Dublin’s dizzy heights: Unbuilt Celtic Tiger high-rises

These five tall building projects were proposed at the pinnacle of the construction boom, before Dublin City Council introduced caps on the height of developments that could be built in the city. Only one of them could be built now.

Heuston Gate, Dublin 8

Plan: In December 2003, Tom Parlon, then a minister of state with responsibility for the Office of Public Works, announced plans for "Heuston Gate", the redevelopment of a 4½-acre State-owned site between Dr Steevens Hospital and the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin 8.

What was proposed was not just Dublin’s tallest building, but the tallest in the State. A 32-storey 123m tower with almost 200 apartments was to be centrepiece of the development which would also provide office space for 5,000 people.

The OPW lodged an application to Dublin City Council at the start of 2004 and the council approved it by the end of the year. The council said that although the 32-storey tower would have a significant visual impact on the immediate and the wider city skyline, Dublin must be allowed to evolve and the skyline should not be “freeze framed”. The development represented a “newly self-confident 21st-century Ireland,” the council said.

The council's decision was appealed to An Bord Pleanála by the Irish Georgian Society, the Friends of Kilmainham and An Taisce. The board's inspector who heard the case recommended the tower be omitted, but the board approved the scheme, tower and all, in 2005. It praised the high quality of the architectural and urban design of the site. However it said the decision should not be regarded as a precedent in relation to any other proposal for a high building in the area or the city as a whole.

Reality: Never officially shelved, Heuston Gate just didn't happen and the planning permission has recently run out. A spokeswoman for the OPW said the part of the site which was to have the tower is currently being used by the Revenue Commissioners and it was in talks with other public sector bodies in relation to using the rest of the site.

Jurys/Berkeley Court hotels, Dublin 4

Plan: Probably the most controversial boom-time development proposed for Dublin was a suburban scheme. Although there were many 20th century embassies, offices and hotels in this largely 19th-century suburb, Carlow-born developer Seán Dunne could not have picked a less receptive community for his development.

Dunne paid €379 million for the seven-acre site of the Jurys and Berkeley Court hotels in 2005 and submitted his application in 2007. The €1.5 billion development would include a 15-storey embassy complex and office blocks, a 232-bedroom luxury hotel and an underground shopping mall. But the centrepiece of the design was the a 37-storey, 132m residential tower which would be “cut like a diamond”.

The council in 2008 granted permission for most of the proposal – except the 37-storey block. Dunne appealed the decision to An Bord Pleanála. His appeal was one of an unprecedented 127 made to the board, almost all against development. Following a lengthy public hearing, the board refused permission in January 2009 saying the plans represented a “gross overdevelopment” of the site.

In October 2009 Dunne returned to the council with a scaled-back proposal. The 37-storey tower was gone, as were the embassy and retail buildings, replaced with a largely residential scheme of 490 apartments in 11 blocks ranging in height from six to 12 storeys. The scheme was approved by An Bord Pleanála in 2011.

Reality: Seán Dunne went bankrupt, Ulster Bank took over the property and a consortium including Joe O'Reilly's Chartered Land and the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund bought the site for €170 million last year. The consortium is developing the 2011 permitted scheme but is starting just on the Berkeley Court site, with Jurys to be developed at a later date. Site preparation work got under way in summer 2016.

Bridgefoot Street, Dublin 8

Plan: Bridgefoot Street suffers from severe dereliction. The biggest blight is a vast Dublin City Council-owned site, where 1960s flats were demolished in 2003 to make way for a regeneration project that never happened. On a smaller neighbouring site, one of the most dramatic apartment plans of the boom was proposed in 2006 by a company called Flancrest Enterprises headed by Michael McCabe and Ed Moloney. The 41 apartments were in blocks reaching to 13 storeys. Their design was striking, with the top four storeys of the tower "cantilevered" projecting 10 metres further than the lower storeys – essentially an upside-down "L".

The proposal found favour with the council which granted permission in 2007, but not with An Taisce, which described it as a “blocky, lumpy form, evocative of the 1960s brutalist style” in its appeal to An Bord Pleanála. The tower in particular would have a “very significant” impact on the protected Mellowes Bridge and on the Liffey quays as a whole, said An Taisce. The planning board concluded the development would not have a damaging effect on the area as long as the top six storeys, including the cantilevered element, were omitted.

