Dead space and sick buildings

At a discussion in the Golden Thread Gallery on Tuesday night, the conversation turned to bad buildings.

These include many of our new apartment blocks but also some of our new hotels.

Take, for example, the new Ramada Encore, opposite the Golden Thread Gallery in the Cathedral Quarter. (Inside the self-styled 'funky' Ramada has some of the worst 'Belfast' kitsch paintings I've ever seen.)

The Ramada is on the corner of Dargan Crescent and yet two thirds of the space it occupies is given over to a car park (in case you haven't noticed there's a big sign saying car park hanging from its side). This means the ground floor space is 'dead'. There are no doors or windows, simply a wall hiding the cars parked on the other side.

What was promised and needed was a busy ground floor in active use which would have linked the two sides of the Cathedral Quarter across the ugly, four lane (with footpath in middle of road) Dargan Crescent. Instead we have another bad building. Nothing new there, says you, look at the GEM offices facing St George's Market. Again the entire ground floor is a wall with no access points.

Architect Ciarán Mackel suggests the cramped private apartment blocks springing up across Belfast are an disaster waiting to happen. A recent survey showed occupancy in this showcase city centre apartment blocks is only at 60 per cent and a majority of those belong to investors.

"Planners could and should have insisted on an extra room per apartment and higher ceilings," says Ciarán. "That would have made them much more liveable." Instead the planners, as is the case in the new block just before Castle Street, allowed the developer to create an apartment block with 'dead' space on the ground floor. There are two retail units and wooden partition hiding car park space and bins. "By refusing to put accommodation on the ground floor, the developer also gets to avoid having to build a generous lobby, an atrium or even a garden space."

(In our picture of the new Ramada Encore, the entire ground floor from the corner back is dead space. In fact, all the space back from the white pillar is car park.)