The recent exhibition The Reason of Towns [1], along with the associated publication Approximate Formality [2] by Valerie Mulvin, are an appraisal of the inimitability and potential of our towns and villages across Ireland. They highlight the distinctive layout of the Irish town, characterised by a strictly structured composition and a foundational assemblage of public buildings. This has provided our towns, even with the most modest populations, with a rich compilation of fine churches, market houses, libraries, and courthouses often constructed from cut limestone and granite, establishing the foundation for a well-defined urban landscape.

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This formal configuration around market squares has provided the backdrop for the theatre of domestic life for centuries. However, many such squares currently stand devoid of vitality, plagued by neglect and dereliction, and burdened by excessive traffic and parking congestion. Any pride or affection we feel for them is inevitably tainted by the knowledge that they are imprints of a colonial past, which lingers in the configuration of streets and squares viewed as not entirely our own. Traces of the past still quietly inform how we move through and relate to them today.

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Over the past one-hundred years since independence, Ireland has struggled in navigating the postcolonial landscape and in addressing buildings with a residual colonial legacy. To date, a considerable portion of this discourse has primarily focused on the city of Dublin. The deliberate destruction and subsequent preservation of its characteristic Georgian terraces over the past century has been well debated and documented, and the value it adds to the urban fabric of the city has generally been accepted within the consensus.

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The capital city assumed a symbolic role in negotiating the relationship with these buildings, determining which of them would be permitted to become emblematic of the emerging nation. This, coupled with the fact that the private market dictates that we develop urban areas faster, compelled the city to engage with its colonial built heritage earlier than its rural counterparts. Notwithstanding the triumphant role that economic priorities play in our evolving relationship with these buildings, this pressurised and hastened response to negotiating their legacy gives insight into the process involved to fully assimilate these buildings into the nation’s psyche. As this process is not as precipitated in a rural setting, an additional dimension of time is added to the dynamic. This passage of time hasn’t healed our relationship with these buildings; it has merely dulled it, leaving behind a quiet, unresolved ambivalence.

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Irish society within the twenty-six counties underwent a discernible shift at the beginning of the latter half of the twentieth century, transitioning away from a predominant fixation on resistance against British imperialism towards a heightened focus on contemporary economic realities. Consequently, the enduring colonial legacy of many of these buildings has made meaningful engagement with them increasingly difficult. Thus, many of them effectively became ignored and abandoned, and in being "tombstones of a departed ascendency – they are of no use" [3]. The collective memory deemed them too innocuous to warrant eradication, yet too historically complex to facilitate meaningful engagement. This brings us to today, wherein our rural towns and villages exhibit a uniquely strong sense of communal pride, yet often remain markedly detached from the very built environment in which they sit.

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Efforts certainly have been made over recent decades to challenge and question these prevailing narratives by various agencies promoting the conservation of our built heritage. However, there tends to be an emphasis on architectural features and artistic characteristics over the social aspects of the built environment. By focusing predominantly on technical and material issues, the broader socio-cultural significance embedded within historic structures can be overlooked, thereby neglecting narratives that contribute to a more holistic understanding of heritage [4].

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This contributes to a significant portion of the Irish population lacking a sense of connection or ownership towards these colonial buildings, perceiving them as outside the scope of the nation's shared heritage. This disconnect does not stem from ignorance regarding the architectural significance of these structures. Instead, it arises from a residual colonial sentiment and collective memory of historical events. Without acknowledgement, this disconnect nurtures estrangement; an estrangement which cannot be overcome by simply celebrating a building's merits and architectural significance, but must invoke an architectural praxis built on social engagement.

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This is what Michael D. Higgins refers as "a feigned amnesia around the uncomfortable aspects of our shared history" [which] "will not help us to forge a better future together" [5]. He explains how the Decade of Centenaries has provided for a period of ethical remembering, which helps to understand the reverberations of the past for today’s society. It has necessitated uncomfortable inquiries into the events and influences that have shaped Ireland and continue to influence its contemporary landscape. The fruit of this enterprise, however, is a resilient society that fosters a "hospitality of narratives" [6], enabling it to effectively address the complexities of contemporary challenges. Through an architectural lens, this empowers communities to reclaim pride in their town and village centres, while critically engaging with and acknowledging the complex histories often embedded within these spaces.

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This revalorisation of built heritage in our towns and villages should not be understood as a finite project, but rather as a continuous process in the ongoing effort to unravel the enduring structures of the colonial condition. Nor should it be seen as unattainable, as many communities have already transformed these buildings to produce socially engaged spaces befitting of the communities in which they serve. It would be disingenuous to suggest that colonialism alone causes dereliction and decay across our urban spaces. There are many active elements within our own creation that drive this process. However, it is important to recognise the significance of this unique dynamic and the complexities it introduces, particularly when compared to our European neighbours with which Ireland is frequently and, at times, too readily compared.

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It is not an exaggeration when Mulvin says, “the conservation and sustainable development of Irish towns [...] could be Ireland’s significant contribution to world culture for the next number of years” [7]. The conservation of these spaces can be understood as an act of decolonial cultural agency that reclaims architectural narratives suppressed by imperial paradigms. Our built heritage identity can extend beyond modest thatched cottages and traditional cozy pubs to encompass structures such as market houses, Carnegie Libraries, bridewells, railway stations, and workhouses, which are often integral to the fabric of our towns. This, in turn, plays an essential role in confronting the monumental housing and climate crises that imperatively shape the trajectory of our future. By acknowledging and confronting the contemporary forces of colonialism, Ireland can move towards a future built on a foundation of ethical remembering, reconciliation, and celebrating of its built heritage. The proof of this will be thriving towns and villages that promote sustainable ways of living; a built heritage of which we can all be proud.

Of the many predicaments facing humanity today, arguably the most difficult to make sense of is the housing crisis [1]. Certainly, natural disasters, pandemics and wars destroy homes, disrupt supply chains and labour markets, and drive mass migrations. Population growth increases demand. But housing crises are not in the first instance created by these events. On the contrary, I argue, they are a matter of design [2].

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In economic terms, housing is often framed as a simple problem of supply: If we just built enough homes, there would be no crisis [3]. This argument will be very familiar to anyone attuned to the current debate around housing in Ireland. Under a market-led paradigm, however, the construction industry can never build enough homes to meet demand because, if it did, their product would lose its sale value and they'd go out of business [4]. So really our problem is one of distribution, not supply, and its resolution therefore is a question of will, not fate [5].

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In making sense of social and political problems, appeals to the laws of nature can be compelling – after all, they have a ring of truth about them: we don't control the weather; we never know when we'll be struck down by illness, injury, or death; violence and our vulnerability to it are unfortunate but inevitable by-products of our hapless existence as human animals [6]. This is a routine intellectual trick performed by liberal economists when they discuss the principle of the free market as though it were something akin to Darwin's theory of natural selection. The argument goes something like this: in the existential competition for scarce resources, there must be winners and losers ('survival of the richest,' if you will) and any attempt to artificially level the playing field is an unwarranted interference with Nature. The inevitability implied by this argument is exemplified in the notion of 'the invisible hand', Adam Smith's classic conceptualisation of market forces, describing how individuals acting in self-interest might unintentionally produce effects that benefit society as a whole [7]. Providing an apparent justification for the unfettered pursuit of profit, the invisible hand was famously adopted by proponents of laissez-faire economics [8]. However, these later theorists took the phrase out of context: the so-called 'grandfather of modern economics', Smith was in fact expressing his concern about the social, political and moral distortions produced by unregulated commerce [9]. The invisible hand may be rational, but it doesn't have a conscience.

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A considerable body of research has examined the causes and effects of Ireland's emblematic post-2008 housing crisis. Much of this work focuses on how global processes of real-estate financialisation and the neoliberalisation of urban governance have intersected with the local dynamics of a parochial democracy suffering from a post-colonial property complex [10]. This research illustrates that, rather than expressing some uniquely deep connection to the land of our forebears, the emphasis on homeownership in Irish housing policy simply reflects the status of private property as the primary financial asset in a system of wealth accumulation upon which our economy depends [11]. This is reflected in a suite of government schemes that attempt to guarantee continuous growth in property values along with ever-wider proprietorship.

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Deregulation, tax breaks, and development subsidies like the Croí Cónaithe (Cities) scheme seek to reduce supply-side costs and minimise risk in order to encourage investors into the market and thus deliver more housing. Meanwhile, demand-side rent supports and help-to-buy schemes, along with loosening mortgage lending criteria, ensure that consumers have enough cash to keep up with ever-higher prices. These measures are based on the seemingly logical assumption that boosting construction and putting money into people's pockets will improve affordability [12]. However, supply-side savings are rarely, if ever, passed onto consumers, while greater availability of capital on the demand-side simply drives inflation. In any case, what does it say about the market if both buyers and sellers require some form of state intervention in order to engage in trade [13]? Is this not precisely the kind of unnatural interference that Adam Smith's disciples warn about? Perhaps the invisible hand is fudging the numbers.

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More importantly, what does it mean for a society in which self-worth is measured by one's ability to independently purchase a home, if most people can't manage to do so [14]? The late anthropologist and historian of debt David Graeber argued that, in contemporary western societies, the traditional hierarchy of value has become disordered such that the symbolic or cultural value of home, as well as its fundamental utility as a place to live, have been subordinated to its exchange value [15]. Put simply, we have come to confuse value with price. Often, questions of affordability are met with appeals to viability, a byword for profitability. Yet the assumptions that underly viability calculations – land and construction costs, contingencies, profit margins – are rarely interrogated. Instead, we question the protective, democratic mechanisms of planning and building control, subjecting them to a persistent smear campaign designed to pressure the state into underwriting an ever-greater share of development risk.

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So what would it look like to meaningfully commit to the vision of a society that provides housing for all? The Irish Cities 2070 group points out that securing the health, wellbeing, and prosperity of Ireland's rapidly growing population – as well as achieving our ambitious and necessary sustainability goals – is entirely reliant on creating and maintaining attractive, compact, well-designed and connected urban settlements [16]. Yet, by centring commercial viability in debates around housing as though it were as natural a consideration as safety, comfort, beauty or belonging, we privilege the needs of enterprise over those of the people it ultimately serves. Perhaps a first step, then, is to question our assumptions about the nature and causes of housing crises – are they just unfortunate by-products of an otherwise reliable system? Or have we in fact designed a system that reliably produces crises? Most critically, we must ask: who benefits from the whole situation?

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In considering such questions, rather than being led by an invisible hand, maybe it's time we followed our gut.

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There are two ways to look at the collision of one's beliefs having pursued an architectural degree, and starting one's first job in architecture. A collision between one's assumptions and reality may not be the nicest experience, yet it can be truly valuable. Such collision, as long as either of the two doesn't change, is inevitable. Such a collision between an architecture graduate's thoughts, and the reality of working in a practice can have positives and negatives – but such an occasionally uncomfortable thing can be beneficial, and in fact broaden a graduate's skillset.

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When the two worlds collide

Architecture is mainly taught through a five-year course. Students optionally, and quite often, take ‘a year out’ between third and fourth year to (most often) work in architectural practice, which is likely to be their first long-term and intense experience with architecture as a career. As long as architecture is taught in the manner it is, the collision between a student's assumptions and beliefs, and their real-world priorities is almost inevitable.

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Such a collision creates an opportunity to question their real-world priorities, and might possibly lead to their improvement, or at least understanding of their role in practice. This can make following their principles easy, intentional, and sensible. However, such collision can, in reality, prove an obstacle – when the theory and the practice don't align, the theory can often feel like a waste of time. This should, in turn, be an incentive to challenge the theory or even practice, so that students and graduates would feel more familiar with life after graduation – if familiarity is considered the only ‘right’ way to be prepared.

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Collision as a benefit and an opportunity

Collision between one's assumptions, beliefs, and priorities, and with every-day architectural practice is inevitable due to the nature of how architecture is sometimes taught. In college, one goes through years of working on various projects in theory to learn how to think when it comes to creating space. For instance, one is expected to pay attention to how the space feels, how it gets constructed and used, about its environmental impact, and last but not least, what it looks like.

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Nonetheless, designing in an architectural studio seems to be rarely led by these criteria, although they are hopefully the ultimate goal. For example, affordability, practicality, and buildability most often seem to be more important than aesthetics, comfort, and innovation.

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Aesthetics is invariably resolved by manufacturers producing a tested list of windows and doors, bricks, kitchen cabinets, and roof tiles to choose from, which are generally considered aesthetically pleasing, but most importantly buildable. They are mostly prefabricated and rely on certification, and a builder’s familiarity with them. This in turn ensures that they are the most affordable option, a priority – particularly in housing. An attempt to use bespoke windows, with a particular aesthetic in mind, will prove pointless due to the cost of production, testing, and certification. This naturally leads to a question as to whether one can design and construct a thoughtful building whilst almost entirely using prefabricated products. More pertinently, a graduate may wonder whether one can aspire to design aesthetically pleasing buildings at all – these may begin to feel like the naïve remain of the college experience that fades away with time?

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Comfort has been (allegedly) defined by minimum sizes of houses and apartments, along with sizing bedrooms, storage spaces, living spaces, balconies, and terraces through housing guidelines – along with often-used typical details of construction elements such as precast concrete floor slabs, or particularly timber frame panels. In this instance, it feels as if there is no need for another Le Corbusier´s ‘Modulor’ studied in the college environment. Here, one was encouraged to re-think what has been established to understand it, and to aspire to improve upon it. Indeed, the fact that something has long been constructed in a certain manner does not mean it is being built in the right way – so how can one be sure that the prescribed and recommended design is ideal, if one is not encouraged to question it?

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Innovative solutions are imprisoned between building regulations and cost requirements that are often non-negotiable. One can either view them as a challenge or as a barrier, and given architecture's role in tackling various societal issues and in making our environment a better place, it feels best to see them as a challenge.

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In truth, the collision between a freshly college-influenced mind and the architectural world poses several questions which could lead to an improvement of the real-world rules by which we construct spaces, an improvement rooted in not accepting reality as it is. In other words, I believe perceiving all the limitations as a challenge rather than as a barrier is the best way in which to improve our built environment.

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Collision as an incentive

Nonetheless, the collision between architectural theory and architectural practice can also be viewed as a wrinkle that needs to be ironed out of a graduate. Resolving this discrepancy can be performed by changing the means by which architecture is taught, by establishing fewer rules, and by making both theory and practice more intertwined.

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Architectural courses should enhance one's creative and problem-solving skills, as well as one´s interest in new solutions and techniques. However, in practice affordability and practicality often prove more important than aesthetics and innovation precisely because they ensure people have a roof over their head, and the safety provided by that essentially offers comfort. It can often feel as if there is no use in pursuing one´s creative skills and innovative thinking, as building regulations and design manuals have already tackled various scenarios. In this reality, architectural courses should perhaps be more reflective of the real work environment, and the philosophy of practice.

