Permission for tall building was given contrary to advice of planning officer

Dublin Corporation's decision last month to approve plans for the city's tallest building at George's Quay opposite the Custom House was made against the advice of its chief planning officer, Mr Pat McDonnell, The Irish Times has confirmed.

It also ran counter to the strong views of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority that the complex would cause "massive overshadowing" of neighbouring buildings and failed every criterion for high buildings laid down in the 1991 city plan.

In his 36-page report on the office, residential and retail scheme proposed by the Cosgrave property group, Mr McDonnell strongly recommended that planning permission be refused because of its detrimental impact on Dublin's low-rise skyline.

As a result Mr Sean Carey, assistant city manager in charge of the planning and development department, had to rely on a brief report from the city architect, Mr Jim Barrett, to justify granting permission for a somewhat scaled-down version of the scheme.

This decision, made by Mr Carey on September 29th, has already been appealed to An Bord Pleanala by a Green Party city councillor, Mr Ciaran Cuffe, who maintains that it would resemble "a giant stump" which would dominate the city's skyline from every angle.

Other appeals are expected to follow from An Taisce, the Dublin Civic Group and the Irish Georgian Society, which had all objected to the scheme on the same grounds. The developers may also appeal the corporation's decision to reduce the height from 100 to 80 metres.

The chief planning officer considered that such a height reduction, recommended by the city architect to mitigate its negative visual impact, was not advisable because it would tend to disrupt the underlying quality of the design by Skidmore Owings Merrill.

In his report Mr McDonnell acknowledged the scheme as an interesting architectural composition which had many fine qualities, designed by a firm of architects with an international profile which had designed and built many fine precincts throughout the world.

However, he said SOM's "forthright architectural statement" was a deliberate attempt to impose a very high building on the city's skyline, at an order of magnitude quite different from existing tall buildings in the area.

"It is inescapable . . . that there is an intention to register this building very strongly on the skyline," Mr McDonnell said. "This transcends its architectural qualities and it is, therefore, planning rather than architectural considerations which have to be taken into account."

Mr McDonnell also argued that the height and bulk of the proposed office tower and adjoining interlinked residential blocks, rising to 24 storeys, "cannot be substantially ameliorated by realistic adjustments to the proposal as it stands".

There was no rationale for saying this "very prominent and assertive" building should stand out from its surroundings because of any intrinsic importance in the business, commercial or civic life of the city; its use was for speculative offices.

His report said there was no doubt that the complex proposed for George's Quay came within the definition of a high building in the current city plan; because of its height and bulk it would be incompatible with the 12 policy criteria in the plan.

Mr McDonnell's views were echoed by the Docklands Development Authority, which has a mandate to develop a 1,300-acre area stretching from Butt Bridge to the Poolbeg peninsula. It described the scheme as extremely disruptive and said it did not comply with the Docklands master plan.

The authority said it had gone to considerable trouble to create buildings in the IFSC "which, whilst unashamedly modern, sought a scale appropriate to the existing scale of the city" and which were designed in particular to defer to the importance of the Custom House.

Recalling the genesis of the IFSC project in the 1987 competition to develop the Custom House Docks site, it said proposals based on imported images of large-scale and substantial heights had been rejected as inappropriate and harmful to the visual image of the city. The city architect, Mr Barrett, took a radically different view, arguing that SOM's scheme had "a positive architectural and sculptural tension".

It also had distinct advantages over an earlier office proposal for the site, which won a 10-year permission in 1990.

He said this earlier scheme - a cluster of seven office blocks rising to 60 metres, marginally higher than Liberty Hall - had "no public realm", with a building form and content "which has been accepted by urbanists everywhere as undermining the historic nature and potential of cities".

The latest scheme would introduce a welcome residential content of 176 apartments and also presented an opportunity to animate the ground area by creating a substantial pedestrian precinct next to Tara Street DART station.