DDDA Is A Farce linked to Anglo-Irish. Enough Damage. Shut DDDA Now.
LarEnough Damage.
DDDA Is A Farce linked to Anglo-Irish.
Shut The DDDA Autocracy Down Now.
The Developer’s Autocracy (DDDA) should be shut down immediately.
The Autocracy is cross-contaminated by Anglo-Irish Bank and is even using curious materials from the promoters of the Poolbeg Incinerator – where politically-challenged and politically appointed officials in Bord Pleanala and EPA-Ireland apparently over-rode the professionals, apparently.
Do your own research to form your own opinion.
__________________
See article posted as comment number 1
See Feb/March edition of Village Magazine.
See Shane Ross, Senator, Irish Republic.
Lifting a lid on Anglo’s links to the docklands
Anglo Irish Bank helped finance the property explosion in the docklands, but was it too close for comfort to the docks development agency, wonder Nick Webb and Louise McBride
SeaniePoolbeg Incinerator, Dublin Docklands Authority, Dublin Developers Autocracy, Waste-To-Toxins, Anglo Irish Bank,
http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/lifting-a-lid-on-anglorsquos-links-to-the-docklands-1640827.html?service=Print
February 19, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Who’s responsible for all the concrete carbuncles?
Part of Unite d’Habitation at Marseille and Park Hill estate in Sheffield
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7899157.stm
Le Corbusier’s Unite D’Habitation (left) has spawned thousands of imitators
BUILDING SITE
Architecture re-appraised by the Magazine
Many would have only the vaguest idea of who he was. He designed no buildings in Britain. But as a new exhibition celebrates the work of Le Corbusier, architect and writer Guy Booth argues that his legacy was monstrous.
I only have to hear a fellow architect say “Corb” and I curl.
Chandigarh’s assembly building is one of Le Corbusier’s most famous
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Le Corbusier will do for me. This vain, mercurial megalith of Modernism wouldn’t have given the average architect a glance.
Only a fool would attempt to emulate his work. Thousands have – the public calls it “Modern Architecture”, a concrete desert where simple souls bend to an architect’s arrogant will.
Le Corbusier’s pincer-like powers lock us into the “modular” grids he so successfully imposed on our lives. Frigid, perfect, masterful – his works glimmer with the fatal splendour of a sunlit iceberg.
He died five years before I became a student at the Liverpool School of Architecture. The air was thick with his influence. In 1970 architecture and town planning still enjoyed the flux of post-war socio-economic theory.
Cumbernauld town centre is hated but its whole concept was controversial
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Le Corbusier had attained the status of a god – his work was not questioned, as the work of famous architects is not questioned today. I avoided his revolutionary manifesto of 1923, Towards a New Architecture. I skipped The Modular of 1948, and Modular II – all sacred architectural creeds. Now I know about Corbusier but approach with caution.
Three examples explain him in the context of how we experience our dwellings, towns and cities today. Each example – like a Hollywood movie star – is scintillatingly photogenic.
The Villa Savoye, built in 1930, is a fatally stupendous design, the second home near Paris of the wealthy Savoye family. Limousines linked the Paris house to the villa – the motor car generated the plan.
The elegant columns, piloti, that raise the principal “deck” of the residence above an immaculate, cemetery-like oblong of lawn (over which the villa “flies” like a plane) inspired thousands of horrible post-war shopping centres, dead average downtown office blocks, and lurid multi-storey car parks. Think lacklustre concrete slimed with pigeon muck. London’s Centre Point is a notable example.
Guy Booth
Our climate cannot be blamed entirely, or the fact that the English are not good at large scale planning and hate piazzas
Le Corbusier’s legacy
Functionalism demanded that these millionaires and their guests walked on floors surfaced with black quarry tiles (as for commercial kitchens) and linoleum. The villa is of reinforced concrete, finished in ever-to-be-repainted white.
Inside, you stand beautifully dressed round the walls, upstaged by your own living room where perfectly arranged furniture begs not to be used.
In Marseille, Unite d’Habitation was an experiment in communism. Opened in 1952, the leviathan block embodies in concrete the ideals of socialist family life – everything but the freedom to do as you want.
le Corbusier
Le Corbusier is thought of by many in the world of architecture as the leading mind of the 20th Century
With its shops (half way up), its children’s garden on the roof, its modular facades gaily painted in Cubist colours, and location in a park, Unite was the “last word”. People hated it.