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This collision could be avoided by changing the way architecture is taught. If theory were more like everyday practice, graduates would be provided with a more realistic view of what a career in architecture will be like. In principle, this would allow a student make a more informed decision as to whether a career in architecture is what they aspire to.

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Collision as a way to improve

This collision is a good thing because it creates potential for improvement, and disillusion can encourage one to discover a different way to make use of one's skills. It creates space for questioning, understanding, and possibly improving architectural practice and, in turn, our environment – rather than choosing to resign oneself to an inevitability.

“I’ll have the squid.”

“How do you want it?”

“I don’t know?”

“What do you want it for?”

“I’m going to do it on the grill.”

“Right, so I can gut it, clean it, give you the tentacles apart, the head prepared and scored, and do you want me to separate the ink for the freezer?”

“Sounds good to me!”

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And thus begins the delicate process of the fishmonger carefully slicing, separating, extracting, sluicing, scoring, wiping, and sealing the fish, which is handed to me.

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This is a vignette of the type of interaction that happens on a regular basis for a good portion of the Spanish population. Every city has its share of fixed markets that open on a near-daily basis in a permanent space, with stallholders selling everything from fresh to dried goods. Though places of commerce, these are civic spaces, owned by the councils and put at the disposal of local businesses to provide a public service. The understanding is that while the markets provide food, they are equally important as community amenities that foster connection between people, and between people and the food that they consume.

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The Irish experience, by contrast, offers little by way of markets that can be integrated into people’s daily or weekly shopping routines. Taking Dublin city centre as an example, the outlook is not positive. Moore Street has been in a state of limbo since the early 2000s, whereby various development proposals, as yet unbuilt, have stymied investment in the basic management and infrastructure needed by the traders to keep the site going. [1]

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Works are due to finally begin on the Victorian Fruit and Vegetable Market this year – after a six-year closure period – with a proposal for a retail market to include cafes, restaurants, and a public event space. [2] The Iveagh Markets, closed since 1996, is in an advanced state of dereliction, with no conclusion in sight to the legal wranglings over its ownership. [3]

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With a dearth of independent butchers, fishmongers, and greengrocers on the high street, the only viable option for most is the supermarket, which has consequences for choice, the environment and communities. There is a lack of real choice of fresh food options when compared to the options on offer from a specialist market provider. Market produce can be bought in the quantities needed by the customer and may be cheaper (for them) as a result, while cutting down on food waste and eliminating the need for the customary plastic packaging. Supermarkets also put consumers at a remove from the producers of the food they’re buying, whether those producers are situated on the other side of the world, or, if local, are financially squeezed by the big stores’ monopoly, with implications for fair pay and the environment.

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Which brings us to the critical value of markets as community spaces, especially when viewed in contrast to supermarkets. Critical urban geographer Sara Gonzalez notes that “Marketplaces also function as spaces for social interaction particularly for vulnerable groups and can promote fairer forms of consumption and production”. [4] Given that their locations are often in socially deprived urban areas, this interaction is particularly important to – often poorer, older – local residents who may be  from immigrant communities, and who derive enormous benefit from these spaces which are not driven purely by “capitalist profit but by reciprocal care, solidarity or cooperativism that benefit traders themselves but also users that gather around them”. [5]

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In recognition of the value that markets provide in relation to communities, sustainable food culture, and choice, much is happening in Europe with regard to their preservation and promotion, though the success or otherwise of these moves is contested. One view is that markets can be used as drivers of local regeneration, maintaining their traditional role as providers of everyday goods while diversifying their offering to cater for a wider range of shoppers and tourists, often with management or ownership transferred from municipal authorities to private companies and landlords. [6]

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The alternative view is that the redevelopment of these traditional markets focuses on affluent buyers and tourists, driving out existing traders and shoppers and leading to gentrification and displacement of poorer local residents, such as has happened at Brixton and Borough Markets in London and at La Boqueria and Santa Caterina Markets in Barcelona. [7]

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So, what can be done in an Irish context to help existing markets to flourish and encourage the establishment of new ones while ensuring that they continue to fulfil the everyday needs of local residents and do not fall victim to over-tourism?

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Retaining Dublin as an example, support from local authorities is needed to promote markets through establishing market-focused bodies with responsibility for developing an overall action plan, like the Institut Municipal de Mercats de Barcelona (IMMB). [8] Traders’ rights need to be protected, particularly in relation to providing long-term licenses to new and existing traders. Publicly-owned space must be provided on a long-term, secure basis, so that markets aren’t pushed out as soon as the land they operate on becomes a development opportunity for a private landlord, as happened to the Green Door Market. [9]

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By-laws should be considered to facilitate longer or more flexible opening hours in recognition of the fact that many people work during the day and would need to access the market early or late. Responsibility for the setting and collecting of rents should be kept with the local authority and pitched at a level to help vendors compete with supermarket prices. This would also prevent sudden and unsustainable rises coming from private owners, as happened at Brixton Market. [10]

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Local councils should work with market management to ensure that the mix of vendors meets local community needs and does not pivot towards a purely tourist offering. Basic infrastructure investment (water, electricity, internet, and WCs) is a minimum requirement, along with the refurbishment, construction and maintenance of built assets. While the focus here has been on a Dublin context, opportunities exist in other urban centres and historic market towns in Ireland, such as is happening in the new Thurles Market Quarter development underway in Tipperary.

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All of which is to say that the development of successful markets that serve an essential civic function is contingent on who gets to shape them, and for whose benefit. Ensuring that markets remain local amenities rather than just tourist spaces will require public ownership; democratic governance by traders with offerings aimed at and priced for local residents; secure tenure for vendors; infrastructure investment; and fair rent policies.

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In the particular is contained the universal, and so it is here. The issues relating to the making of successful and equitable markets that prioritise the needs of residents over the interests of tourists and private capital apply to Irish society more generally, not least in the realm of housing. And so perhaps there is an opportunity in the establishment of a framework for development and governance of marketplaces to provide guidance on how we might manage the bigger issues of our time.

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“My second body came to find my first body when the river flooded my house… the river was in my house but my house was also in the river.”

Excerpt from The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard

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‍The River Farset, which gave Belfast its name – Béal Feirste, meaning ‘Mouth of the Farset’ – was consumed by the city’s underbelly in 1848. Undone by the river’s own achievements in industrialising the Victorian town, this Venetian-style ferrier, cum public dumping ground, was shoved and rerouted into subterranean hollows. These sewer pipes forged new confluences between the Farset and its beneficiary, the River Lagan, who would accompany Belfast into its cityhood in 1888 only to be reacquainted with the dreary descendants of its donor’s builders in the twenty-first century.

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I have lived with the River Lagan, and all that comes with it, for some time now; the viridescent shopping trolley stench of low tide; midwinter starling murmurations; gaudy, palm tree shaped wayfinding; and Buckfast bottles on the towpath tongue tied by adolescents asking what music I am listening to – Chappell Roan is always the right wrong answer. Together we are residents of the timeless ‘Climate Change Floodplain’ marked by the Department of Infrastructure’s (DfI) ‘Flood Maps NI’ that brings the river into my house and suspends my rental bed in the public riverbeds of the Lagan.

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I enjoy my current proximity to the river but I am reminded of these perils when they reposition the ‘Flood Defence Works’ blockades on what has become a bi-monthly basis. I am always reassured, however, by DfI’s efforts proudly cable-tied to silver trespass-friendly hoarding that reads: “£18m Belfast Tidal Flood Alleviation Scheme (BTFAS): Delivering a scheme of works that will provide a long term approach to tidal flood risk management for over 1500 properties in Belfast.”

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‘BTFAS’ represents an imperative and decisive need to once again reconsider and reconfigure our relationship with the city’s arterial waterways. The scheme’s single-solution intervention, however, unfortunately speaks of a form of urbanism not unknown to Belfast. Offering a discontinuous, tunnel-visioned wall, this ‘Flood Defence Barrier’ ties together binary conceptions of climate challenges facing the city with the very attitudes and approaches that built the Farset’s tunnels - all put in motion by a quick unlearning of what it means to build walls and barriers in Belfast.

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Elsewhere in Europe, cities are dismantling such infrastructure in favour of diversified nature-based solutions while we are reminded that our new £18m brick-clad concrete wall only grants us a false sense of built security until 2080, at best. One might forgive this ‘necessary evil’ should its offering to the public realm and towpath be marked by generosity, a seat here and there perhaps, yet even the steeply pitched coping slabs prohibit the pleasures of sitting down.

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The decision to mirror the brick of my home – and the 1500 others like it – in its public facing facade is an interesting one: simultaneously working to flatten city-river relations through what now feels like a privatised throughway, while also suggesting a sense of always having been there, alongside the compendium of bodies that shape our shared material milieu.

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I am sure these deliberations have concrete answers, but sometimes when I traverse the sections of the wall that lie underground, perforations permitting pitiful access to the river, I wonder who might raise these occlusions should the tide swim up to meet us. Has the nursery 200m from my doorstep been granted the agency to act on this suggested inevitability, or must it await the department's designated keyholder coming up the Lagan in a bubble?

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I am relieved to have been asked better, muddier questions by an assemblage of steel staging and rope drifting up the Lagan on a floating public pavilion. Designed by architects OGU and MMAS in collaboration with sound artist Matilde Meireles, DRIFT asks how dissolving the neat boundaries we draw around ourselves, and the city, might better deal with the complexity of living with, and on, the water.

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Funded through cultural channels not typically reserved for advancing architectural production in the city as part of ‘Belfast 2024’, this project is not bound to offering the bricky certainty of our Flood Defence Barrier; rather, it takes form through knots and scaffold couplers, held together by that which remains uncertain: our right to be on, in, beside, and with the River Lagan. Unlike its £18m peer, however, DRIFT mirrors the river’s temporality to grant its waters – and those it sustains – agency in responding to such rhetoric.

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Re-presenting the Lagan’s undulating surface as site, the project rests on a system of three pontoons that unfasten the city’s quays from the water’s edge. In its counterweighted greys and blues, DRIFT resists visual and ideological camouflage, instead inhabiting the complex material interdependencies and vulnerabilities between the river and its receding urban peripheries.

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I once fell into the River Lagan – before its banks were fenced off – when I spotted a harbour seal by the Weir Bridge. It was then, as Daisy Hildyard puts it, that my second body came to meet my first, reacquainting me with the waters that quenched my thirst, washed my feet and dishes, flushed the sewers, and returned to wet my waist. Towed downstream to inhabit such tidal ecologies, DRIFT’s pontoons invite us to experience these private and public lives of the Lagan, and their entanglement with our own – Meireles’ collaged soundscapes unfolding beneath folded white linens sparing us the niceties of embodied submersion.

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Now disassembled, it is these curated temporal intimacies that continue to ripple and breed new forms of publicness in the city; watery writing groups and kinetic kiosks that have emerged in its wake to turn toward the river and explore its duality as both site and more-than-human subjectivity.

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In this sense, DRIFT punctuates its cladded-concrete counterpart with leaky perforations that mirror its own. In the end, neither contains nor resolves. What the Lagan’s walls present as a unidirectional, government-led prerogative, however, DRIFT quietly renders everybody’s business. It is this collectivising – this knotting of the individual with the natural, socio-cultural, and built bodies of the river – that sets vital terms and conditions. For these troubled waters demand an architectural climate praxis better attuned to the coalescing boundaries, interdependencies, and agencies that allow, limit, and negotiate change.

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Perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, our peatlands are an active cultural landscape. [1] Liked or loathed, most people have experienced ‘a day on the bog’, [2] time spent with neighbours and extended family that has created a strong emotional tie to peat cutting. The state has encouraged this too: the establishment of Bord na Móna in the 1940s created whole new communities, building housing and fostering economic development. [3] Coupled with the economic necessity of a cheap fuel source, a desire to be self-sufficient, and the sense that a way of life is being brought to an end without consultation, significant resistance to peatland restoration has emerged in the midlands.

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Ireland’s peatlands contain 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon, [4] but 1.9 million tonnes are lost every year as drained, exposed peat releases stored carbon into the atmosphere. [5] Left alone, the peatlands would continue to contribute hugely to our carbon emissions, and fragile, scarce habitats would continue to vanish. Doing nothing is not an option. Restoration requires huge work: drains to be blocked and filled, invasive species to be removed, sphagnum inoculation, and monitoring of biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions. People are needed.

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However plans for much of the peatlands see rewilded landscapes combined with wind or solar energy parks powering data storage. [6] These futures show the bog returned to an imagined natural state, a depopulated wilderness, all trace of its unique industrial heritage removed. It would become a place devoid of people, aside from those passively using the bog as a recreational amenity.

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Against this narrative of wilderness stands a history of vernacular architecture and construction in the bog. Relatively unsuited to human beings, bogs have forced us to employ technology, tools, and architecture whenever we encounter them. The nature of that construction can tell us about our changing relationship to these landscapes.

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Throughout prehistory, timber toghers (causeways), platforms, and crannogs were built in the bogs. The toghers sometimes crossed the bog, but often stopped abruptly in the middle. It has been speculated that as well as a means of crossing from one side to the other, they may have provided access for foraging, or even spiritual labour, many toghers contain or are surrounded by ritual deposits. [7]

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There is also much documentary evidence of Irish society’s changing relationship with the bog over the past 200 years. Accounts of people evicted from their houses finding temporary refuge on the bog are common; houses built from the barest of materials: the turf itself, brushwood, and sometimes even using the facebank of the bog as a rear wall. [8] Photographs from the nineteenth century onwards show woven creels and slide cars, turf barrows, footings, clamps and ricks. [9] Carefully assembled, temporary constructions for the processing of the turf as fuel.

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From independence onwards, the government sought to use the bogs as an indigenous source of fuel, and for economic development of rural areas, finally establishing Bord na Móna in 1946. This period saw the bog itself transformed as a built artefact, a rural-industrial landscape of parallel peat fields and deep drains, a network of railways connecting to power stations and factories, workers’ housing and facilities, huge chimneys and cooling towers visible for miles around. Irreparable damage was done to the bog, but a physical legacy of a unique industrial vernacular was created, much of it now threatened or sadly already gone. [10]

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The architecture of the peatlands is ingenious and economical, made from the materials at hand, and often designed to be easily dismantled or moved. It reveals that our presence on the bog is temporary, peripatetic, but at times it has also been a place of a place of refuge. We are guests of the bog. But for the most part we have also come to the bog to work, to forage it, or cut it for fuel, our relationship with the bog is defined by labour.

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It is difficult to imagine a future where whole communities are again employed by the bog, but it is not difficult to imagine one where they maintain their emotional relationship and physical connection to the landscape. Across the midlands, community groups are engaging with one another and discussing ways to maintain their stake in their bogs, many are fully aware of the contradiction they face in trying to preserve the bog for future generations while still cutting it for economic or emotional reasons. Some are forming meitheals to engage in the work of peatland restoration and citizen science, importantly they seek to continue active roles in the stewardship of their bogs.

