design is now a lost art.
. . . . notwithstanding the fact that the person who submitted that planning drawing appears to be twelve years old
so this time we’re just going to give ourselves full marks for paper 1 and jump straight to paper 2
. . . . . without answering any of the actual questions.O _ K a y
Everything An Taisce said is probably true, but unfortunately there always seems to be a faint – there goes the neighbourhood – tone to An Taisce pronouncements, however well intentioned, especially when they’re accompanied by clearly disdainful references to ‘lower-order shops’ and ‘cheap garish signage’ etc. etc.
The decline in the standard of streetscape presentation and the poor quality of public realm in general are huge issues for Dublin, but we also need to acknowledge that traders are actually the lifeblood of the city and ‘up-market’ will only ever be a part of the trading spectrum. I mean straight away there’s going to be a disconnect with your target market if your shop-front presentation is polite and restrained and you’re business is selling burgers and chips for 3.99 . . . . not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The manager of Supermac’s made a reasonable point about his unauthorised projecting signs: ‘. . . without these signs, which are less garish and more delicate than the flat signs, people could walk by and not even know we’re there.’
I think we need a planning policy that recognises the reality that some businesses are dependant on a high-volume, transient, market and these business are probably also dependant, to some extent, on having high-impact signage, or else they risk going bust.
As I’ve said before on this topic, I think this presents a design challenge that the design community hasn’t risen to yet.
Other businesses clearly don’t come into this category and are just taking the piss.
I’d been looking for this for a long time; the original spire design for the unfinished James’s Street church:
From a 1994 publication commemorating 150 years of the Parish of St. James.
Apparently the project was initiated in 1842 and the foundation stone was laid by Daniel O’Connell on 4 April 1844. Patrick Byrne’s original design was in the prevailing version of the ‘English Perpendicular’ style, but we can see that simplifications began to appear at upper facade level with the omission of ornamentation detail and the intended battlements, before the spire project was completely abandoned, presumably reflecting the sombre mood in famine Ireland.
@Praxiteles wrote:
A book review from the Journal of Sacred Architecture, vol 18:
The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism and Historic Preservation,by Steven W. Semes
2009 W. W. Norton & Co., 272 pages, $37.80The Ethics of Preservation
by John CluverSemes’ concluding chapter brings all of these ideas, and others, together with the goal of outlining a new conservation ethic, namely, “to retain whatever we deem valuable from the past that does not obstruct necessary change.” Alterations to our historic buildings need to find the balance between preserving their ability to convey their history and allowing them to fully participate in modern life. Recognizing their need to change in order to continue to have meaning, they should neither be preserved in amber, nor casually altered without regard for the intent behind their original design. In this way, Semes’ book takes a very moderate tone, as it does not strongly advocate for a particular style or design methodology. Instead, his emphasis is on the primacy of context in guiding additions, whether the work is in the historic center of Rome or at the modernist campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. It is the rarity of this attitude today, however, that makes this book so radical and controversial within preservation circles, and a must-read for those who care for and care about our architectural heritage.
John Cluver practices archicture and historic preservation in Philadelphia, PA as a partner in the firm Voith & Mactavish Architects LLP.
That sounds like it could be a good read.
One of the ironies in modern conservation thinking has been that it affords sacrosanct status to the layers of alterations and additions by which many historic buildings have evolved over time, while condemning the very idea of altering the same buildings now except where the alteration screams out ‘intervention’.
At the root of this piece of flawed thinking at the core of current architectural conservation scripture is the same compelling but daft concept that drove the Modern Movement, that is that from now on there is a fundamental difference between the past and the present, when in reality, we all know that, by tomorrow, the present will simply be just more of the past.