After this, nothing happened for some years, but in 2013 the developers sought an extension of the planning permission which was about to run out. However, by the time the extension was sought the development was governed by the 2011 city development plan, and despite being almost chopped in half, was still too high at seven storeys. The extension was refused.

Reality: The site remains derelict. Attempts to contact the developers were unsuccessful.

Spencer Dock Hotel, Dublin 1

Plan: Dublin's docklands are one of just four areas in the city designated for high-rise, which, under the council rules, means a building over 50m. The docklands already has some bigger buildings, notably Dublin's tallest, the 67m Montevetro, now named Google Docks.

Montevetro seems dinky compared with what was planned for the city’s east end, with schemes such as Harry Crosbie’s 120m “Watchtower” and the 130m U2 Tower. There was also an application for a 152m, 35-storey hotel on sites barely bigger than St Brigid’s cloak (before she spread it out) on Mayor Street behind the Convention Centre.

The Spencer Dock Hotel was a €300 million Treasury Holdings scheme. The application, made in 2007, was for a 440-bedroom hotel to be operated by the Ritz Carlton group, which Treasury said was integral to the success of the conference centre. The Docklands development authority was among those who opposed the development, saying it would overshadow almost 1,000 homes, mostly newly built apartments.

The council said that while the proposed 35th-floor public viewing area would provide spectacular views over the city, the height was excessive and it refused permission in 2008. Treasury had another go, appealing to An Bord Pleanála, which also turned it down. Now: After several years, a pocket park was put on the sites a couple of years back; it faces the blank backside of the convention centre. The council said it had some contact from a planning consultant in relation to the sites two years ago, but has heard nothing since. Under the Docklands Strategic Development Zone, which since 2014 governs the site, a 13-storey hotel could be built on the site.

Thomas Street digital hub, Dublin 8

Plan: The Church of Saints Augustine and John, or John's Lane Church as it is more commonly known, has been the tallest structure on Thomas Street for more than 140 years, but a decade ago, this might have changed dramatically.

In 2003, the Government set up the Digital Hub Development Agency to steer the development of lands, formerly part of Guinness’s James’s Gate brewery it had bought two years previously. The plan – to attract tech companies – got off to a poor start when the flagship MediaLab Europe project failed and Google set up shop in the docklands instead.

The following year, the Government sold two sites on either side of Thomas Street for a combined total of about €118 million. The successful bidders were Manor Park Homebuilders, which was to develop a site on the south side of the street, and P Elliott & Co, which successfully tendered for the Windmill site on the north side of Thomas Street.

Manor Park Development went for broke, seeking a dizzying 53-storey 170m development. The council said No and An Bord Pleanála upheld the decision in a 2007 appeal.

The council approved Elliott’s proposal: 16 storeys, or 67m, with 269 apartments and almost 6,500sq m of “digital media” office space. The decision, however, was appealed to An Bord Pleanála (the main issue was the effect on the protected “windmill” structure in the middle of the site), which refused permission in 2007.

Reality: The site was untouched for some years, until in 2010 plans were approved for a €40 million accommodation for almost 500 students. At approximately half the height – nine storeys, it was completed this summer in time to take in students for this academic year.

A short history of high-rise in Dublin

Dublin has a fear of heights, particularly when it comes to housing. It is not surprising when some of the few experiences the city has had with taller buildings – – the Ballymun flats and, depending on your tastes, Liberty Hall in Dublin 1 – have turned out pretty badly.

Most of what was built from the late 1950s to the 1970 was just big and ugly, rather than big, tall and ugly. Even the 12-storey Hawkins House in Dublin 2, widely considered a monstrous structure, couldn’t be called high-rise.

Fewer tall buildings were built in 1980s and 1990s. In the suburbs these were the decades of three-bed-semi sprawl and the in the city centre it was the era of Georgian pastiche and “shoe-box” apartments in four- and five-storey buildings.

Height came back on the agenda in the late 1990s, when planners saw increasing numbers of applications for taller buildings. In 2000, Dublin City Council published Managing Intensification and Change: a Strategy for Dublin Building Height, recommending that taller buildings be located mainly in former industrial areas, such as the city's docklands, and be concentrated in clusters at the main railway stations of Heuston, Connolly, Tara and Pearse.