Modular planning – a grid controls everything – made the flats like railway compartments. The idea of a two-level duplex failed because the bedrooms were set on open balconies overlooking living areas.
Le Corbusier hoped that Unite would promote his 1920 vision of A City of Towers: identical, 60-storey apartment blocks set in a rigid grid within urban parkland.
Unite spawned plans for every awful working-class housing estate in Europe – the most notorious at Park Hill in Sheffield. The Barbican is a splendid attempt but still grim.
Plymouth Civic Centre
Plymouth Civic Centre is not beloved of all in the Devon city
The Legislative Assembly Building in Chandigarh in India was completed in 1964. It is an overpowering architectural juggernaut created in sculptural reinforced concrete for a brand new Indian regional capital. Nehru invited Le Corbusier to create the Chandigarh Master Plan and design its civic complex.
The architect relished the megalomaniacal freedom of concept. The Assembly Building is a breathtaking cooling tower projecting from a square “cage” studded with a variety of “Architectonic functional nodes” . Yes, architectural jargon begins with Le Corbusier.
His post-war influence exerted a fatal fascination over a young generation of British architects. They relished a period of urban renewal gilded with socialist optimism. Architecture and town planning were to create the ideal society. London’s Royal Festival Hall and Plymouth city centre represent a keynote.
Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp
Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp sticks in the mind
But what of London’s National Westminster Tower, the Institute of Education, the Millbank Tower, the Churchill Gardens Estate, the Economist Building, St Thomas’s Hospital, Hemel Hempstead New Town, Harlow New Town, Cumbernauld, and even the BBC’s Television Centre? Despite the distinguished names involved, all miss the mark.
Why? Why was it all so disappointing? Why should Le Corbusier’s amazing concept of a reinforced concrete, minimal component structural building frame be so difficult to translate? Why should his modular design rationale have stultified thousands of projects?
Harlow new town
Harlow New Town rather less so
Our climate cannot be blamed entirely, or the fact that the British are not good at large scale planning and hate piazzas.
We must bring to earth a vision of one who saw architecture as cosmic, who made the impossible look easy. Students cannot resist Le Corbusier but his ideals are way too rich for them. He did not conceive form in solid terms – he manipulated an abstract concept of an ideal condition of living. Frigidity is essential to his genius.
Take two examples of Le Corbusier’s creed:
• “Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on towards its destined end, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this new epoch, animated by the new spirit.” (Towards a New Architecture, introduction to the section, Mass-Production Houses – 1923)
• “All this work on proportioning and measures is the outcome of a passion, disinterested and detached, an exercise, a game… a duty to be straight and loyal, dealing in honest-to-goodness merchandise.” (The Modular, Chapter 3, Mathematics – 1948)
For Le Corbusier humanity was the merchandise, piled in pallets in a standardised industrial environment – clean, impersonal, good. But people are warm, loving, dilatory and bad.
Le Corbusier’s creed of scrupulous Modernism was doomed to anti-climax – we cannot live up to it. Grasp this fact and we may forgive the brave attempts to emulate Le Corbusier during the three decades from 1950. Two centuries ahead of his time, Corbusier’s ideals, years after his death, remain sizzlingly innovatory.
February 19, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Sunday, 15 February 2009
Docklands authority in the dock over property
As property values plummet in Dublin’s docklands, concern has been expressed about the DDDA’s failure to pay interest on a key loan and the declining value of its holdings.
DDDA chief executive Paul Maloney with Anglo Irish Bank chairman Donal O’Connor
The South Wharf site at Poolbeg in south Dublin which was bought for €412m but is now valued at between €90m and €125m
The Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) is facing a substantial write-down in the value of its assets after the collapse in the property market. DDDA chief executive Paul Maloney confirmed to the Oireachtas committee on environment that most of its assets, which were valued at €177m last year, are “development assets”. Development land has been the most adversely affected sector in the property downturn.
Chief among its assets is its stake in the South Wharf site at Poolbeg in south Dublin which was bought for €412m. Following Maloney’s revelation that the state body and its partners are not paying interest on the loan to nationalised Anglo Irish Bank, the Sunday Tribune obtained three valuations of the site. The independent experts valued the land at €90m, €120m and €125m respectively, well below Maloney’s assertion that he expects the site to be written down by just 20%-30% when it is valued in the coming weeks.
