Big Read: Tall storeys – should we be aiming higher with our buildings?

“It was one of the first buildings in the city to symbolise 20th century Ireland after Busáras was completed in 1953 and it truly deserves to be referred to as an icon of Dublin city centre,” says architectural historian Emma Gilleece. “With its original windows, it was a beautifully transparent building before the glazing was replaced in the early 70s. It remains one of the most recognisable, yet underrated buildings in Ireland.”

In the brave new world of 1960s Ireland, building up was the way to go. “It seemed to be the klaxon for buildings reaching towards the sky which were not as elegant as Liberty Hall,” Gilleece says. “Hawkins House began its construction the same year as Liberty Hall, O’Connell Bridge House was also completed in 1965, and Apollo House in 1969.” (The wrecking ball came for Hawkins House last week — it was long cited as Dublin’s ugliest building.)

Three years after Liberty Hall opened, Cork County Hall, at 67m, became the country’s tallest storied building, and by the end of the decade, seven 15-storey tower blocks in Ballymun welcomed those fleeing the slums of Dublin city centre.

It seemed as though the skylines of Ireland’s cities would change forever, but more than 50 years later, our urban environment remains remarkably low-rise and proposals to build high provoke passionate arguments.

This week, planning permission for a 12-storey apartment block in the Dublin suburb of Phibsborough was both welcomed and condemned, with many of those in the latter camp arguing that it would be out of kilter with the houses around it.

Last week An Bord Pleanála refused planning permission for Johnny Ronan’s Waterfront South Central scheme in Dublin’s docklands. Contrary to its name, it was set to be built on the north docks, close to the 3Arena. The project included 1,005 apartments, some of which would be housed in two towers, one of 44 storeys, the other of 45. The tallest, at 167m, would be more than double the height of the city’s tallest building, Capital Dock, which is nearby on the other side of the Liffey.

The appeals board said that it did not have jurisdiction to overrule a High Court finding that the development would contravene height restrictions in the North Lotts and Grand Canal Dock Planning Scheme under Strategic Housing Development provisions. Ronan’s plans were far in excess of the heights permitted in the area.

Ronan Group Real Estate (RGRE) said it welcomed An Bord Pleanála’s recognition that its apartment scheme “is the correct one for the site and would support Government policy on housing and development”.

It added, however: “We are therefore deeply disappointed that it felt legally obliged to refuse planning permission due to Dublin City Council’s legal action seeking to uphold the Strategic Development Zone at the expense of the Government’s Strategic Housing Development policy… Unfortunately, Dublin City Council’s continued efforts to frustrate Government policy are impeding much-needed development in this area of Dublin.”

For Richard Coleman, architectural principal of the London-based Citydesigner, one of the key architects behind the Waterfront scheme, An Bord Pleanála’s decision was hugely frustrating.

“It is normal for the regeneration of the dock areas of European cities to build high,” he says. “This scheme is outside the sensitive historical centre and before the 2008 recession there were a number of high-rise projects that were planned for the docklands of Dublin. And they were of the sort of height that we are proposing.” He mentions schemes by the ‘starchitects’ Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid that were mooted before the financial crash.

Coleman’s career is steeped in tall buildings. He worked on one of London’s first skyscrapers at Canary Wharf, and was involved in the design of the city’s Swiss Re building, commonly known as the Gherkin.

He believes Dublin should follow the lead of both Canary Wharf and La Défense, Paris, and plan for tall buildings away from the city heart. “Substantial buildings away from the city, by their very symbolic nature, give rise to an interest in that part of the city which currently is not drawing people’s attention. Buildings like the Waterfront become a marker,” he says.

“Because it does just pop up in one or two sensitive places in the Dublin Georgian skyline, we decided to make a public space at the top. So, while you might see it, you know it belongs to you. You can go up and be part of it. It’s not just for rich people.”

‘Developer-led vanity projects’

Despite the planned public access to the towers, one of the criticisms levelled at it by commentators such as Sinn Féin’s housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin was the proposed cost of the apartments, which would have put them out of the reach of all but the very highest paid.

“This is great news for our city,” Ó Broin tweeted after the An Bord Pleanála ruling. “Planning policy must deliver sustainable and affordable urban development, not developer-led vanity projects.”

Ronan had wanted to sell 101 apartments in the Waterfront scheme to the city council for social housing for a total of €70m. The most expensive was a two-bedroom apartment with an indicative cost of €964,030.

The developer, who was nicknamed The Buccaneer in the Celtic Tiger years, told the Sunday Independent in March that his high-rise apartments were aimed at highly paid tech workers in the Silicon Docks. He said extra supply would free up existing properties and help to stem the housing crisis.