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These are inventive and ingenious communities. At the outset of industrial harvesting, technology and expertise from across Europe was brought in, loanwords like ‘ganger’, ‘bagger’, ‘haku’, and ‘peco’ became part of a midlands vernacular, the imported technologies and machinery were reproduced and transformed in the Bord na Móna workshops to respond to the needs of specific landscapes and times.

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The labour of the bog was supported by social spaces created by the workers, buildings known officially as ‘production centres’ are colloquially known as ‘tea centres’, likewise the mobile staffrooms on rails or sleds known as ‘tea huts’. These objects, sitting somewhere between machine and building, are made simply and directly using the materials and techniques available in the workshops, the design language of industry was domesticated by the workers, with spaces for sitting by a stove, making tea and frying sausages. [11] Regional variation emerged, with some structures common on the Longford / Roscommon bogs being unknown in Offaly.

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Can this vernacular architecture be transformed from an agent of the exploitation of the bog, to an agent for its restoration? The truth that restoration of the peatlands will be labour intensive suggests that it could be. The communal nature of this work will require social and support spaces as peat harvesting before it did. Spaces for communities to gather that might partly replace the social function that peat harvesting currently provides; places for shelter for those visiting the bog or to safely pass through it; places that make space for people; and secure our bogs as living cultural landscapes.

The idea that politicians will manipulate or misrepresent data to paint a favourable picture, as seen at last November’s election when multiple government ministers claimed 40,000 houses would be built in 2024, knowing full well that was nigh-on impossible, is nothing new. Back in the 1960s, new houses were counted when any grants due were paid, and on becoming the new minister with responsibility for housing, Neil Blaney made sure housing grants were paid under his tenure and not the previous incumbents, so he could claim credit for houses started and finished before he was in office. That’s politics, and often housing, one of the most political of policy areas.

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Sixty-odd years later, data is still being misused and abused. In some ways, it is more worrying now as data increasingly informs policy (a good thing), but the data is often not independent, nor rigorous in its production (not so good).

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When tackling the issue of housing completions, it is important to note that since the 1970s we now count a new house when it is connected to the electricity grid. The issue here is that housing is most often connected to the electricity grid long before it is finished, and so it could be up to a year before the ‘connected’ house is ready to occupy. Neither does being connected to the electricity grid mean it is legal to occupy – that status is only conferred on receipt of a Certificate of Compliance on Completion (a ‘Completion Cert’).

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So, housing completion numbers are nine to twelve months ahead of themselves. 2024’s 30,300 ‘completions’ will come on stream for occupation all through 2025, and maybe even into 2026. Our completions aren’t really complete.

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Indeed, we are lucky we are counting houses properly at all. Until 2017, the Department of Housing had been overcounting the number of new houses being completed in the country by up to 58%. New electricity connections had been including every “warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse” – to misquote Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive – as well as actual houses. Defending his overzealous officials, the Minster at the time said: “All I can do is use the same methodology that we’ve always used” [1], which was untrue.

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Under his successor, Eoghan Murphy, it was discovered that the officials knew all along the numbers were overestimated when he asked them to calculate more accurate statistics –  “Yes, but the right figure will show fewer new houses, Minister.”

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There are question marks hanging over a lot of other data too. Are we really short 484,000 new houses in Ireland, or some 22% of the current housing stock, as per a recent report from Hooke and MacDonald, the estate agents whose main business is selling apartments? Why do we count density per hectare in terms of the number of housing units (e.g. eighty per hectare) instead of number of bedspaces, which is a much better metric as it focuses on the number of people being accommodated. The answer, of course, is that more units generate more rental income, and increasing bedspace density would mean having to build larger apartments, thus reducing the income-generation potential of developments.

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Will more supply bring down house prices? No, it never has, as supply is only a small part of house price inflation – interest rates and wages are much bigger drivers. Should it really cost €590,000 to build a two-bedroom apartment? Councils do it for an average of €345,000.

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Do we really need €20 billion a year of international investment in the Irish housing system, most of which will be used to build apartments solely for rent? This is a typology few want for a plethora of reasons (poor construction and challenging owners management issues, for example), and a tenure about which the Department of Housing’s own research contradictorily found 86% of non-home owners aged 25-49 want to be home-owners? Homeless numbers bizarrely only count those with some form of a roof over their heads, and also exclude 3,500 homeless international protection applicants.

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According to the Central Statistics Office, Ireland had 163,433 vacant houses at the last census in 2022. According to GeoDirectory, a commercial database company set up by An Post and Tailte Éireann, there are less than half that number – at just over 82,000 empty houses. That is quite the difference, and yet attempts to understand this difference by looking at GeoDirectory’s methodology (the CSO’s is publicly available) are difficult as they don’t release it. Yet it is the GeoDirectory number that ministers cite when they want to underplay their lack of progress in tackling vacant housing for many years now.

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This is all fun and games for housing data nerds, but it is also highly risky. A lot of panic-inducing common narratives are provably untrue (e.g. RPZs don’t work), yet still recited ad nauseum by wilfully or otherwise naive politicians and other commentators, and are sometimes found influencing housing policy. Claims that tens of thousands of housing units were held up by judicial review led to legally dubious sections in the new Planning and Development Act. Claims that it is simply not viable (whatever that means) to build apartments has led to subsidies of up to nearly €250,000 per apartment [2]. Claims that we are short an untold number of apartments will lead to further wooing of international money; and so on. All of this comes at a cost, not always financial.

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Policy then becomes policy for those with political access, investors, and other overseas landlords, not policy for decent housing. Ireland’s official housing document, ‘Housing for All’, becomes ‘Housing for the Top One Per Cent’, as like in all good housing crises, the political and lobbyists answer to a housing crisis is yet more luxury housing.

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In the absence of a meaningful response from the state, the private sector has the state over a barrel. Housing policy will never succeed when its foundations are wobbly.

A town stretches itself towards fields beyond. At its edge, a low, long building is beached parallel to a road that heads away, towards somewhere else. Marooned in a sea of tarmac, the building’s facade is repetitive. Windows reveal the backside of photo frames and potted plants. A large sign at the gate proclaims the building’s function. Its aged residents listen to the drone of passing traffic.

At another end of a town, identical low-pitch warehouses hold production lines of pharmaceutical and engineering innovations, small businesses, and product showrooms. One building in their midst marks its difference by solid fencing painted brightly to look like giant multi-coloured pencils. At regulation height, the fence conceals one-, two-, and three-year-olds as they play in the narrow space between it and the rectangular-box building. Their squeals spill over the fence.

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A town. Any town. Many towns. Such scenarios repeat.

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Within these nursing homes, crèches and early years centres, there are incredible nurses, carers, minders, and educators supporting the needs of our youngest and oldest citizens. Their commitment is humbling, their contribution to their communities often greatly undervalued [1]. A profound shift has, over decades, taken place in terms of formerly intergenerational relationships of care, likely due to society being tied by the structures and priorities of capitalism. Our built environment reinforces this separation of generations with institutional typologies that silo us in terms of age and mobility, at either end of our lives, the stages at which we are potentially most vulnerable. Whilst this might make sense for many rational reasons, in this separation of old from young, we have lost something of what it means to be human.

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We must question whether these built forms of care, located often at the edges of our settlements, are really the spatial models that we wish to replicate again and again and again. How, instead, can architects, urban designers, and planners generate proposals to enable clients, governments, and citizens to recognise that in the built environment there is so much potential for the establishment of alternative scales and spatial relationships in how we care for our youngest and oldest. Whilst there are notable well-designed examples of care facilities, all doing tremendous work, we seem to be somewhat unquestioningly translating commercially viable, increasingly larger models of care provision into monolithic building types. The rate of closure of smaller and medium-sized nursing home and childcare providers, often family-run, is concerning [2]. The vulnerability of the nursing home typology was highlighted, with profound trauma, during the recent pandemic and, as Fintan O’Toole recently reminds us, we must not forget this so readily [3]. Indeed, it is welcome to note that in the 2023 Draft Design Guide for Long-Term Residential Care Settings for Older People the Irish Government commits to “supporting older people to remain living independently in their own homes and communities for longer” [4], and recommends the household model of long-term residential care, with maximum twelve residents per household [5].

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This is a time when Ireland’s ageing population is projected to continue rising for the next three decades [6]. It is a time where childcare providers are under sustained pressure and can barely match the demand for places. It is a time where the government’s Town Centre First policy aims to “regenerate” town centres [7]. The opportunity is ripe for an integrated approach.

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There are emerging examples of relationships between such care settings. Here and there in Ireland, preschooler groups make weekly visits to their nearby nursing home in a pedagogical strategy known as intergenerational learning [8]. Research from the US notes that the co-location of childcare and elder care helps “both generations thrive” [9]. The work undertaken by the two-year “TOY – Together Old and Young” project, across seven European countries including Ireland, facilitated “young children and senior citizens learning and developing in intergenerational community spaces” [10]. The built environment could facilitate these fruitful exchanges more easily. This text, then, is a call for spatial and design leadership to explore, develop, and promote the potential of this intertwining and integration. Both childcare and elderly care are understandably highly regulated sectors. To bring these care settings together or alongside one another into a new architectural typology – a model approach that could be replicated across towns, villages, and city neighbourhoods – a vision is needed that looks beyond the inevitable challenges that must be overcome. Architectural design is well placed to explore and develop such a vision, a blueprint that can be worked towards through policy and planning shifts. A professional design ideas competition could be one such starting point, as could advanced university design studios, each accompanied by public exhibition, publication, and advocacy.

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As babies and young children, our small worlds incrementally expand. In our older age, most often, our worlds gradually shrink. At either end of this circle of life, our encounters with one another, then, are more pronounced, more significant. The sense of touch has profound healing capacity: holding the hand of an older person, hugging a distressed toddler. Staying present. Taking time. Thus, though physical needs may be wildly different, for a number of years at our youngest and our oldest ages, like the intersections of a Venn diagram, there are substantive parallels in our social needs.

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The simplest encounters may make for the richest shared intergenerational experiences: observing the daily passing routes of a local cat or fox. Counting the dots on a die and the squares on the board to the next ladder or snake. Playing the role of customer at a make-believe café. Tending, together, to the cultivation of flowers and vegetables. Hearing, when confined to lying in bed, the sounds of playing and chattering. Watching. Listening. Trusting.

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Enabling such opportunities on a regular basis offers a sense of purpose to both age groups. For older people, the anticipation of each next encounter with non-judgemental, imaginative, and endlessly curious young children is a powerful stimulus. For the youngest, these exchanges develop instinctive compassion for others from childhood. We can make design decisions so that, even at intimate scales in urban contexts, occupants young and old are facilitated to sustain deep connections with the more-than-human world, ensuring its natural cycles are perceptible in long-term residential environments for older people and in long-hours daycare for young children.

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The Dutch typology of the hofje, typically “a collection of identical cottages grouped around a communal garden” or urban courtyard, “built with private capital, originally to provide free housing for the elderly poor who could no longer provide for themselves” [11] is a beautiful fusion of social purpose and architecture, and an example that could inform this intergenerational proposal.

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Through adjustments in Irish policy and planning, and with thoughtful design across all scales, keeping generations visible and connected at the centre of our towns and neighbourhoods would, via the ordinariness of the everyday, harness the potential of the built environment to foster empathy, the core of our humanity.  

Bloom Lane, situated off Ormond Quay and near the Jervis Shopping Centre, is Dublin City's unofficial Italian district. A perfect example of a previously ignored alleyway working hard to reinvent its function and impact on the surrounding urban landscape, Bloom Lane is pedestrianised, with properties on both sides. Bloom Lane is an excellent example of an alleyway that has transformed from a practical passageway into a dynamic public space with a cultural appeal.

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The 'Italian Quarter', was originally designed as part of an urban regeneration project on the 'decaying northern quays'. The development maintained the facade of an older building while the frontage was cut through to construct a pedestrian access route running from the Millennium Bridge through the Italian Quarter to a zebra crossing that connects to the rest of the Millennium Walkway and the Jervis stop on The Luas Red Line. Bloom Lane has been revitalised through the use of public art, careful lighting, and clever design.

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Today, the lane stands out as a creative area in the city thanks to its vivid street artwork and colourful paintings. In addition to making the neighbourhood more attractive, these artistic features give it a distinct personality that draws people on foot and promotes exploration. The installation of expansive murals and public art, which gives the area vitality, marked the beginning of Bloom's Lane's makeover. These vibrant, eye-catching pieces of art transform the alley into an outdoor gallery, providing local artists with a platform and visual stimulation for onlookers. By giving the alley a unique character, the artwork transforms it from a plain backstreet into a renowned example of urban inventiveness, that draws both locals and tourists to the area, making it a destination rather than just a shortcut.

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Bloom Lane highlights how, with the proper interventions, even modest, underutilised places in congested urban settings can be transformed into assets that work hard and add to the city's cultural and visual appeal. Bloom Lane thrives because it strikes a balance between aesthetics, usefulness, and community interaction. This transformation of an ordinary alley into an inspirational location demonstrates how small-scale urban interventions can have a big impact. Imaginative design can make even the most ignored streets work hard for the city and its residents.

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On the other hand, across the Liffey, Exchange Street Lower, near Temple Bar and Essex Quay/Wood Quay in Dublin's city centre, is a public place that falls short of its potential, despite its prominent location, and the cultural and historical value of its surroundings. The street is disappointing due to poor design, neglect, and missed opportunities. This alleyway lacks individuality, with a dreary and utilitarian style that fails to capture the liveliness of its surroundings. Compared to the bustling and distinct atmosphere of adjacent districts, it feels generic, with no unique features or undefined architectural elements to catch attention or engage passersby.

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Adjacent restaurants attempt to activate the route's courtyard with outdoor seating. The courtyard, a hidden space with potential, remains disconnected and underutilised, further emphasising the need for cohesive planning. Other efforts such as The Báite Viking longboat – a unique feature that hints at the potential for the street to connect more deeply with Dublin’s rich history and culture, via an artistic installation that draws upon the city’s Viking heritage – remains a point of pride and intrigue for both locals and tourists. However, much like the street itself, the longboat fails to engage its surroundings or the fleeting glances of those who wander.

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Despite its high traffic volume, Exchange Street Lower is hardly working, offering little to encourage visitors to stop and interact. The lack of greenery, benches, or other pedestrian-friendly amenities restricts its function to that of a shortcut rather than a destination. Exchange Street Lower represents a missed opportunity to connect key cultural landmarks in Dublin.

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Exchange Street Lower and Bloom Lane are both instances of Dublin's tiny urban areas. Bloom Lane demonstrates how small-scale, smart interventions – such as decent lighting, regular maintenance, and the introduction of public art – can transform an alley into a dynamic and engaging location. In contrast, Exchange Street Lower exemplifies the dangers of neglect and a lack of purpose, even in a desirable location. The striking contrasts between the two demonstrates the transformative power of design and investment in urban settings. Where Bloom Lane works hard to create value for the city, Exchange Street Lower rarely works, and remains an untapped asset waiting to be realised. Bloom Lane demonstrates how intelligent interventions may transform a space into a dynamic and engaging environment, while Exchange Street Lower is emblematic of neglect and wasted opportunities.