Maloney admitted that the value of the DDDA’s assets “will be far lower this year, as we go through our annual accounts. We are determined that the €2.5m currently in the accounts for the next three years for community and social education purposes will not be affected. We have a borrowing facility with National Irish Bank. I want to make it clear that it’s in place to help us through what we expect will be a difficult period”. He claimed that the current downturn in the market is “cyclical”.
The news that taxpayer-owned Anglo Irish Bank, and apparently Allied Irish Bank, limited the recourse on the loan to the land and the €100m guarantee, despite the loan being closer to €300m, also shocked observers. Maloney said it took a 26% stake in Becbay, the company that bought the site, to ensure it had voting rights. He also revealed that the site was valued at between €250m and €370m when it came on the market.
“We insisted that although we were taking a 26% stake in the site, we would not go beyond €375m. Our 26% was only up to that proportion; anything over it we left to the developers to take at their own risk, which they did,” he told the committee. He did not say why they were willing to go beyond the highest valuation provided by their valuers for the site.
The DDDA invested €32.8m in the purchase of the site and has since “accrued interest and working capital costs of €37.6 m”, Maloney said. The loan is being renegotiated as it was held on a two-year initial facility.
The DDDA has begun public consultations on the future of the South Wharf site and other land under its planning jurisdiction in the Poolbeg peninsula. Maloney said the plan is to have taller buildings facing Dublin Bay and that “they would become smaller towards Seán Moore Park”. To the south, he said, “many of the buildings will be houses rather than apartment blocks and the developments will be under six storeys”. The tallest building will be 15 to 18 storeys, he said.
Other assets owned by the authority include CHQ, the shopping centre in the IFSC that has struggled to attract tenants and faces significant competition from Harry Crosbie’s Point Village, a major retail scheme for Spencer Dock planned by Treasury Holdings and its partners and a district centre planned for Poolbeg.
Maloney also revealed that the authority is considering bailing out developers by purchasing empty apartments in the docklands for social and affordable housing. Apartment prices in the docklands have plummeted since the collapse of the property bubble. One-bed units in Liam Carroll’s Castleforbes Square development, for example, were priced at almost €350,000 two years ago; last week they were launched on the market with prices starting at €204,000. Two-bed apartments that were €440,000 now have a starting price of €250,000.
Maloney said the DDDA has held talks with the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government “in an attempt to use empty apartments for social and affordable housing. The rental accommodation scheme is in place and we are examining it. I understand further affordable housing initiatives will soon be taken by the department. The affordable units we are selling in the docklands are priced well below market values but are selling and people are moving into them … I expect new initiatives to emerge in the coming weeks and months”.
Sunday Tribune
February 20, 2009 at 6:08 am
Would that be DDDA’s investment in the Irish Glass site? or the payments to directors?
Quote:
THE Dublin Docklands Development Authority paid almost €1m to companies linked to its board of directors in the past three years, it has emerged.
The news comes amid calls for the board of the state agency to be sacked due to its involvement in the controversial purchase of the €411m former Irish Glass Bottle site in Dublin.
According to the DDDA’s latest annual report, it paid €964,648 to companies which had direct links with three of its directors, including:
€372,555 in consultancy fees to Arup Consulting Engineers in 2006 and €310,000 in 2007. One of Arup’s directors, Niamh O’Sullivan, is also a director on the DDDA board.
€149,655 to PricewaterhouseCoopers for internal audit and consultancy services in 2007. The firm’s partner, Donal O’Connor, was chairman of the DDDA board until he resigned last December and took over as chairman of Anglo Irish Bank.
€132,438 to the O’Donnell Tuomey firm in 2007. Sheila O’Donnell, who stepped down as a DDDA director last month, has a controlling interest in this company with her family.
http://www.independent.ie/business/i…a-1636819.html
http://www.archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=7402
February 20, 2009 at 6:09 am
Maybe…..
O’Casey Centre timeline
Design: March 2006 – January 2007
Construction: April 2007 – September 2008
Completed: September 2008
Planning applied for 2006
O’Donnell apointed to board in 2007
€132,438 was paid to the O’Donnell Tuomey firm in 2007
Centre completed in 2008
O’Donnell resigned 2009
http://www.archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=7402
February 22, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Named: four of Anglo’s ‘golden circle’
From The Sunday Times
Tom Lyons
February 22, 2009
Gerry Gannon, Joe O’Reilly, Seamus Ross and Jerry Conlan are four of the businessmen who secretly bought 10% of Anglo Irish Bank with the bank’s own cash
The businessmen who bought 10% of Anglo Irish Bank last summer, using funds supplied by the bank, include the co-owner of the K Club and the builder behind the Dundrum Shopping Centre. The “golden circle” also includes the country’s biggest housebuilder and the founder of a private hospital group.