“You have to increase supply — it’s that simple,” he said. “How do you stop a fire? You throw water on it. Even during the Economic War, the 30s, 40s, 50s, the government and the local authorities built houses. A house is a house. Even when we had f***-all, at least they were building houses.”

Dublin is not the only place where tall buildings are sharply dividing opinion. In Limerick, a 14-storey building, the Opera Site, has received planning permission, much to the chagrin of An Taisce and the Irish Georgian Society.

“It is completely out of keeping of its setting on Bank Place across the river from the landmarks such as Hunt Museum and St Mary’s Cathedral,” says Gilleece, a Limerick native. “It was disappointing that the Hunt Museum endorsed such an insensitive insertion. The tower will disrupt the historic vista looking from Clancy’s Strand across Curragower Falls on the Shannon.”

For architect Emmett Scanlon, the director of the master of architecture programme at the UCD, decisions to allow tall buildings cannot be taken lightly.

“[Dublin] had constructed, at length, a plan about how it would develop and this [Ronan’s] development was not working with the plan,” he says. “And if one puts faith in how the city makes decisions and carries out analysis and research as well as public consultation, and then decides that certain schemes don’t fit in with that, then I guess it’s the right decision [to reject tall buildings].

“Buildings are a product of the culture of what’s appropriate and in contemporary Dublin and many contemporary cities, it’s become quite evident that buildings beyond 10 or 11 stories are quite problematic from a point of view of climate [the environmental impact caused by their construction].”

Scanlon believes “there is a future in a city that becomes somewhat taller and denser” but planners have to be mindful of the urban landscape that has long existed here.

“We have to remember that, in general, the Irish city is constructed of streets and parks and squares. We have a traditional urban morphology of cities, like Copenhagen or Paris, and tall buildings like Capital Dock seek to be autonomous; they seek to disrupt that for whatever reason. They don’t necessarily seek to respect the street pattern; they seek to stand against it.

“I think in terms of Dublin, we’ve placed the tall building in one category and the city in the other and I think there’s a middle ground where Dublin could get taller but still respect its morphology. One of my concerns for the docklands is that tall buildings, in the way they are designed and consciously conceived, don’t necessarily deal well with the street or the ground. Look at the amount of work going on in the UK right now in terms of rehabilitating 1960s and 1970s towers, which suffered from that problem.”

Low-rise character

Another Dublin-based architect, Peter Tansey, argues that tall buildings typically represent the vanity of the developer, although he accepts that these figures have helped shape the urban landscape of Ireland for centuries.

“What does a tall building mean for the identity of the city? Look at cities like Berlin or Paris and it’s very controlled in terms of how the landscape of the city is managed and how developers or corporate identities’ interests are played out within that,” he says.

“If you have a 40-storey tower, twice the height of anything else above you, it not only has a clearly symbolic context, but it has a very real presence within the city’s life.”

Tansey says two of Dublin’s tallest buildings, the residential Capital Dock, and the office block the Exo, which is set for completion this year, “are tall and significant but they are not present in my experience of the city… I live in the centre. But if you get a building that’s twice the height, then they absolutely become present. There’s a critical height that does that wherever you are, whether it’s Chapelizod or Blackrock.”

He believes a building that is part of the skyline to such a degree is not acceptable in a city of Dublin’s low-rise character. “It’s not Dubai,” he says. “This would be a kind of corporate hijacking of the city. We have a cultural history here. The Collison brothers [the billionaire Irish founders of Stripe] are not going to locate their business here because there are a couple of towers. They know what Dublin is.

“We don’t have to invent something for transient capital. The buildings that are there at the moment — the 22-storey towers — there could be dozens of those and it wouldn’t matter to the identity of the city, but when you start putting these super-high ones in, that changes everything.”

Alan Robinson does not agree. The chief executive of the Docklands Business Forum believes Ireland’s capital needs to grow up — literally. “We have a chronic housing problem and schemes like Johnny Ronan’s greatly help to alleviate that,” he says. “Instead, we’re asking people to make long commutes on a creaking transport system.”

He believes the docklands is the perfect part of the city in which to build up. “There are a huge number of people who would live here if they could but there simply aren’t enough homes to cater for that demand,” he says.

Robinson looks with envy at Cork. Its city council has given planning permission to a 140m, 34-storey tower in the city’s docks. It will, by a distance, be the tallest building on the island. “That’s the kind of vision we need in Dublin,” he says, “but we’re frustrated at every turn.”

Coleman, meanwhile, believes a time will come in the near future where Dublin catches up with other cities when it comes to building upwards. “High-quality tall buildings,” he says, “can be fundamental to how cities regenerate and become vibrant and vivid symbols of change too.”