Dublin planning is not for the squeamish

Unless you have a strong stomach, it's best not to spend too much time with Dublin City Council/Corporation's planning decisions since the war. The first picture shows the very best the city has to offer: the start of O'Connell Street. It's pretty much the defining view of Dublin in many guidebooks, weather.com, and elsewhere. Amazingly, these buildings were built in the 1920s according to a strict brick-alternating-with-stone template from the planners. They replaced Georgian buildings destroyed in a British navel bombardment a few years previously. This was shortly after partition when the Free State's economy was extremely precarious, the industrial wealth of Belfast having been incorporated into the province of Northern Ireland, which remained under British rule. It's hard to imagine the job done more handsomely. Just compare it to the horrible, out-of-proportion building that has recently been placed next to this group (on the right) to replace a defunct cinema of no architectural merit:



The building on the right is out of scale with the 1920s buildings and, unlike them, is cheap looking and shoddy. I just can't figure out how they thought this was a reasonable continuation of one of Dublin's most famous views. It seems that good architecture, good planning, and the post-war years simply don't go together.