OBJECTIONS TO a €350 million redevelopment of the Montrose RTÉ broadcasting campus at Donnybrook, Dublin, are scheduled to be heard at a planning appeal today.
The objectors include the German ambassador, whose residence on Seaview Terrace adjoins the site RTÉ has earmarked for a new digital broadcasting complex.
The objectors also include the financier Dermot Desmond, along with other local residents, as well as An Taisce.
RTÉ director general Cathal Goan told the opening session of the inquiry yesterday that the station had spent the last eight years developing Project 2025 to integrate its television, radio and online services, as well as services in publishing and the arts, on seven hectares (17 acres) at the northern end of its 13-hectare (32-acre) campus.
Mr Goan said RTÉ held “a unique place in Irish life”, commanding “trust and special loyalty” but to continue the best possible services it now had “to meet the demands of the digital age”.
He said the station had “reached a point when it can no longer continue economically to re-engineer or add to its existing facilities”.
The redevelopment masterplan has been designed by architects Scott Tallon Walker, which had designed the original television centre, dating from 1961, on the site.
In a presentation to the planning hearing yesterday, Peter Dudley of Scott Tallon Walker said the original television centre would not be demolished, nor would the sports hall.
However, he said the radio centre, which dates from the mid-1970s, the library and the multistorey car park would go.
Mr Dudley said the development of the RTÉ campus had come about over three master plans, and Project 2025 should be seen as “an architectural continuum”; it would be “wrong to suggest the existing buildings be frozen in time”.
Around the world, different television stations had concluded that existing buildings were not suitable for the new digital age, he said.
The new complex buildings would vary in height from 28.5 metres at the front of the site facing the N11.
The buildings would include an atrium rising to 36 metres at its apex, but the buildings would be “stepped down” towards the back of the site, descending to 10.7 metres facing local housing.
Phase one of the development would see the demolition of the multistorey car park and the construction of three new high-definition digital television studios, a new “young people’s” studio and associated back-up facilities.
Phase two would involve further television studios and back-up facilities, while phase three would involve the first section of a production and administration building, a news room, radio studios, offices, orchestra studio, a basement car park and a canteen.
Phase four would include the atrium, main entrance, a public plaza and the removal of the existing set storage building, the existing library/sound stage and radio centre.
Phase five of the redevelopment at Montrose would include further production areas, rehearsal and performance spaces and storage spaces.