The report also defined what “height” meant. Low-rise, it said, was below 15m; mid-rise was up to 50m; high-rise meant up to 150m; and “super high-rise” was anything above 150m. The report, although referenced by developers in applications, was never put on a statutory footing.

When it came to drafting the 2005-2011 city development plan, the council avoided specifics in relation to heights and locations. In late 2006, new city manager John Tierney said the council would take the lead in developing high-rise complexes and that he did not envisage a cap on the height of developments.

The following year, Dublin City Council decided to review its height policy; in early 2008 the management published its draft proposals Maximising the City's Potential: a Strategy for Intensification and Height.

Buildings more than twice the height of the 59m Liberty Hall were proposed for strategic locations including Grangegorman in Dublin 7, as well as the previously identified sites of Connolly, Tara Street and Heuston stations, and the docklands. Dozens of other areas were identified as having “potential” for high-rise or “landmark” buildings of unspecified height.

When this went down like a lead balloon, a more modest version was drafted, with reassurance that the city would remain predominately low rise, but was never formally approved. Since then, heights have been scaled back. In the development plan for 2011-2016, councillors used the template of the 2000 and 2008 studies to restrict heights to only those areas.

They agreed to buildings of more than 50m, or above 16 storeys of apartments and 12 storeys of offices, at four locations in the city: the docklands, George’s Quay and the Connolly and Heuston station areas. Nine areas were identified as having potential for mid-rise buildings of up to 50m, if a local area plan was devised which permitted higher buildings at the particular location.

All other developments in the city could be low-rise only. There remained, however, a byzantine level of complexity in the definition of low rise:it was now a pick-and-mix ranging from 13m for suburban apartments to 28m for inner city offices. Part of this anomaly was due to the expression of height in terms of storeys as well as metres and, because apartments have lower floor-to-ceiling height, they would end up significantly shorter in metres than offices.

Following a recent compromise, under the new city development plan 2016-2022, permissible suburban height will run to 16m for both apartments and offices. In the city offices remain at 28m, though inexplicably not apartments, which will have a maximum height of 24m, a mismatch which perpetuates the city’s odd relationship with heights.

High-rise Dublin: the experts’ views

Paul Kearns, a planner and co-author with Motti Ruimy of Redrawing Dublin, says there seems to be an "almost emotional distaste" for height in Dublin. The concept that tall buildings could be attractive is one people seem unwilling to consider, he says. Instead, their acceptability seems to be judged on whether you can see them or not.

“We need to move away from the almost singular obsession of can you see the building, to, if you can see it, is it beautiful?

“Also, we never seem to be interested in the views from the buildings or the fantastic and diverse possibilities of new housing choices.”

Kearns says there is a reasonable argument for not having tall buildings in the centre, but there is a great reluctance to having them anywhere. “Everybody agrees, in theory, that height is okay in the right place. Few of course agree on the right place. Why not allow overlooking Phoenix Park, where there wouldn’t be overshadowing of existing housing, or have significantly tall clusters at Dart stations overlooking the sea?”

Paul Keogh, founding partner of Paul Keogh Architects and former president of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, says allowing a blanket height of 24m or 28m across the city is "a bit worrying". "I'm not against height per se, but it's a question of location. On the right site you can go higher."

The existing scale of the city – heights of about 20m, should be used as a “shoulder height” with architects having to put forward an argument for something greater. “What would be assessed is the planning gain: what impact does that have on adjoining properties, how it is improving the character and quality of the location?”

Keogh designed the OPW’s 32-storey Heuston Gate scheme, but he says achieving high densities was not the point of that development. “Our building in Heuston was nothing to do with density, it was everything to do with making a landmark.” However he says once an area gets congested with high-rise buildings, they stop being landmarks. “London, for instance, has gone a bit crazy.”

Kevin Duff of An Taisce's Dublin City Association says the body is concerned about the creep upwards in height over successive city development plans. "We have problems with a definition of height that states low-rise is 24m or 28m when a four-storey Georgian building is 14m. To have low rise as double that doesn't make sense. It's not a proper definition of low rise and no other city would see it that way."

He points out that Frankfurt, home to some of Europe’s tallest buildings, defines low-rise as 20m.

He says it does make sense to designate some areas for height, such as Heuston and the Docklands, rather than leave the decision of whether height is appropriate in any particular scheme to up the council planners, but he said having 14 areas designated for taller buildings amounted to “overzoning”.