An architect whose views on building heights in Dublin were influential in persuading An Bord Pleanala to reject plans for a high-rise scheme on George's Quay in the city yesterday described the proposed Spencer Dock project as "timely and reasonable".
Mr Brian Hogan was invited by the Spencer Dock developer, Treasury Holdings, to give his views to the oral hearing yesterday after they read his documentation on the George's Quay appeal.
Mr Hogan admitted he was at first taken aback by the unprecedented scale of the proposed development. Then he recalled that his height strategy "would encourage taller buildings in this location".
"It was clear to me that the project was in an entirely different category to George's Quay," he said.
A positive feature of urban planning in recent years, he said, was the recognition that the cellular structure of neighbourhoods, parishes and urban villages was the proper place for both rehabilitation and redevelopment.
Good examples included the IFSC, Temple Bar and Smithfield, commercially-driven initiatives "based either on tax incentives or on cultural pints and pizzas".
To be successful a certain "critical mass" was required: the larger the site, the more comprehensive the programme.
The more speedy its realisation, the better chance a project had of developing its own environmental and "human" personality and of becoming a real place. "Trees and families grow together," he said.
Designation had revived Dublin city centre, Mr Hogan said. "The Spencer Dock brief reinforces that revival of down-town living-and-working with another surge of development energy on the back of a major national facility, the conference centre."
The IFSC's eventual credibility, he claimed, had made a Spencer Dock-type project inevitable. It was not too big: it conformed with the "norms of expansion" seen over the previous 150 years and reflected the mixed-use policy that currently informed "enlightened" urban renewal.
"At last, influential voices calling for increased urban housing densities are being heard and are being reflected in national policies. Spencer Dock responds decisively to this call," he said.
As older parts of Dublin responded to contemporary commercial demands, so the new scale of 21st-century development would beget its own environmental solutions.
To seek to impose a traditional street pattern on the project would be "another kind of unworkable pastiche papering over the fear of the new" in an attempt to make Spencer Dock look like something it was not.
It was not unusual, he said, for a development to include a proportion of land which could not be built on, thereby enhancing its overall plot ratio entitlement.