Sir, - So, Tom Nisbet thinks (July 16th) this row of houses detracts from the beauty of the natural landscape. He may even be right but I'm afraid this vein of thinking has produced an attitude in planning that any house or man-made construction "desecrates" its surroundings.
This objection to anything protruding into the line of sight from any point to any other point has produced the ridiculous situation where people with plans to build perfectly attractive houses on fine sites with good views are regularly forced by the local planning authorities to excavate the hillsides they are supposedly trying to protect and bury their homes away out of sight with views on three sides of nothing other than the wall of earth resulting from the excavation.
In Dublin, the same restrictive thinking has led to the rebuilding of the tenement houses of old, renamed as apartments, and all in red brick and mock Georgian styling. There seems to be an attitude that there is no point in looking for permission for anything more imaginative and that any proposal, no matter how ridiculous, will be accepted so long as it has a mock Georgian facade and plenty of red brick.
Funny thing is that if Gandon came along today and proposed the Custom House he'd probably be told to take his monstrosity away and come back with something in a nice red. - Yours, etc., Jim Smyth,
Clonee,
Dublin 15.