Newton's Optic: "Hotflowers House will be a challenging vertical counterpoint to the horizontal wharfscape," Newton Emerson is told by the developer.
The Dublin Docklands Agency plans to increase the height of the proposed Hothouse Flowers tower to 100 metres, only 20 metres shorter than Bono, it has emerged. Initial plans for the building, which will be known as "Hotflowers House", specified a 60-metre high residential block with a nightclub at the bottom and a recording studio at the top. Apartments were to be marketed under the slogan "I Can't Hear Clearly Now".
However, after further consultation with themselves developers Dung-Low Artless have decided to add an extra 40 metres to the structure so that planning officials will have to run up more stairs to catch them.
"The new design will be submitted for approval first thing tomorrow," explained a company spokesman yesterday. "It'll be easier in the morning."
The revised plan envisages a twisting, spiralling, spinning arrangement symbolising how the Environment Minister will react when he sees it.
Architects Flower-in-Law House and Partner, who won the competition to design the tower after or before everybody else lost, say their brief was: "To deliver a dynamic, multi-purpose and adaptable planning application" and also "To take Dublin into the 21st century without the need for cumbersome time-machines or unsightly inter-dimensional wormholes."
Due to its extra height the newly-proposed building is slightly wider, slightly cheaper and slightly more like the actual building the developers plan to put up eventually. Music industry sources deny that the final tower will be taller than the Dublin Spire although they do admit that it could be "Bigger than Jesus".
In addition to a nightclub and a recording studio it will also include a 24-hour pub, a sawmill, a novelty car-horn showroom and a woodpecker sanctuary. Apartments will be marketed under the slogan "Hotflowers House - A Home for People".
Although the plans are expected to be approved pending expectations of more plans to approve, the likely choice of developer remains controversial. Dung-Low Artless has a poor track record of apartment projects throughout Dublin including Corrs Quay, Pogues Plaza and Westlife Walk, which were all widely criticised as "jukebox" schemes. "Dung-Low Artless are nothing but a pack of boomtown rats," said one industry insider yesterday.
Company chairman William Careless designed the firm's early projects himself with the help of an in-house team of technicians and an "Oxford" brand protractor . "As far as I'm concerned there are just two angles in this business," he once said. "Right angles and wrong angles."
He has also described architects as being: "Only interested in charging around 3 per cent of the initial cost of these enormously profitable landmark buildings."
In addition to its high-rise city centre portfolio, Dung-Low Artless is heavily involved in large-scale green-field house building and is credited with introducing the naming convention for such developments now adopted across the industry. This combines the species of tree cut down to clear the site with the type of watercourse into which its sewers are directly connected - for example "Cedar Brook", "Chestnut Canal" or "Christmas Shuck".
By choosing to work with an architect on this stage of the Hotflowers House planning application project, Dung-Low Artless has demonstrated that it is moving away from simply stacking boxes on top of each other and moving towards stacking boxes slightly offset from each other. This will be conditional on Dung-Low Artless having free rein to stack surrounding boxes any way it likes.
"We have been given a unique opportunity to contribute a radical pioneering innovative gateway signpost signature iconic addition to the Dublin skyline," said a spokesman for the architects yesterday.
"Hotflowers House will be a challenging vertical counterpoint to the horizontal wharfscape facilitating a dramatic line-of-sight synthesis between the city and the sea that draws the eye along an exciting new axis of urban geometry in a way that, for some reason, those two big chimneys on Ringsend Power Station don't."
Meanwhile the first apartments in the complex are already available for early down-payment. "The penthouse should appeal to someone with €30 million to spare who needs a really good view of the docks," said an estate agent yesterday. A buyer from the North is believed to have expressed an interest.
Newton Emerson is editor of the satirical website portadownnews.com.