Whenever I visit a building my late grandfather Vincent designed, our past conversations resurface.

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Glasnevin Parish Church, Our Lady of Dolours, is nestled into a bend on the Tolka River. It sits close to the river's edge where Griffith Park meets the National Botanic Gardens. Two interlocking pyramidal forms – one slightly smaller than the other – define its distinctive silhouette. The stepped heights allowing a wash of light to enter a lofty internal volume. Today, the church stands as a familiar and reassuring presence, a quiet landmark within its suburban surroundings. As with many modernist buildings of its time, its completion in 1972 was met with contention and scepticism. [1]

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In post-war Ireland, church architecture was in transition. Following Vatican II (1962-1965), ecclesiastical architecture underwent a notable shift. Traditional ornamentation gave way to minimalist, modern spaces, defined by abstract iconography and an emphasis on community participation. The church was no longer just a place of worship, but a space designed to foster engagement and inclusivity. Glasnevin Parish Church was one of the first in Ireland to feature an integrated parish centre, reflecting this new community emphasis. The altar was allegedly centrally-sited so that no member of the congregation would be further than 100 feet (30 metres) from the celebrant. [2]

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One of the leading figures in this transformation was Liam McCormick, who designed some of the most celebrated modern religious architecture in Ireland. His influence on Glasnevin Parish Church is unmistakable. Liam had previously designed a series of sloped-roof churches surrounded by moats, similar to Glasnevin. In an coincidental twist, Glasnevin hosts one of McCormick’s non-religious commissions: the Irish Meteorological Office, completed just seven years after Our Lady of Dolours. It echoes the church’s pyramidal form, creating an unexpected dialogue between two distinct, yet interconnected, structures.

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At first glance, I can enjoy Glasnevin church simply as it is: an open, unembellished space—calm, uncomplicated. The low-level brickwork walls lining the perimeter feel sturdy and grounded, while above, an expansive panelised soffit glows with reflected daylight. The architecture speaks in a measured, deliberate tone, revealing its rationale with quiet confidence.

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Then, the conversation begins – part memory, part projection. I recall that the exposed brick walls were a pragmatic choice, selected to minimise flood damage from the nearby river. The expressive I-beams anchoring each corner were not stylistic, but rather an efficient way to secure the structure to solid bedrock. Even the panelised soffit, with its rhythmic repetition, is made of inexpensive cement fiberglass boards, chosen for their acoustic performance and fire resistance.

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It strikes me now how straightforward and accessible my grandfather’s approach to architecture was. Every design decision was rooted in engineering logic, the artistry is in the careful assembly of the elements.

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Our Lady Seat of Wisdom at UCD Belfield was, remarkably, designed and constructed as a temporary structure in 1969. [3] It was commissioned by the Dublin Diocese, not University College Dublin itself, which was the cause for some student protest at its opening. Despite its intended impermanence, the modest church remains, quietly integrated into the campus landscape. When it first opened, during the transition period of Vatican II, news coverage referenced conflicting rituals: "the altar has been designed in such a way that mass can be celebrated either facing the congregation or in the more traditional way". [4]

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In contrast to Glasnevin, Belfield’s church is low-lying and unobtrusive, its simple octagonal form presenting a consistent facade from all sides. The roof gently pitches from post to post, revealing a continuous clerestory, while a short steeple rises modestly from the centre. Considering its requirement for quick assembly and disassembly, the church follows many principles of modular design, employing standardised components that repeat within each segment. This approach gives the structure the clarity of a kit of parts, where each element is distinct yet contributes to a cohesive whole. A unique aesthetic emerges from the linear joint lines wrapping the interior, reinforcing the sense of order and rhythm.

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When a building’s tectonics are honest and on display, its structural elements become an essential part of its identity. The act of exposing all the building components fosters a deeper connection to craftsmanship and tells a story of the construction. This honesty invites a conversation between the designer and the observer: every structural decision and material choice is laid bare, to be read, interpreted, appreciated, or debated. In this way, the church becomes a space where past and present intersect.

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Learning from the rational, problem-solving approach in both churches has been invaluable to my own understanding of architecture and approach to design. Viewing architecture through the lens of engineering fosters collaboration; it reframes architectural design not as an aesthetic layer, one to be sacrificed for value engineering, but as an integral response to performance needs.

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When architecture and engineering are approached as a shared effort, unexpected solutions emerge. Rather than instructing a collaborator to execute a predetermined idea, I have found it far more rewarding to ask, “What can be done?” rather than “Can you do this?”. When we foster shared ownership of design across disciplines, new avenues for exploration and innovation open up, ones that might otherwise remain undiscovered.

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For me, these moments of engagement with architecture echo past discussions with my grandfather. Both Glasnevin Parish Church and Belfield’s Church serve as touchpoints – silent but enduring lessons in design and craftsmanship. I am grateful for their presence, each visit offering an opportunity to pick up where we left off in our conversations.

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Ireland is one of the most expensive places in Europe to build a home. Materials and labor have been outpacing inflation since the 1990s. Irish apartments are now subject to rules so strict that they’re the second most expensive in Europe [1] to construct. On top of these high construction costs, there's another factor weighing on prices: the cost of basic infrastructure – water pipes, roads, community parks – that new residents end up footing. I want to talk about how spreading the costs more fairly could benefit everyone, not just newcomers.

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Historically, local authorities used to pay for infrastructure through a combination of national grants, commercial rates, and domestic rates, which had been in place for decades. In 1978, though, the Local Government (Financial Provisions) Act removed domestic rates. That decision effectively ended the system where water and other utilities were funded by the public as a whole. Today, first-time buyers and renters shoulder a heavier share of the bill.

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Take water connections as an example. Uisce Éireann manages and maintains Ireland’s water infrastructure and is overseen by the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities. In principle, it receives the bulk of its budget from central government. However, under the Planning and Development Act 2000, new developments also pay a Section 48 levy to local authorities and a separate water connection charge to Uisce Éireann itself. Of the agency's total funding in 2024, about €72 million [2] came directly from new domestic connections. And much of these charges are passed onto first-time buyers and renters.

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The most recent iteration of Uisce Éireann charges come from the 'Shared Quotable Rebate' (SQR) system. It was introduced to address the ‘first mover disadvantage’, where a developer faced with the cost of building water infrastructure is deterred by the high upfront cost. The SQR tries to fix that by offering partial rebates to the initial investor if later developers connect to the same infrastructure. Unfortunately, it does so by shouldering the first mover with significant upfront costs.

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Increasing the upfront cost of delivering homes decreases housing supply by discouraging investment in housing, a point firmly made by the Report of the Housing Commission. It makes investment in housing riskier than it already is and that is something Ireland cannot afford. The Department of Finance [3] says that to deliver 50,000 homes a year, approximately €16.9 billion would be required from private capital sources. Making that investment riskier by increasing the upfront cost will inevitably result in fewer homes.

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Underpinning all of this is a question of fairness: why should people who don’t yet own a home pay more for water or roads than those who have lived in the area for decades? A more promising path is to spread these essential costs across all residents through local property taxes, much as local authorities did before 1978 through domestic rates. Reintroducing that broader tax base doesn’t just solve a moral dilemma; it also supports a more robust approach to financing critical infrastructure.

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When the burden of infrastructure is shared, builders can invest more confidently in new homes. That means more projects can move forward, and the houses or apartments that get built are more affordable than they would be under the current system. Lower home prices, in turn, make it easier for first-time buyers to enter the market.

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Such a shift also creates a better incentive structure for local authorities and residents. With a broader property tax base, local governments can collect predictable and reliable revenues from both existing and newly built homes. They would have a stronger reason to champion growth in their communities – because every new project would predictably contribute to the overall fiscal health of the community. Rather than relying on upfront fees which slow down development, property tax revenues grow as developments fill up. Revenues can then be reinvested in better roads, public spaces, and social services, further enhancing the area’s appeal and attracting more residents and businesses, creating a win-win for local residents and newcomers.

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Sharing the costs of infrastructure across all taxpayers isn’t just about fairness (although it is about that). It is about making the incentives of development align toward shared prosperity. The payoff is a virtuous cycle in which everyone – newcomers and existing residents alike – benefits from a healthier housing market and a better-resourced public realm.

Already functioning as a successful reuse of an old industrial infrastructure without any intentional architectural intervention, the Royal and the Grand Canals are likely our largest, and certainly longest, public spaces in the city. From the moment the sun emerges in spring, to late autumn, they bustle with activity, hosting commutes, walks, runs, and late-night gatherings. These truly vital spaces were gifted to the city by the cyclical nature of industrial change.  Decommissioned, they have persisted throughout the success and decline of Dublin, fostering public social space which is increasingly rare within the stoic red-brick city centre. Our canals offer roots from which civic and cultural spaces may grow.

A reflection from John Banville’s Dublin memoir, Time Pieces, illustrates the canals’ enduring appeal:

“… by the canal at Lower Mount Street Bridge and watched a heron hunting there beside the lock . .. I told her I loved her, but she closed her eyes and smiled, with her lips pressed shut.”[1]

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Dubliners display a love for their city on these banks every summer, and yet it goes on unrequited. Public spaces adjacent to the Grand Canal such as Portobello Square and Wilton Park are being eroded by speculative demand, despite their evident popularity in a city thirsty for space. Portobello Square is a rare open public square directly abutting the canal, so intensely popular at times that the authorities see no other crowd control option but to physically impede the public from occupying it. In 2021, Portobello Square was boarded up and temporarily privatised in return for an investment in its redevelopment.[2] This was a convenient alignment of interests, as the space had also been fenced off the previous year to prevent anti-social activity.

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The Grand Canal’s banks often do not inspire hope in the here and now, instead becoming a discomforting reflection of our town and country. The most recent fencing off of the canal to prevent its occupation by unhoused asylum seekers [3] proved unpopular, not solely for its inhumanity, but also its cost. Hope, however, lies within this provocation; the moment of inflection should be seized to offer a new scale of social and cultural infrastructure to the city. The canals are crying out for rejuvenation through a top-down shift in thinking, to irrigate the city with public cultural spaces, foster more pace for unexpected encounters and more feed for the friction and forum that cities are ultimately about. Another greenway won’t activate the canals’ multitudinous potential to invigorate their dense urban surroundings.

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Plans released by Waterways Ireland at the beginning of this year set out to enhance public seating, increase accessibility, and combine two existing narrow pathways to form one wider path.[4] Unfortunately, these proposals fall short of the ambition these urban spaces so desperately need. Combining pathways may optimise the space as a liminal venue of commute, yet may equally alienate those who use the bank as a space for slower, un-programmed occupation. Addressing the challenge of these banks’ inability to support year-round activity within their current footprint seems quite the daunting task.

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The canals would benefit from receiving intentional interventions beyond their immediate banks to amplify their use. Where possible, the tarmac roadways lining the canal banks should be reappropriated in service of the canal corridor, providing and connecting into adjacent cultural spaces. In King’s Cross in London, a sculpted mediation of the streetscape down to meet the water’s edge becomes seating for an outdoor cinema during summers[5], and in Paris, new businesses are opening in alcoves along the Seine, unlocked by the riverside’s pedestrianisation.

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One thing has become abundantly clear, engagement in this issue should not be the sole task of Waterways Ireland. At minimum, council authorities should engage with W.I. to support their common ground. As it stands, similar to the redevelopment of Portobello Square, the current W.I. proposal for the Grand Canal’s banks involves a public private partnership, with IPUT Real Estate part-funding the works to the canal banks.[6] Unfortunately, investment of substantive urban change always seems to lie beyond the remit of the local authority, Dublin City Council.

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When the building of the Grand Canal was commenced by the Board of Inland Navigation almost 270 years ago, it was government founded, funded and led.[7] Dublin City was building much of what we now see as its most definitive urban fabric, public and private, at a time when architectural neo-classicism proliferated with bold metropolitan might. The Rotunda, Grattan Bridge, Parnell Square, and Gandon’s Customs House, are just some of the iconic city elements built in this time. Perhaps in our government’s present moment of liquid economic abundance, we should aspire to a new era of bold urban thinking; a new scale in what we demand from our city; and, ultimately, in what we propose that our city becomes. The canals are a good place to start. Their waterway function now secondary, the city should lean in, commit to the development of this deeply urban space, and allow the future of the canals to define Dublin anew.

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The innermost tip of the estuary is where the wild Atlantic Ocean meets the River Shannon, the body of water that shares its name with Ireland’s first new town. Building work on this new community began in the 1950s, with Shannon emerging as a symbol of the excitement and optimism, seeking to manifest the ambitions of the newly established Irish Free State. Envisioned as a ‘‘city of tomorrow", it attracted industries and factories from England, the United States and Europe, encouraged by the development of the nearby airport and Ireland’s first free trade zone in the nearby industrial estate. Architects Downes, Meades, and Robinson, along with town planner Frederick Rogerson, designed the town’s housing and infrastructure.

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I live in the Cronan Estate, at the end of the terrace, in a four bedroomed home that my grandparents moved into in January 1975. The most exciting part of Cronan is the layout and urban design. Architects traveled to Europe and England, looking at examples of innovative post-war housing developments, inspired by the seminal Garden City Movement that emerged in the early 1900s. This movement imagined built up urban centres surrounded by green belts, providing inhabitants access to nature while also dividing different civic spaces. Inspiration was also gathered from the Radburn Design developments, first implemented in New Jersey in the 1920s, taking an approach to planning that separated pedestrians and cars, creating distinct zones within housing developments with defined uses. This division of spaces is achieved by having the fronts of houses facing onto a shared green space while the backs are used for more functional purposes. In both of these examples there is a clear division, separating the green areas from the more functional built environment.

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Following these principles, in the Cronan estate, houses enjoy large green spaces at their fronts, with parking, roads and access installed to the rear. The front, the focus of the estate, is carefully designed so that it is working hard. The backspace by comparison is hardly working, a leftover space that over time has had to compensate for changes in use and increased spatial strain. This layout of greens along the front allows one to walk from one side of the estate to the other without crossing a road. This is replicated in many of the original estates in Shannon, creating a meandering pedestrian green band, with very few roads between. Through this well planned out organisation, these spaces flow into one another, as if the houses and greens naturally sat in perfect harmony from the beginning of time. They are working well, and for me, while growing up, it would have seemed inconceivable for the estate to be laid out differently.

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The low garden walls are the perfect height for my neighbours to sit and chat. When I dig up my garden at the start of the summer, people stop to chat, to talk about their own gardens; there is a pride in maintaining their fronts. Neighbours and local groups come together to maintain the greens, planting trees and flowers. The trees fill the views from my living room, allowing me to watch the seasons changing from within my home.

