The firm of O'Mahony Pike Architects, which is making quite a splash with its 16-storey apartment tower for Zoe Developments in the Grand Canal Docks, has now received the acclaim of its colleagues in the planning profession for the redevelopment of the Johnston Mooney & O'Brien site in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.
The site itself was once highly controversial, with an official investigation into its sale to Telecom Eireann in 1989 for nearly £10 million. It was later acquired by Sheelin McSharry and developed to a very high standard for a mixed scheme of apartments, offices and a hotel.
In awarding the project a certificate of merit for urban design, the Irish Planning Institute's jury said it had successfully exploited the amenity potential of its setting between Herbert Park and the River Dodder - and done so in a way that "contributes to their wider use and appreciation by the general public".
Comprising four major buildings, it is arranged around a broad pedestrian "promenade", dead straight on the axis of the park's main water feature. This is by far the most inspired aspect of its urban design because it extends the axis to the very heart of Ballsbridge, giving the area a new civic focus.
According to the IPI's jury, civic focus and good public spaces are what Ballsbridge has lacked. O'Mahony Pike's scheme addresses "these defects in the urban structure", particularly with the promenade, which has become "an elegant thoroughfare and vibrant meeting place - a place of real civic status".
The Herbert Park Hotel - one of the very few in Dublin with a truly contemporary interior - opens on to the promenade, as do the even more angular office buildings. The two apartment buildings, by contrast, throw a serpentine shape along the Dodder and form a "sinuous new boundary" to Herbert Park.
Though the buildings are both emphatically modern and significantly higher than their neighbours, the jury felt they constituted "a strikingly handsome addition to the predominantly Victorian character of the area" - just as, one might add, the US Embassy was when it was built in the early 1960s; it still is.
"The successful transformation of this redundant industrial site has been clearly facilitated by the adoption of coherent planning/design objectives which serve not only to exploit the amenity potential of its river and parkland context, but also to enhance and revitalise Ballsbridge," the jury said.
It made no mention of one of the most important elements of the scheme - the construction of a new bridge across the Dodder, which minimises the traffic impact of the development on Ballsbridge Terrace.