Four of the 10-strong group of investors assembled by David Drumm, Anglo Irish’s former chief executive, are: Gerry Gannon, Joe O’Reilly, Seamus Ross and Jerry Conlan. Either they or some of their companies now owe several billion to Anglo. All four declined to comment last week.
Gannon co-owns the K Club, which hosted the 2006 Ryder Cup, with Michael Smurfit. He is the founder of Gannon Homes and owns a large amount of land in north and south Dublin.
O’Reilly is best known for developing the €1 billion Dundrum Shopping Centre. His company, Castlethorn, plans to build a €1.2 billion new town in Adamstown, west Dublin. He also plans a mixed-use development on O’Connell Street in Dublin.
Longford-born Ross runs Menolly Homes, the country’s biggest housebuilder. He owns Dunboyne Castle in Co Meath and recently ended a dispute over profits made on the development of houses in the K Club. He lost millions when the International Securities Trading Corporation (ISTC), a finance company set up by Tiernan O’Mahony, a former Anglo executive, came close to collapsing.
Conlan is the least well-known of the four. He sold 400 acres of land he co-owned in Naas, Co Kildare, known as Millennium Park, for €340m. He used much of the proceeds to found the Mount Carmel Medical Group which owns a maternity hospital in Rathfarnham, south Dublin. Mount Carmel has been appointed by the Health Service Executive to build private hospitals on the grounds of public hospitals as part of the co-location strategy.
The Sunday Times has been able to ascertain that the following businessmen, some of whom have had dealings with Anglo, are not among the 10 investors: Sean Mulryan, Patrick Doherty, Sean Dunne, Derek Quinlan, Denis O’Brien, JP McManus, John Magnier, Noel Smyth, Michael Whelan, Jim Mansfield, Richard Barrett, Johnny Ronan and Fintan Drury.
Patrick Kearney, a founder of PBN Property in Belfast, did not return repeated calls made last week. He was variously “in a meeting”, “in another meeting” and then “flying to Gibraltar”. Kearney is Anglo’s largest client in Northern Ireland and a close friend of Drumm. His business partner, Neil Adair, established Anglo’s Belfast branch.
John McCabe, the founder of McCabe Builders, also refused to comment last week. He was said to be “out of the office”, then “not at home” and finally The Sunday Times was told “he will call you back if he wants to”.
McCabe is an important Anglo client who lives on a stud farm in Meath formerly owned by Charles Haughey, the late taoiseach.
Last week Ulick McEvaddy, a well-known business figure, described the “Anglo 10” as “heroes” who were prepared to put themselves at risk to support the bank.
One banking source said: “Sure, they were patriotic, but if your bank asks you for a favour [in these market conditions] you do it.”
In total, Anglo Irish Bank lent €451m to a group it has described as “10 long-standing clients”, to buy 10% of the bank. The shares are believed to have been acquired through nominee companies.
The transaction was agreed to prevent the stake acquired through contracts for difference (CFDs) by businessman Sean Quinn coming to the market last summer. It was feared that this would result in a sharp fall in Anglo’s share price.
Three-quarters of the loans were secured against the shares themselves, with the remaining 25% secured on the participants’ “personal assets”.
The bank admits it is likely to have to write off €300m of the money it loaned the 10 investors. Because Anglo has since been nationalised, this loss now passes to the Irish taxpayer.
The Financial Regulator has “categorically” denied knowing the terms of the deal or the identity of the investors beforehand.
It said it knew “steps” to unwind the Quinn shareholding were being put in place, but has not explained why it did not seek further information on the final structure of the deal.
The emergence of four of the 10 names will put further pressure on the government to disclose the others.
Brian Cowen, the taoiseach, said last week that his advice from the attorney general was that he could not disclose the names.
Donal O’Connor, the Anglo chairman, said last week it “would be wrong for the bank to refer to any transactions or dealings with any specific customer of the bank”.
Eamon Gilmore, the Labour party leader, yesterday called on the government to appoint a High Court inspector to investigate various activities at Anglo.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article5781014.ece
February 26, 2009 at 10:59 am
Maloney also revealed that the Developer’s Autocracy is considering bailing out developers by purchasing empty apartments in the docklands for social and affordable housing. Apartment prices in the docklands have plummeted since the collapse of the property bubble.