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The communal front areas are an extension of the home and gardens of the people living here. They provide a safe and inner sanctum, meaning that people feel at ease leaving their children to run outside. This outside space is working hard, and is an important space to the people of Cronan. When I was a child I would play at the front, sometimes running back through the alleyways, my feet clanging the metal manhole covers as I ran between the front and back of the houses. Lying in bed at night, I still hear the sound of someone travelling that same route, with the same loud clanging of the metal manhole echoing into the silence of the estate.

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The backs of the houses by comparison are hardly working, serving a more functional purpose, providing access to the roads and parking. The patchwork of well considered green areas and walkways along the front are a stark contrast to the backs that are formed by leftover space rather than intentional planning. The roads slink their way through the estate, allowing for cars as a mere afterthought.

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The back is where you park your car, unload groceries and dry your clothes. Neighbours work on their cars and people might sit outside on summer nights drinking. This space has many uses and functions. Between arguments over parking and the most direct route to the pub, this space is noisy and overused causing the backs of the houses to struggle to contain the noise leading to its overspilling.

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Part of the problem lies with the limited space designed for parking in the 1970s, with an increasing number of cars crammed into the small space. This is reflected in the changing materiality of these backlands over time. When the estate was in its infancy, small green spaces were peppered across the back with beech trees. Green was interwoven with the practical use of the space for parking and access, linking the two spaces through its shared materiality of the front. These spaces have been replaced with tarmac and concrete, strained by efforts to provide room to accommodate everyone. 

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This once vibrant public space has been sterilised. Still, it holds the potential to work hard to serve the needs of its residents each day. A return to its previous state is still possible, however, green spaces beside parking have recently been tarmaced over due to them being viewed as untidy. If these could be replanted with grass and trees, this small change would unite the front and backs again. Planting along the alleyways would further enforce this link and also help to improve biodiversity. These small changes would return the spaces to the original vision of the planners and architects of Shannon and in turn improve the quality of spaces for everyone, it would lead to a space that is able to work hard again.

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Contains Spoilers.

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The Brutalist was directed by Brady Corbet and written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold. Both were interested in the subject matter due to the parallels between film-making and architecting, in particular the challenges of aligning artists’ creative vision with the expectations of their patrons [1].

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Beginning in 1947, the saga spans decades, telling the immigration experience of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Jewish Hungarian-born architect. A holocaust survivor who emigrates to America, Tóth eventually comes to the attention of a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Van Buren’s commission for Tóth to design a multi-purpose community building initially seems a salvation. Through Tóth’s obsession and Van Buren’s greed, patronage eventually descends to exploitation.

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The making entailed nine years of dedication for Corbet and Fastvold (a gestation equal to many buildings). When initial budgets for €28 million made its realisation impossible in Hollywood, it was filmed in Hungary for an incredibly low budget of $10 million [2]. Production design was even hindered by material shortages from the Ukraine war. The entire 3-and-a-half-hour movie was filmed on a very tight schedule, a mere 33 days of shooting. It has been frequently compared to the film Oppenheimer, which had a budget of $100 million and was filmed in a brisk 57 days.

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Throughout the film, a number of storylines explore concepts of intent and narrative. When his cousin’s wife accuses László of improper advances, it changes his fortunes irrevocably. We never see evidence of this advance, like many key interactions in this film it is left open to our speculation. However, years later a distraught László references it, saying the allegations were invented because “they do not want us here,” despairing at his incapability to define the narrative as a Jewish immigrant to America. On numerous other occasions in the film, individuals fabricate stories to reflect an imagined or preferred reality [3].

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In the epilogue, we are presented with a similar question of authenticity. László’s niece Zsófia, who left America to become an Israeli citizen, presents a retrospective of his work at the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980. In her speech she reveals a significant insight: the architecture of the Van Buren Institute was a reinterpretation of the spaces her uncle experienced in the concentration camps. She claims he based certain spaces on rooms in Buchenwald, transforming them with soaring ceilings.

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Tóth watches on, wheelchair-bound and mute, as his niece states “I speak for you now”. It is left ambiguous if Zsófia’s version actually was his design intent [4]. She could be retrospectively applying a narrative to suit her world-view, placing Toth’s Jewish identity and trauma at the forefront of his design philosophy and success [5].

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We’re told her uncle allegedly outlined an apolitical architectural philosophy in his memoirs, his designs were: “machines with no superfluous parts… they indicate nothing. They tell nothing. They simply are”. This unsentimental outlook gives the second act of the film its name: The hard core of beauty, and the title and theory are lifted from a Peter Zumthor essay of the same name [6]. This is also consistent with one of Tóth’s monologues about architecture earlier in the film [7].

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Zsófia ends with a statement that seems to dismiss the creative process and design philosophy we’ve seen in the previous three and a half hours: “no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”

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The application of new interpretations outside of a creator’s control, transpositions of meaning, are commonplace in architectural history [8]. As one example, Brutalism, with its muscular, fortress-like forms, is sometimes today associated with federal dominance, even authoritarianism, or the destructive bluntness of urban renewal [9]. At its origin it was often a hopeful, utopian style with ambition to rebuild and rehouse from the rubble of war. The term brutalism originates from raw concrete, béton brut, not brutality. Some film critics have pondered if the ‘brutalist’ in this story is in fact the sinister Harrison Lee Van Buren, applying another new meaning to a brutalist.

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Despite receiving ten Oscar nominations, the film has prompted a negative reaction from some architects and architecture critics [10]. It takes many liberties with architectural history; the inaccuracies have been extensively described elsewhere [11]. Its portrayal of the architect as an uncompromising visionary, unwilling to work for others, is reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s problematic Howard Roarke in The Fountainhead. The film’s sombre, serious tone that has led some to incorrectly believe it is, at least partially, a true story [12].  Tied up with the complexities of artistic authorship is the expectation that a serious film like this has a responsibility to be accurate and realist, lest fiction be mistaken for fact.

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Many architects and architectural critics find Laszlo’s buildings as depicted unconvincing, particularly so the Van Buren Institute [13]. It is hard to judge the institute, as filmmakers had to be thrifty in how they shot it. Most scenes, for example, had to decide whether to focus solely on floor or ceiling. Only segments of the building were constructed as large-scale models, the rest replicated by computer generated imagery and implied off-camera [14]. A certain number of real sites were used around Budapest to complete the impression. The architecture of the institute is therefore not one thing, a holistic vision, but several fractured things. This portrayal through fleeting glimpses creates a suspense and mystique worthy of a marauding horror-movie monster. Similarly the more we see, the less captivating it becomes [15].  

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The lukewarm reception of the film’s architecture is all the more fascinating following revelations about its use of Artificial Intelligence. After controversy around the use of AI in post-production to enhance Brody and Jones’ Hungarian accents, an interview with production designer Judy Becker was unearthed. Becker stated that the film’s architecture consultant, Griffen Frazen, used the AI engine Midjourney to quickly create three Brutalist buildings for the film, at an early stage of development. A sample image provided in the article imitates hand-rendering in graphite or charcoal. Becker went on to explain “Now I will have these digital prints redrawn by an illustrator to create mythical buildings” [16]. Corbet has defended the collaboration and creativity of his team, stating that all renderings ultimately used were hand-drawn by artists. A24, however, released a statement that two digital renderings in the end sequence video were generated by AI [17].

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With the fleeting glimpses we see of Tóth’s other buildings, it would hardly be a surprise if generative AI was used, even as just a tool in their creation. The buildings appear clunky and varied, mostly resembling incomplete appropriations of brutalism and international-style buildings. These results would be typical of the nascent abilities of AI image generation during the film’s creation (it has already greatly advanced since). Their uncanny quality is reminiscent of what Neil Leach describes as “machine hallucinations” [18]. Familiar yet unfamiliar, they resemble both everything and nothing.  

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The Brutalist has generated a very rich debate and numerous interpretations (see articles referenced, the list grows daily). Ultimately the architecture in the film is a vehicle, almost incidental to the telling of the characters’ stories. Corbet was less interested in an exercise of faithfully recreating accurate historical architecture, his main intent with the buildings and spaces shown was to externalise the mind of his sullen protagonist [19]. Considering the time and budget constraints on the production, the selective use of AI could be argued as pragmatic.

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In terms of who defines the narrative around this film, it's unlikely that the architecture world’s unease with aspects of the film will have much impact. Its enormous success has allegedly generated a new appreciation for Brutalism outside architectural circles, at a time when its buildings are facing widespread erasure from public and private entities [20].

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If the film prompts audiences to visit and value the authentic work of architects in post-war America: Breuer, Gropius, Le Corbusier, Rudolph, Kahn, Saarinen, Goldberg, Pei, Yamasaki, Weese; even if one is sceptical of the journey, the destination will be worth it.

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When OpenAI launched ChatGPT-3.5 two years ago, there was a rush of speculation about the impact the new technology would have on the building professions. A collective sigh of relief soon followed as architects everywhere realised that prompting text-to-image tools produced far less convincing results than they could possibly have hoped for. For the time being, at least, human participation in the practice of architecture seemed assured.

Nevertheless, various other strands of AI-based technology will inevitably bear upon the way in which architects approach their work. This article suggests how a few of these advances are likely to influence the practice of the profession in the near, intermediate, and longer terms.

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The near term: less tedium

As things stand, according to findings published earlier this year by the RIBA and elsewhere, AI is already starting to make its mark on everyday architectural practice. Text-based large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini – easily accessible to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection – are already being employed to automate tedious and repetitive tasks. PDFs and Word documents containing data relevant to routine office operations, such as planning legislation and building regulations, can be uploaded directly to an LLM and searched with impressive speed for relevant and precise information. LLMs are also being used effectively to contribute to performance specifications and equipment schedules, as well as to assist in the preparation of technical reports.

In the sphere of visualisation, the limitations of text-to-image tools like DALL·E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, as well as Photoshop’s native AI tool, Firefly, have already been alluded to. These limitations mainly relate to the technology underpinning the generative process. Text-to-image generation is mostly performed using a technique called ‘diffusion’, where thousands, and sometimes millions, of images of existing buildings are scrutinised at the level of the individual pixel, and the data harvested from this process is then recombined to create a plausible representation of a building that does not actually exist (Fig. 2). The resulting image may, at first glance, appear to depict an architect-designed building but, as the technology that produces the image does not correspond to any of the human processes involved in architectural design, the resemblance is little more than superficial (at least, at the time of writing).

Much work in this area has been carried out by the French architect and machine learning engineer Stanislas Chaillou. For a fuller explanation of how text-to-image technology works, as well as a more favourable opinion of its capabilities, his book Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice is a good place to start.

While text-to-image technology has a long way to go, image-to-image tools can sometimes prove useful. The elegant line drawing to the left in Fig. 1, by Shay Cleary Architects, appeared quite recently on a cover of Architecture Ireland. A phone picture of this image was uploaded to an app called LookX, which very quickly translated it into something approaching a conventional 3D rendering. The text prompt used to generate the rendering was: ‘create a contemporary living room in a carefully restored Georgian house’. The image that appears on the right was a second iteration. It is easy to see how such a tool might come in handy in the tense few minutes before a client meeting.

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The medium term: agents and advanced CAD

If we characterise near-term AI as something akin to an office assistant, medium-term AI is more likely to resemble an office administrator.

For about a year now, the tech press has been heralding the arrival of what it refers to as AI’s ‘agentic era’, a phase that roughly corresponds to stage three of the framework for AI adoption famously hypothesised by OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman. In this approaching phase, we can expect AI tools to be specifically tailored to the ways in which architects, as individuals as well as in teams, actually work. A company called Anthropic recently gave us a flavour of how agentic AI might work. They have developed a feature where an AI app can be trained to, in a sense, take control of a computer and independently perform complex tasks such as booking flights, arranging project team meetings, or filing documents into rationally organised directories.

Over the coming months, we are also likely to see medium and larger practices migrate to increasingly sophisticated AI-enhanced CAD and BIM applications. Although officially launched in May 2023, Autodesk’s Forma is continuing to evolve in interesting ways. Forma allows architects to quickly model complex site conditions and then immediately simulate the impact that the local environment will have on a variety of site proposals.

An application called ARCHITEChTURES covers similar ground to Forma. However, in addition to providing massing solutions for complicated, multiple-use developments, ARCHITEChTURES does a credible job of proposing apartment plans from preliminary site layouts. The apartment plans it suggests are updated in real time as different site options are examined.

While Forma, ARCHITEChTURES, and a host of other very impressive apps are not purely AI-based, they combine advanced machine learning techniques with long-established parametric design approaches to simplify the most laborious and least rewarding aspects of the design process. Development in this area is advancing at pace, and we can expect a wide range of applications of this type to become part of the working environment in the coming months.

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The long term: area planning and design assistance

The longer-term impact of AI on the practice of architecture is, of course, far less predictable. Of the many areas where advances can be expected, two seem particularly ripe for consideration.

First, stepping momentarily outside the strict confines of the architect’s office, it is worth reflecting on the impact AI-related technologies will have on the broader building regulatory environment.

As an indication of what might be expected, the City of Los Angeles is using AI tools to speed up the process of reviewing planning applications. Its system uses algorithms to evaluate development proposals against the city’s zoning and land-use regulations. Cities like Austin, Toronto, Melbourne, and Singapore are innovating in broadly similar ways. Allowing for cultural and other differences, Irish planning authorities are likely to advance in a comparable manner, using AI technologies to assist with the preparation of development plans and design guidelines, as well as with the review of planning applications. Such a development would bring about a significant transformation in the design and construction environment; however, while it might suggest a more efficient and transparent process, it is easy to see how other complications could arise.

In the longer term, we can also realistically expect that AI will eventually start to reshape the creative process itself. As LLMs and other AI systems become more sophisticated and move beyond the diffusion technologies mentioned above towards more vector-based models, architects will be able to develop tools that examine and mimic their own personal design methodologies. In this scenario, an architect might upload drawings from previously completed projects to a specially trained AI model. This model would then scrutinise the uploaded material and assist the architect in refining and developing concepts for future projects in a manner complementary to the architect’s own design technique. It is a tantalising idea and well within the bounds of possibility.

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Concluding comments

In preparing an introductory piece about its emergence in the architectural profession, many interesting aspects of artificial intelligence, including some innovative applications to which the technology is already being applied, have, of necessity, been overlooked. Similarly, some important developments in the regulation of the technology have been ignored as well. These include what some might see as California’s emerging role as the world’s AI regulator-in-chief; recent EU legislation concerning the use of AI, as well as interesting critiques of this legislation by Stripe’s Patrick Collison, among others; the massive amounts of energy required to run LLMs, as well as the knock-on effect these requirements will have for the natural environment; the AI-related re-emergence of nuclear technology in the production of energy; and ethical issues around the training of LLMs. All these topics will have an important impact on how the practice of architecture develops in this country. We would do well to get the conversation going on these issues sooner rather than later.

