A landmark 37-storey tower, 12 metres taller than the Dublin Spire in O'Connell Street, is being proposed for the site of Jury's Hotel in Ballsbridge by property developer Seán Dunne, of Mountbrook Homes.
The company will lodge a planning application with Dublin City Council today seeking permission to redevelop the seven-acre site occupied by Jury's and the adjoining Berkeley Court Hotel, where the scheme will be on public display this weekend.
Apart from the 132m residential tower, which would have a range of cultural facilities at its base, the proposed development includes a multi-storey embassy complex and office block, a 232- bedroom luxury hotel and an underground shopping mall.
The cultural element of the scheme, which was devised by Gate Theatre director Michael Colgan, comprises an "art house" cinema, a jazz club, art galleries, artists' studios, music rooms, rehearsal studios and what is billed as a European Centre for Culture.
Altogether, the site would accommodate 536 apartments, many of them large enough for family living, and Mr Dunne said this showed that Mountbrook was "playing its part in the need to halt the drastic, unsustainable urban sprawl of Dublin" all over Leinster.
Designed by Copenhagen-based Henning Larsen Architects, who were chosen after a competition involving nine practices, the scheme's main selling point is that it will open up public access through a site which has been surrounded by railings for more than a century.
The glass and steel tower - five storeys higher than originally mooted - would be located on the axis of Pembroke Road, one of the main routes from the city-centre to Ballsbridge, and would appear to be "cut like a diamond", according to design director Ulrik Raysse.
Named "One Berkeley Court", the tower would be flanked on one side by 11-storey apartment blocks along Lansdowne Road and the 15-storey embassy complex and adjoining office block on the Pembroke Road frontage of Jury's Hotel, which is closed. A series of apartment blocks would stretch back to Shelbourne Road, laid out along the proposed sequence of public spaces, which would cover three acres of the overall site, which was acquired by Mr Dunne for a total of €379 million in the autumn of 2005.
Retail at ground and basement levels, including restaurants and bars, would account for 27,375sq m, or 14 per cent of the development. Also included is an ornamental pool, which could be turned into an ice rink, and a creche for 150 children.
Eighty trees, including a stand of evergreen oaks, would be felled. But these would be replaced by more than 220 new trees, many of them exotic, which are intended to evoke the site's historical use as Trinity College's botanic gardens.
Defending the scale of what Mountbrook is proposing, Mr Dunne said that Ballsbridge had been wrongly portrayed as a village, but it was really a national centre which housed the home of Irish rugby, the Royal Dublin Society, 29 embassies and the headquarters of AIB.
The "outmoded and ugly" office blocks built during the 1960s and early 1970s had now reached the end of their useful life and, like the current development of Lansdowne Road stadium, "the cycle of developing Ballsbridge for the 21st century is now ready to commence".
* The plans are on public display at the Berkeley Court Hotel from noon to 6pm today, tomorrow and on Sunday.