Finally, while some in the profession remain fearful of the impact that AI will have on job security, others cleave to the more hopeful and, perhaps, more likely view that AI will actually put more control over the design process into the architect’s hands. The truth is that it is too early to say what the overall impact of the technology will be. All we can realistically do for now is stay ahead of developments and take advantage of their benefits.

Curated by Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli, the Portuguese pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibited photographs of Alvaro Siza meeting, in their homes, inhabitants of housing he had designed, many decades earlier, in various European cities. It included Schilderswijk in The Hague, designed between 1984 and 1993 for immigrants from Turkey, Morocco, Cape Verde, and Suriname. The design process of Schilderswijk included the construction of full-scale models to demonstrate Siza's plans to future inhabitants and to solicit their feedback. Resulting layouts include a sliding door that enables the apartments’ living spaces to be divided into public and private zones – the latter providing a realm into which Muslim women can retreat. Recognising, listening to, and designing for ‘the other’, at Schilderswijk Siza created housing that could be inhabited in multiple ways.

When, during construction, he was invited to present the project in the Berlage Institute, a conversation ensued that can be analysed through De Carlo’s triad of publics [2]. The presentation itself was addressed to an architectural public. A member of this first public, Herman Hertzberger, pointed to the second – the client. Siza’s housing in The Hague was commissioned by a city council engaged in the urban renewal of a district in which 46% of the population originated from outside Europe (rising to 93% by 2016) [3]. Hertzberger objected to Siza’s spatialisation, within Dutch social housing, of traditions at odds with that nation state’s ambivalence towards cultural, religious and gender differences. He evoked a homogeneous welfare state coming to an end; Siza had been approached by a local council deliberately seeking out an architecture open to immigrants’ requirements. At stake within the conversation was the architect’s responsibility to these immigrants, the project’s instantiation of De Carlo’s third and most elusive public: buildings’ users. Often unknowable to the client, it is a public with whom, in ways that range from the sincere to the performative, architects occasionally overtly engage in discussions about architecture. However, it is simultaneously a public with whom, through their design of ordinary environments, architects habitually engage, in an indeterminate, intimate manner.

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During his 2016 visit to Schilderswijk, Siza met its original residents, but also newcomers; people he could have encountered during his participative workshops, but also people unborn when he was designing the scheme. What compelled Grande and Cremascoli to organise these encounters? What relationship was explored in the ensuing photographs? In what way is Siza connected to the current inhabitants of his buildings, and they to him? Recent analysts of the architectural design process have resorted to the spectral when describing how architects imagine the future inhabitation of their buildings. Paul Emmons suggests that, through the act of drawing, architects project an ‘imaginal body’ or ‘skeleton self’ into the spaces they propose [4]. For Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, architects’ assumptions that inhabitants will, in some measure, be formed through being in their spaces, necessarily reduces them to shadowy, ghostly figures; the inhabitants do not yet exist [5]. The Berlage conversation between Hertzberger and Siza indicated a shift in European architectural culture, away from the relative certainties of designing for the default subject of the modernist welfare state, towards the more onerous task of designing for a postmodern heterogeneous public. Celebrating the newly unknowable public emerging in the 1980s and 90s as differences in gender, class, culture, and race were increasingly acknowledged, Rosalyn Deutsche repurposed the idea of the ‘phantom public’ in her argument – validated in works such as Schilderswijk– that this unknowability was generative rather than problematic [6].

For the architectural public of a Biennale, some of the potency of the 2016 photographs rests, I think, in an intimation that they capture Siza encountering the everyday, corporeal manifestation of his phantom public. During an interview, Yüksel Karaçizmeli, a Turkish long-time resident of Siza’s Bonjour Tristesse housing in Berlin, asked Esra Akcan to thank the Portuguese architect for the design of her living room [7]. This would suggest that the Schilderswijk photographs might also record the inhabitants (similarly residents of authored architecture) meeting a person heretofore phantasmic in their lives. In my interpretation of them, the images of duffle-coated architect and tea-serving hosts (perhaps too cosily) register architecture as the site of a multi-layered human relationship between designer and inhabitant that persists across space, time and states of being.

Colomina and Wigley propose that design is a practice that seeks to negotiate ‘the indeterminacy of the human’ [8].With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is becoming imperative that architects articulate the critical role of human agency and indeterminacy in design, and develop methodologies that demonstrate to themselves, clients, and the general public the discipline’s capacity to sensitively create social realms. These methodologies will presumably harness the capacities of AI (to, for instance, enable the observation of ‘agent populations’ navigating simulated buildings) [9]. But, drawing lessons from architecture’s recent history, the use of AI should be tempered by a scepticism towards any certitude latent in such methods. Projects such as Schilderswijk suggest that robust architecture emerges from design processes involving consideration of and openness to the mysterious lives of others. I believe that such architecture is founded upon a resolution to work, with and through uncertainties, towards the establishment of a human relationship with De Carlo’s utopian phantom public – all those people who use architecture.

Two cities, both alike in dignity: one vibrant, revelling in its love of watching and being watched; the other smug and staid - watching and watched but neither advertised. This article takes its inspiration from Dublin and Paris, though equally it could be London and Rome. One is on the continent of Europe: full of piazzas and long balmy evenings attracting walkers and maunderers. There are buzzy bars, café’s and bistros and the city feels like one large open air exhibition of sociability. The other is not continental, though might sometimes fancy it. The Victorian obsession with manners is still being shaken off and the idea of openly advertising your curiosity is too vulgar for words.

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A recent trip to France and Italy left me feeling full and satisfied; not just because of the good food but the good cities, where sociability is prioritised resulting in safe, happy and diverse places to meet. In this article I wish to look at the importance of celebrating and observing the social life of cities, in essence: people watching. It is no coincidence that le flâneur, a wandering observer of urban spaces, is a French term with no direct translation into the English language, or that the Italians have a specific word for an evening stroll which is taken to both exercise and socialise—to look at others and be looked at: La Passagiata.

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The value placed on people watching is most obvious in Paris where café’s and bistros on boulevards and squares offer row upon row of chairs, all facing outwards allowing their sitters to simply wait and watch the world go by. It is a form of urban theatre with the prime spots being those at the front - a ville spectacle. A city that encourages people watching does more than just enabling nosiness, it allows for moments of connection between human beings and in so doing, generates an understanding of the importance of great public spaces in cities. A great public space is a democratic space, [1] a forum for strangers to interact but more than this, it reduces isolation and increases social support. Affection between human beings can, depending on the space, increase in public rather than decrease. In turn, these moments of affection and closeness ‘draws upon and contributes to the richness of public life’. [2]

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The ‘English Pubs’ or ‘Irish bars’ in Paris offer an interesting study into the difference between these countries’ when it comes to public life and how it is viewed, or, as is most often the case, not. In all that I witnessed, these spaces of libation and meeting were lined with seats and benches facing not outward but inward, toward each other. Though this article is not about the seating arrangements within the hospitality industry, I do believe this to be a microcosm of a wider social issue: countries that are yet to value the beauty and importance of people watching, a spectator sport that should not just be limited to meetings of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). The café culture of Paris, where residents are encouraged to sit and linger over their coffees on streets and sidewalks, has extended into other realms of public life and planning. Its residents no longer need the excuse of coffee to enjoy the city from a vantage point: it is a city that espouses this ethos at every turn, offering public seating and places for lingering in abundance. ‘Whereas cities were once dominated by necessary activities, cafés brought recreational life into play with a vengeance’, [3] streets are for staying rather than merely passing through.

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In his checklist for convivial public spaces, Jan Gehl lists twelve qualities that public spaces should strive for, one of which is ‘opportunities to see’. [4] Gehl is an architect and urban designer who understands the importance of the human dimension in cities stating that ‘the quality of a dwelling and city space at eye level can in itself be decisive to everyday quality of life’. [5] Thinking of Dublin city, where I lived for many years, I struggle to think now of its truly public places - spaces where people can gather and socialise, people watch and exist; where the enjoyment of the city and its urban spectacle are afforded without paying a premium for a coffee or a drink. At the heart of this issue, is a capital with a disturbing lack of public seating, squares and places of congregation. Two obvious examples that come to mind are Smithfield square - so large in scale it results in a dwarfing of any human form - and Portobello Harbour which has now, controversially but unsurprisingly, become the front yard of NYX Hotel.

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In recent years Dublin has also become a city that has seen a decrease in public perceptions of safety. According to a poll conducted in 2023, residents of Dublin felt less safe in the capital than in 2016. [6] An increase in Garda presence could be one answer but is there also an argument for ‘eyes upon the street’? [7] Jane Jacobs’ great cry for safety in cities could be as relevant in 2025 as it was in the 60’s. To achieve this we need cities that encourage people onto the streets, to enjoy and watch. So, in the name of happier, safer and more human cities let us facilitate, not inhibit, our natural gregariousness and curiosity.

Dublin’s North Georgian Core is one of the city’s most important built assets, comprising a pioneering network of 18th and early 19th-century streets and squares developed by successive generations of the Gardiner family and by other pocket-sized family estates. Although vast tracts were demolished during the 20th century, including fine terraces on Summerhill and Grenville Street, Gloucester Diamond, Rutland Street and beyond, much survives in the area extending from the North Circular Road in the east to Dominick Street and Parnell Square in the west. And unlike the South Georgian Core, it is still densely lived in, populated by thousands of residents in a bricked landscape that is topographically more stimulating and culturally more diverse than its southside cousin.

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Despite these qualities, Dublin’s greatest ‘known unknown’, our best kept public secret, is that the North Georgian Core is floundering in a deleterious cycle of substandard uses and ever-accelerating unauthorised development in a property investment model – to call it for what it is – that is fundamentally at odds with the protection, custodianship and even the future survival of the area’s architectural heritage. Worse still, it is consolidating social injustice and chronic poverty in an area that has the least capacity to address it. Under this pernicious regime, the type of high-quality urban homes in historic buildings promoted by multiple central and local government ‘adaptive reuse’ strategies, plus RIAI best practice models, have not the slightest prospect of being delivered.  

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This is because there has been a massive shift in investment patterns in the area, not just in the face of the current housing crisis, but also in the aftermath of the last economic recession. Where previously own-door, old-school, budget bedsits populated some Georgian houses in so-called ‘pre-‘63’ formats, now, as a result of the ‘bedsit ban’ introduced under new legislation in 2009, many are set out as under-the-radar ‘units’ packed with beds and bunkbeds in a housing standards limbo-land that constitutes neither apartment nor hostel accommodation, but mere rooms into which a kitchen and bathroom have been squeezed, with accompanying top-dollar rents. In other cases, such as houses on Gardiner Street and Gardiner Place, where families, students and children until recently lived in reasonable quality 1990s-type Georgian house conversions, the properties have been sold over their heads to investors specialising in providing homeless and emergency accommodation to the State through enormously lucrative contracts [1].

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In countless other instances, where Georgian houses were in redundant commercial use: solicitors offices, local newspapers, community group facilities, tourist hostels, religious buildings – all providing multiple opportunities for high-quality, sensitively divided apartment homes as espoused by the Dublin City Development Plan – they have instead transitioned to unauthorised high-density accommodation of the poorest quality without so much as a planning notice being erected, often identifiable by blinds kept firmly closed apparently under landlord decree. One case in point is a house on Gardiner Place, where a fine late-Georgian property was used for many years as offices for Community Action Network (CAN). Following its recent sale, the house is now filled over four storeys with no less than 34 advertised bed berths, without any planning permission for change of use, or the resulting fire and disabled access requirements [2].  

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The areas affected may surprise readers: they’re not backwater side streets. They include flagship Georgian squares, such as Parnell Square, where unauthorised mutilation of its mid-18th century houses continues to spread; principal city arteries like North Frederick Street, set out by the Wide Streets Commissioners; and architecturally significant streetscapes like Belvedere Place and Gardiner Street. Even rare early-Georgian houses next to the Department of Education on Marlborough Street have recently been subdivided and, in one shocking case, entirely gutted from top to toe. There is a rulebook for the majority, but in the North Georgian Core there is one rule only: don’t ask and keep the head down. Even certain estate agents are in on the act, typically advertising Georgian houses in commercial use as a series of ‘rooms’, and posting only exterior photographs in their listings to limit the evidential record from prior to their inevitable unauthorised conversion.

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To be clear, the time referenced is not the 1970s. Instead, this has been the steady pattern of the most recent decade, happening in our own time, in an era of laws, regulations and policy guidance relating to housing standards and protected structures, and it is presently accelerating at an alarming rate. The phenomenon is not a function of the relaxation of planning laws in relation to emergency refugee accommodation, of which the North Georgian Core also hosts a significant concentration, but rather an out-of-control development model in which the State itself is a prime actor at central and local government levels [3]. This is exercised through funding for homeless and emergency accommodation services, approved housing bodies, private sector companies, housing assistance payments and related strands. All providing vital supports in an era of massive pressure in Ireland’s housing sector, but manifestly unaccompanied by regulatory checks and balances.

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So complex is this network, particularly its hazy intersection with private-sector providers, that no one public agency has a picture of the scale of what is happening on Dublin’s northside. And as housing is such a hot political issue, Dublin City Council’s planning enforcement section is both reluctant and inherently compromised to deal with matters housing-related, even in cases where protected structures are suffering material damaged, as the council itself is a statutory housing and de facto homeless authority. Not a single conservation enforcement officer, never mind a team, is employed by that section for a city with over 9,000 protected structures.

The impacts on the North Georgian Core are manifold: the most obvious being a consolidation of inequality in an area which is already one of the most marginalised and densely populated in the State. Secondly, the illegal damage being undertaken to protected structures, including the gutting and subdivision of historic interiors, the insertion of PVC windows and doors, marring facades and streetscapes, and a total lack of proper conservation-led investment in facades, roofs, and exterior envelopes. This represents an assault on Ireland’s finite cultural heritage which in many cases, incredibly, the State itself is indirectly facilitating.

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But most impactful is the displacement of any quality investment in the area, either in historic buildings or in new developments, where the tens if not hundreds of millions of euro flowing into the district annually should actually be targeted. Instead, bargain-basement accommodation – it cannot reasonably be called housing – has now become the governing market for the district. There is absolutely no prospect of change unless the State itself intervenes in this deleterious cycle.

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It is vital that the new government gets to grips with this issue. This must include the establishment of a dedicated conservation planning enforcement unit in Dublin City Council staffed by accredited building conservation personnel. The spatial framework for the Strategic Development Regeneration Area (SDRA) for Dublin 1, being prepared under the Dublin City Development Plan, must prioritise investment in existing historic private properties as a policy action, and not just default solely to regeneration of social housing and lands in public ownership [4]. This should include street-by-street design strategies informed by architectural conservation and public realm expertise.

In a Dublin solution to a Dublin problem, 80% grant funding should be offered for large-scale conservation works to Georgian exteriors to draw long-term reluctant property interests in from the cold. And central government must better coordinate the regional and national distribution of emergency housing for our most vulnerable citizens so that Dublin, which currently hosts 80% of the State’s homeless accommodation, a staggering 82% of which is hosted in the city centre, is placed on a more sustainable footing [5].

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It is not quite as famous as Murphy’s law but in Ireland Parkinson’s Law of Triviality might be the one we should pay closer heed to. This ‘law’ – named after the famous historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson – observes the human weakness for getting caught up in trivial details at the expense of the bigger picture.

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To illustrate his case, Parkinson put forward an imagined committee in charge of developing a nuclear reactor. This committee then spent as much time worrying about what material to use for the staff bicycle shed as other critical elements of the project. People sometimes refer to the ‘law’ as ‘bike-shedding’ – a term which has taken on a whole new meaning in the vocabulary of Ireland over the past six months.

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Last July, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Office of Public Works seeking details of how much had been spent on a new bicycle shelter for Leinster House. It was one of hundreds of such information requests that I submit each year to a whole range of public bodies including government departments, local authorities, hospitals, and state agencies. That particular Sunday, I wrote a story – just 435 words in length – sent it to the national newspapers, and got ready to enjoy the rest of the day. Unwittingly, I had just thrown a hand grenade into the court of public opinion.

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The €336,000 cost of the project was described as ‘inexplicable and inexcusable’ by Taoiseach Simon Harris and became a meme on social media. It was dissected at the Public Accounts Committee, raised in general election debates, covered by the BBC and The Guardian, and became a touchstone for public anger over spending of taxpayer money.

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Yet, in the greater scheme of things – it was a miniscule project, loose change when set against for example the €2 billion-plus cost of the National Children’s Hospital. What it did carry though was resonance and meaning. The cost of the Children’s Hospital, whether it eventually ends up being €2.2 billion, €2.3 billion, or €2.4 billion can be a little too abstract. Every extra €100 million that gets added to the bill would build nearly 300 Leinster House bicycle sheds, but that’s not so easy to quantify mentally.

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A €336,000 bicycle shelter though? That carries everyday meaning. It’s the price of building a house or thereabouts. When we think about a sum of money like that, it’s tangible – we all know what we could do with it if we had it. But when we think about €100 million, what would that buy us and what exactly does it look like? How does a lay person – or indeed a journalist – tell the difference between two major projects, both costing the same amount of money? Which one of them was too expensive? And which one was executed to near perfection and achieved maximum value for money for the taxpayer?

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There was a certain bitter irony in the bicycle shelter story, too.

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A few years ago, I spent months working on a documentary with RTÉ Investigates and reporter Paul Murphy about the operations of the Office of Public Works. The programme highlighted a series of OPW projects: cases where land was purchased, or leases were signed at a sometimes-tremendous loss to the taxpayer. This included the €30 million purchase of the still-idle Thornton Hall in North Dublin for development of a ‘super-prison’. The programme featured a lengthy contribution from Allen Morgan, a retired valuer from the OPW, who courageously went public about his experiences working in the public sector.

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He and a colleague had once prepared what was known as the ‘five-case review’, selecting a few cases (or basket cases) from the annals of the OPW. ‘We were just asked for examples,’ Morgan said, ‘We didn’t think there was much point in giving twenty [cases] and we certainly could have.’ Yet the programme, despite airing on primetime TV, did not garner a fraction of the attention that the much simpler story on a bicycle shelter in Leinster House did. And maybe the word ‘simple’ is what is key.

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It is so much harder to get to grips with these larger projects, with their complexity and the often-enormous sums of money involved. In the wake of the bicycle shelter story, there was considerable sound and fury from the public, the political sphere, and the public sector. There were promises that this would not happen again but how likely is that really?

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For any long-time observer or reporter on Irish society, these stories crop up as steady as a metronome. They follow a similar pattern: revelation, outrage, a vow of reform, before being forgotten. Direct accountability is almost always absent. PPARS, e-voting machines, the FÁS Science Challenge programme, the Kilkenny flood relief scheme; there have been so many it becomes hard to remember. But if lessons are being learned, what are those lessons?  Is it a Department of Infrastructure as has been suggested by the Taoiseach Simon Harris?

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If it is the answer, it is hard to find a single person in public service and procurement who agrees. A recent headline in The Irish Times sums up the conundrum we all face when it comes to public spending, most especially mega-projects. A rail spur to connect Navan to the Western Commuter line is now expected to cost €3 billion, according to National Transport Authority forecasts. It will comprise forty kilometres of new track running through predominantly agricultural land and the development of three new stations on the route. As a project, it ticks so many boxes – reducing congestion, reducing car dependence, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But how do we assess its cost? Is the €3 billion estimate too high or too low? How long should the project take and how long will it take?

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More transparency around these projects would help. But more than that, we need a better system of communicating the development of public infrastructure; experts in the field – architects, planners, and engineers – using social media and the media to explain the nuances and complexities. There is a glaring knowledge gap in how these projects are funded and developed. And until that gap is filled, it remains extremely difficult to hold public bodies to account for how they are executed.

When determining whether a space is working, in terms of accessibility, we often look towards details such as ramps and widened dimensions. However, for autistic people, atmosphere is perhaps an unexpected yet key element in whether a space is working hard or hardly working. Bright lights, uncomfortable textures, and certain sounds might deter autistic people from using a space so as to avoid becoming overstimulated and potentially having a meltdown.

The need for spatial alterations to facilitate the needs of autistic people is recognised in Ireland. Yet, the solution is often a momentary change of use in an existing building. For example, supermarkets (a typology notably found challenging by autistic people) often host quiet evenings, one night a week, when the usual bright fluorescent lights are dimmed and noise levels are controlled. Even Shannon Airport (the example I use for a building that is hardly working) has a sensory room which creates a space for autistic people to re-regulate themselves. However, these efforts are surface-level solutions for a deeper spatial issue. They highlight how unaccommodating these spaces are outside of limited quiet hours and singular rooms, and could be argued to be reminiscent of the spatial othering historically faced by autistic (and other disabled) people relegated to spaces parallel to the rest of society. [1]

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The Living Bridge on the University of Limerick campus, designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects,  is – perhaps unconsciously – an example of a public space that works hard for autistic accessibility. Spanning a particularly wild stretch of the Shannon River, where cormorants dry their wings on small islands and swans fish under trees that seem to almost float in the current, the bridge twists and curves from the main campus to the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. Upon stepping onto the bridge, two floor textures become apparent. On one side of an ebbing and flowing walkway, an aluminium surface gives walkers an extra spring in their step with a muted clunking sound underneath (which may appeal to sensory seekers). Meanwhile, a parallel path in a soft aggregated material seems to absorb force, muting the sound of walkers, joggers, and cyclists. Two alternative sensory experiences are available for bridge users to choose from or swap between.

The bridge is experienced almost as a series of rooms, with each stretch of ten metres or so offering a new view and a soft change of direction, resulting in a snake-like motion from one piece of land to the other. These bends provide a sense of privacy in what would otherwise be a long stretch of public land. This may be reassuring for autistic people due to their difficulties with social situations. The Living Bridge allows pedestrians to weave past each other almost on happenstance, thus avoiding anxiety about interacting with strangers.

In a similar vein, the concave wooden benches dotted along the perimeter of the bridge provide a sheltered resting space for the public to pause as they either relax or regather themselves with the help of the surrounding calming landscape. It has been noted that some autistic people may use their built surroundings to ‘ground’ themselves when overstimulated.[2] The slight nested nature of the benches with overarching glass sheets provides a momentary respite for someone overwhelmed by the bustling nature of a transitory space.

Lastly, the lighting on the bridge is coloured and soft. Positioned under the bridge, on the floor, and on the below-waist-level railing, the lights are in stark contrast to the bright white overhead lights often found in public space and are instead reminiscent of the colourful dark lighting often found in sensory rooms.

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As previously mentioned, Shannon Airport has a sensory room. However, the spaces outside of the sensory room create the harsh environment which warrants the need for a separate accessible room in the first place. Vast empty spaces feel like interior fields and provide few opportunities for tethering an overwhelmed body to the comfort of a hard and secure surface. Fluorescent overhead lighting is almost startling as it beams not only from above but reflects off the white polished floors below. Loud and regular announcements on the intercom are discombobulating. A sense of intense interiority is formed by the lack of windows, creating a claustrophobic space which does not signal any relief from what might be read by an autistic traveller as what is colloquially termed a “sensory hell”.

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In essence then, the atmosphere of a building can be seen as an essential element in determining whether a space is accessible or not (or rather, working hard or hardly working) to people with certain socio-sensory disabilities such as autism; perhaps best described by poet and art writer, Lisa Robertson: “...the entire body became an instrument played by weather and chance”.[3] Thus, in the case of autistic people, the small subtleties of the lighting, acoustics, textures – all the things which constitute atmosphere – can play the body like an instrument, leaving them overstimulated through no fault of their own.

Our current system of designing and making buildings has reached an unprecedented level of standardisation. Global networks of supply have dismantled historic approaches to making buildings, which were based on material availability, climate, and cultural practices. Throughout the world, architecture is now made from the same kit of parts, which is heavily reliant on four basic products: steel, concrete, glass, and plastic. Each contributes to the hyper-industrial world we inhabit, and together they represent what has been referred to as the Quadrivium Industrial Complex [1].

As industrialisation brought about the ubiquity of standardised materials at unprecedented speed and scale, regulatory frameworks [2] were designed around them, supported by aggressive lobbying and marketing campaigns [3]. Advertised as low-maintenance and technologically advanced, to mid-twentieth century Ireland these materials were symbols of a bright future in which cold, damp buildings subject to fire risk were things of the past [4].

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Today, both the process of specification and the materials from which we build have become so entrenched that it can be difficult for many to imagine an architecture situated outside of the standardised system. Testing, certification, mortgages, and insurance policies in Ireland and beyond are generally designed around these systems. Natural materials with proven efficacy over centuries of service are often dismissed by the building industry due to their inherent irregularity, which can make them resistant to automation, and difficult to produce at scale. They are too often considered risky and fringe – a costly, niche option.

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Architect and writer Keller Easterling has described the “single evil – single solution” outlook on architecture as “a fallacy, the truth is far worse” [5]. To make meaningful change in the construction industry, we need to accept that there is no simple solution to the problem of architecture, and that all construction practices cause harm, even if the full impact of a material’s extraction is not immediately visible. However, we instead continue to conduct the practice of architecture, or of architectural fabrication, as an exercise in problem-solving, to a series of standards established for predictable outcomes – a one-size-fits-all approach.

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We are at risk of losing sight of architecture as an important mode of cultural production and further consolidating the monopolies that exists within the construction and development sector. To deliver cost-effective architecture that is of a particular place requires a granular understanding of local biodiversity, ecosystems, cultural specificities, and situated knowledge systems.

Architectural discourse is gradually recognising the need for a new direction. With a growing consciousness of both the enormous scale of our environmental impact, and the almost prohibitive cost of development, as an industry we are beginning to question not what we will build, but how we will do so: focusing on architecture as more than function or aesthetic, but rather as networks of resources, people, and ecologies.

The Irish Concrete Federation is evidently threatened by this, having recently updated their age-old slogan to an almost insistent “Concrete Built IS Better Built”. And in the face of growing pressure for change, the construction industry is seeking a silver bullet to enable it to carry on as normal. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber [6] has declared mass timber to be just that, stating that if construction over the next couple of centuries substitutes business‑as‑usual materials such as steel and concrete for engineered timber, the atmosphere could return to pre‑industrial conditions. However, we at Superposition believe that this understanding of material resourcing is misguided. No material can be sustainable if it is applied at a scale that is unsustainable, and we cannot reach carbon neutral construction within the boundaries of the current system.

There is great urgency here. If we estimate that a typical construction cycle spans seven years, then we have just four remaining cycles before 2050 in which to radically transform our construction practices. This is crucial to meet the ambitious targets established by the Paris Accords and to avoid severe environmental consequences. Although modular construction is often presented as the solution to seemingly global building crises, increased modularity will only result in increased homogeneity and reduced biodiversity. It is therefore deeply necessary for architects to engage with localities in a more specific and materially focused way.

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While a shift to bio‑based materials is necessary, it is just as crucial to ask how these materials will be cultivated: where, on whose land, using what resources, and at what cost? While mass timber holds promise, there exists a cautionary tale around the pitfalls of monoculture plantation. In moving away from generalised solutions to the “problem of constructing architecture”, we must urgently work to establish a resilient and biodiverse construction industry, marked by concentrated pockets of knowledge that address conservation, sustainable cultivation practices, material usage, embodied knowledge, culture, and economy, and view each site’s distinct challenges as opportunities for innovative architectural solutions.

Superposition’s recent collaboration with Atelier LUMA, on the Unwanted/Overlooked Species Project [7], explored underutilised trees and plants native to the Camargue region of France, such as cypress and Aleppo pine, as well as invasive species such as the tree of heaven and cane de Provence. Our investigations focused on the highly resilient, heat-resistant Aleppo pine tree. Currently, due to the large number of branches and the conical shape of the trunk, over 80% of Aleppo pine trees harvested do not meet the current timber grading profile, and so fully virgin trees are burned for energy, or mulched.

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In collaboration with the regional timber council, Fibois Sud Provence Côte d’Azur, and a local sawmill, we explored how Aleppo pine could become a viable source of construction timber. Taking reference from historic boat construction, which sought out, and often cultivated particular grain direction in trees to generate desired forms that were stronger and easier to work with, we designed a joinery system that embraced the complex and unique grain patterns of these timbers. The result is an adaptable framing system composed of just two elements – a node and a strut – in varying configurations and lengths.

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Similarly, our project “An Experimental House” explores ideas for assembling and disassembling a structure with limited means within a particular context. The design is underpinned by digital design tools which allow for the rapid planning, transformation, and translation of the form. The first phase of the project was designed for easy assembly and disassembly within a gallery context. The second iteration of the structure elaborates and evolves the framework to explore ideas for grounding, sheltering, servicing, inhabiting, and maintaining, on the grounds of VISUAL Carlow.

Engaging with the material context within the region of a site, the project explores alternative uses for local, varied, and sustainable materials including native larch sections – a species compromised by climate change and the spread of disease – indigo, and beeswax from a local hive as a cladding material. These elements are held in place by the folded steel nodes which form the guiding logic for the arrangement of the structure. The structure utilises helical screw piles, and is designed to be disassembled, relocated, and inhabited upon completion of the exhibition.

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Other recent projects from small and emerging Irish practices such as Fuinneamh Workshop Architects’ “Den Talamh” [8] and RAT Office’s “An Bothán Cladach” [9] seek to emphasise the use of natural, found, and irregular materials that embody the craft histories and material cultures of their sites and engage with both the challenges and opportunities of material scarcity and limited budgets. Further afield, students led by Kate Davies and Emmanuel Vercruysse at Hooke Park, the Architectural Association’s forest campus, have been exploring the construction of post-tensioned space frame structures and walkways which utilise found and pruned beechwood branches. The structures incorporate 3d scanning, CNC, and robotics in their design and making and propose an argument for the value of using near or on-site materials in spite of their inherently diverse characteristics. Together, these projects can be read as an increasing response to, and an attempt to practice outside of, the monolithic industrial architectural complex and its underlying thesis that humanity’s spatial demands can only be met through ubiquity and standardisation.

We see the future of sustainable design not as an exercise in the replacement of existing global networks with “green alternatives”, but rather in highly location-specific micro practices which respond intelligently to varying site constraints and climactic conditions and are flexible enough to integrate a wide range of materials while empowering local actors. This approach to architecture may not be scalable in the traditional sense, but rather utilises a particular framework or way of thinking which can be applied to a broad range of projects and regions. With contemporary technological advances, highly responsive and specific approaches to construction are not only essential, but entirely possible.

‘Studio’ is a broad term for a place of creative work in several fields, including film, television, radio, architecture, photography, fine art, music, and dance [1]. At a time of growth in creative industries in Ireland, this article focuses on the studio as a building type, especially in film and television, where studios tend to be large. Understanding these places can improve professional practice and policy around media industries, which have distinctive architectural and urban planning needs. It may also help public understanding of an urgent issue in Irish media – the infrastructure of RTÉ, which requires significant public expenditure and good will to fulfill its mandate sustainably while keeping pace with technological change.

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Recent public debate has reminded us of the geography of publicly-funded radio and television in Ireland: the large scale of RTÉ’s studios in Donnybrook, its smaller facilities in Cork and Limerick, and the studios of TG4 in Spiddal, Co. Galway [2]. Only those in Donnybrook and Spiddal are purpose-built, having been designed to a high standard by the acclaimed Dublin-based firm of Scott Tallon Walker. Closely related is Ireland’s network of privately owned studios, originating in 1958 with Ardmore Studios in Bray, Co. Wicklow, and recently expanded by the nearby Ashford Studios and by Troy Studios in Limerick. Dominated by commercial feature film and television drama production, often for overseas clients but supported by publicly-funded tax incentives, the private sector has recently seen a growth spurt in which at least three more large facilities are in planning: Greystones Media Campus, Dublin Fields Studios in Clondalkin, and Hammerlake Studios, Mullingar [3].

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Each of these is vying to be Ireland’s largest studios with an exuberant self-promotion reminiscent of the explosive growth of the Hollywood studio system in the 1920s. Meanwhile, RTÉ’s studios in Donnybrook – built in the 1960s, just a few years after Ardmore – are downsizing or threatened with closure. The discrepancy highlights the relative neglect of public service media in recent years but also an opportunity to recalibrate with joined-up thinking and greater ambition. Notwithstanding complaints about its cost, RTÉ’s underdeveloped estate shows that it has never been funded enough. In other recent publications, I have related this problem to European and American contexts, but here I want to compare it specifically to Los Angeles. That city has an urban area ten times the size of Dublin, and a population eight times as large, in which four clusters of film and television studios (Hollywood, Studio City, Culver City, and Burbank) directly employ about 100,000 people and produce over a quarter of all US film and television output [4]. There are significant differences of scale, economics, and ideology but we can still draw lessons from Los Angeles because it has shaped many international standards in studio design and construction, many studio buildings are still in use that were constructed a century ago, and the economic and cultural contribution of studios is a source of pride.

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In the 1920s, when the GPO was first occupied by 2RN, the predecessor of Radio Éireann, William Fox was building the massive studio complex called Century City; Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks were financing the new studios of United Artists on Melrose Avenue; and Jack and Harry Warner were expanding their headquarters on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood to new and bigger studios in Burbank. This expansion was driven by growing international markets for Hollywood films but also by technological change. In the 1910s, the first studios had been open-air timber frame stages protected from the California sun by retractable muslin shades [5]. These were soon replaced by glasshouses with iron or steel frames, which were more permanent but still prioritized natural light. Both early types were made for silent cinema and housed actors, crew, and sets for multiple productions side by side without concerns for noise. In the late 1920s, the coming of sound brought dramatic change, requiring heavier concrete structures whose opaque and insulated walls excluded both light and sound. That type still dominates today.

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While commissions from the Hollywood film industry helped drive the architectural innovations of Richard Neutra, Paul R. Williams, Claude Beelman, and Albert C. Martin, Los Angeles studios developed world-leading standards that governed their buildings’ layout, dimensions, materials, lighting, climate control, acoustics, communications, and electrical power. Many of those standards were developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, which remains influential today in the US and worldwide [6]. Indeed, the design and construction of studios set many trends in architecture: studios built for ‘talking pictures’ in the late 1920s pioneered the use of tilt-up concrete walls; excessive heat generated by studio lights in the 1930s and ‘40s helped to popularise air conditioning; and the ramping up of television production in the 1950s and ‘60s accelerated the use of epoxy resin floors in commercial buildings, and the mainstreaming of open-plan offices, electronic systems, and digital networks.

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All of these technologies were used in the construction of Los Angeles’ most famous purpose-built television studios at CBS Television City in Los Angeles. Opened in 1952, this was designed by William Pereira and Charles Luckman in the minimalist, rectilinear style known as ‘mid-century modern’ – the closest comparison in Los Angeles to the more Miesian but equally beautiful buildings of RTÉ. As such, just as MGM, RKO and other famous studios favoured neoclassical buildings in the 1910s and art deco structures in the 1930s, CBS Television City continued a tradition of film and television companies commissioning innovative architecture [7]. As media industries, constantly in the public eye and aligned with the visual arts, they valued design excellence and sought to promote it through studio buildings that embodied their ethos. Many of these have been bought and sold, changed hands, and modernised but there has been remarkable continuity too with most of the city’s original studios still in use today.

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Feature film and television drama production is distributed more globally now than before and, ironically, Ireland’s recent success is one of the current sources of pressure on the industry in Los Angeles, along with the decline of theatrical exhibition and the rise of virtual production, AI, and streaming [8]. Signalling this, the original Warner Bros studios in the heart of Hollywood, which are well-preserved and still functioning, were recently joined by the high-rise postmodernist headquarters of Netflix, unceremoniously squeezed into a corner of the site in 2018. Meanwhile, Los Angeles also has a proud tradition in public service media, embodied in PBS SoCal, the Southern California affiliate of the national broadcaster, for whom Gensler recently refurbished studios between Disney and Warners in Burbank [9].

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Like all of these, film and television studios in Ireland are also adapting to dramatic change. Some of the private studios currently in planning have been delayed by financial caution on the part of investors, still reacting to last year’s Hollywood strikes and calculating the effects of AI. And RTÉ is seeking to modernise in response to media convergence driven by Hollywood and big tech. In my next article in this series, I will further develop the argument that the best way to address the sectoral challenges of the day is to cluster indigenous Irish media and creative industries in a diversified and densified RTÉ campus in Donnybrook. This would also bring exciting opportunities in architecture.

Statistics and climate action have a difficult relationship. Sometimes the statistics presented are not easily relatable, appearing abstract and therefore impersonal. Other times they can be presented at such a large scale, they seem to overwhelm our ability to act on the climate emergency. On this occasion, statistics were a starting point for Demolition Take Down, a research project initiated by two architects.

Let’s begin with the headline number of nine million tonnes of construction and demolition (C&D) waste produced in Ireland in 2021 as calculated by the Environmental Protection Agency [1]. This amounts to a staggering 48% of all waste produced in Ireland that same year [2]. In 2022, the Central Statistics Office estimated that the construction industry accounted for roughly 6% of the employed population in Ireland [3]. These three statistics are not absolutes, they fluctuate year on year [4]. It is the disproportionate relationship between the size of the waste production relative to the size of the producer that is the principal concern. This sparked a year-long project to understand why a small percentage of people had helped to produce such a large percentage of our nation’s waste. The gains from a potential change in attitudes and behaviour within this 6% club seemed a hopeful outcome to aim for.

This project was conducted in three parts. Part one gathered information primarily from a series of in-depth interviews with professionals operating in the construction industry on the back of an industry sentiment survey. Part two focused on an inter-disciplinary learning environment between students of architecture and of property economics. Part three was about dissemination and raising public awareness about the issue through a large-scale installation and supporting events, hosted by IMMA during September 2024.

In the beginning, care was taken to remain neutral in order to act as a go-between for various stakeholders in the industry. We appreciated a nuanced approach was required. The project departed from solely analysing statistical facts towards collating anecdotal evidence. It therefore painted a clearer picture of tensions between the economic mindsets of vested interests and the aspirational gumption of activists and academics.

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One area that this writer was focused on was the decision-making prior to buildings being demolished. The temptation to point towards the circular economy as the solution to C&D waste was resisted. While it is acknowledged that circularity is to be encouraged, it tends to make the unsustainable sustainable if relied upon. A lack of resources, imagination, skills, and knowledge is affecting top-down and bottom-up decisions, leading to the total removal of buildings from the built environment they each helped to shape. An engineer in a local authority put it rather gloomily “The only way C&D waste will reduce in this country is if there is another economic recession! It is unlikely that C&D waste will be reduced for the right reasons” [5]. This is not a future to wish for.

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The theme for this series of articles, "Future Reference", is apt because, in some instances, the total removal of a building or neighbourhood can make our future points of reference more uncertain. If you keep taking pieces of neighbourhood away incrementally, there is a chance that some people will later grieve for what is gone. They might walk through their neighbourhood where a building was demolished, replaced, or left as an empty site primed for future investment. Even if they can’t pinpoint what used to be there, they might feel a sense of loss. Some argue a reliance on demolition as the political tool of regeneration is leading us towards a nowhere place. In solving present problems, and searching for a better future, do we really need to erase the past?

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Public attitudes are the life and death of a building. Let us pause for a moment to consider problematic human behaviours like pursuing the path of least resistance through urban sprawl or the deliberate decline of parts of our cities and towns. Perhaps this momentary pause might take us from a top-down view – that in order to regenerate we must obliterate the past – towards a bottom-up approach: that sometimes the answer may be selective demolition, or even none at all. Whether empowering citizens to have more agency over their local development plans through delegated power would result in less waste is debatable; it would require an Irish construction industry that has the skill set and knowledge required to adapt existing buildings for new uses in a viable manner.

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Ultimately it will be our shared cultural and social values that will allow us to reduce carbon emissions and retain embodied carbon within our existing buildings. The challenge will be how to unlock the power of culture to get things moving in the direction of adaptive reuse. It is this writer’s hope that the Demolition Take Down project can build upon our research to date and find like-minded practitioners within the 6% club who are interested in rethinking the value system currently associated with our existing buildings.

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To encourage positive change, we intend to keep questioning and pushing back against current methods of practice and policy in Ireland. By working together, stitching new within old, we will ultimately make no "newer or greater contravention" [6] to the quality of our built environment.

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In 2015, an estimated one million people entered Europe in search of a better life [1]. Driven by conflict and hardship in regions across Africa and the Middle East, refugees and migrants began establishing migratory routes, with many first arriving in southern European cities like Athens. I visited Athens in October 2015, when borders were still open, and the impact of the influx was palpable. Migrants gathered in public spaces across the city, waiting for the opportunity to continue northward. Nearly a decade later, Dublin has emerged as one of their chosen destinations.

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Smog regularly shrouds the identity of the city of Athens and, like the negated identity of the city, the migrant’s individualism is hidden within the general term of ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant’. Like migrants in Dublin, they are an overlooked presence in society. The vast numbers that appropriate the streets reach a saturation point, and their excessive visibility normalises their vulnerability; their neglected state goes unnoticed.

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The urban fabric of Athens is shaped by the polykatoikia, a residential typology that forms a homogenous concrete landscape symbolising structure and order. The ground floors of these buildings, often housing commercial shops, typically extend out toward the street, with storefronts showcasing goods to entice both locals and tourists. However, amid Greece's economic recession many of these commercial units were left vacant, creating spaces that had relinquished their original purpose, with residential space occupied above.

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In Dublin, the inverse is present – streets become inhabited, and homes fall to ruin. Buildings lie dormant, shops remain shuttered, and migrants occupy the space outside in public parks, neglected street corners, and undercrofts between city blocks. Deprived of formal spaces, they adapt – carving out niches within these leftover spaces. Here, new uses arise, as migrants imprint a new meaning onto these areas, illustrating de Certeau’s notion of space defined “by its users, not by its makers” [2]. These urban inversions reveal social functions, and the inequalities, embedded within the city’s structure.

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One can observe the migrant to be trapped, both literally and metaphorically, somewhere between their homeland and their future home, belonging to neither. For many, Athens is but a transitory stop en route to final destinations like Dublin. In both cities, the streets become waiting rooms, as migrants tend to slip into the interstitial spaces clustering together where the city is void of life. Since Covid, city centre occupation has been cast aside by Athenian and Dubliner, in favour of the suburbs and a working-from-home culture. This exodus has created ambiguous spaces that “belong to everybody and nobody” [3], allowing for alternative forms of occupation by those without other options. These spaces of leisure, such as city squares or pedestrian zones designed for strolling, dining, and sightseeing, juxtapose with migrants’ makeshift domestic activities – sleeping in public parks, bathing at public fountains, or scavenging for food. Migrants, like discarded objects, can become “matter out of place” [4], and in their new context they are overlooked because their new identity has yet to be defined. These “waiting rooms” underscore the migrants' vulnerability and the visible yet unnoticed aspect of their existence.

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In both Dublin and Athens, everyday life subtly reveals the social contrasts shaping these cities. Simple acts like airing laundry highlight the divisions within society. In more affluent areas of Athens and Dublin, laundry retracts internally, as some regard the obtrusive display of laundry as a marker of poverty and disorder. In the more affluent areas of Athens, the balcony is no longer associated with domestic chores but with leisure. The allocation of additional space internally and economic provision of dryers allows the task to be internalised. In contrast, the polykatoikia facades serve as supports for drying racks, with undergarments displayed unashamedly beside household linens, giving glimpses of the inhabitants’ lives. The facades of the polykatoikia recede, drawing focus to the laundry and blurring the boundary between public and private realms.

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For migrants, the technique of laundry is radically transformed, driven by their context and estranged from their origin. The lack of resources and mechanisms to launder obliges the migrant to forsake the clothes they choose so carefully for their journey. Their acceptance of donated clothing is an initial signifier of their acceptance, whether willing or not, of a new social identity in their host country. Once they find a stabilising presence, their clothes become suspended on incongruous objects that once restricted movement – such as chain-link fences. Like the migrant’s identity which has been altered, the chain-link fence is read anew, and hints at their creativity in repurposing their context.

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Whether the clothes are draped over a fence, or hung on balconies of the polykatoikia balconies, the smoggy air of Athens knows no boundaries and it subjects the migrant, the local, and the tourist to the same atmospheric conditions – creating an invisible platform of equivalence, curbing any difference previously uncovered through the indexical system of laundry. In Dublin, the same conditions must also emerge.