Have you ever just stopped and looked at the city around you? At the traffic lights, signposts, stone walls, and houses that pepper the urban landscape? Well, if you haven’t, you will after a visit to Francis Matthews’ most recent exhibition, EXT/INT, currently running at the Molesworth Gallery, off Dawson Street, until 22 April. For those who may be familiar with Matthews’ work, his affinity for urban architecture, streetscapes, and backlands is on display to great effect.

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On arrival, one is faced with the discreet sign for the Molesworth Gallery and a polite request to ring the doorbell for entry. Once inside, a small side table displays a list of the works, the first of which hangs on the opposite wall, marking the start of the exhibition. Kitchen simultaneously captures the relationship between the interior and the exterior, and sets a quiet but energised tone for the rest of the works. Entering the gallery’s reception room, one is greeted by a friendly member of staff. The room is flooded with natural light from two large sash windows, illuminating six small-scale paintings, including a series of monotone studies titled Inchicore (grey) one, two, and three. A circuit of the room brings you to the entrance to room two, where the atmosphere is considerably different: more subdued, with less natural light, and five works of a much larger scale. Inchicore one commands the visitor’s attention, over 1m wide, depicting a traffic junction. The diverging roads pull the eye, lit with tantalising pools of street light. Strong verticals, in the form of traffic lights, frame the composition. Gently glowing traffic bollards guide the viewer through the painting like silent beacons. Returning to the lobby and up the stairs, the final seven works are arranged in the remaining gallery space. Here, two large-scale feature works anchor the room; in particular, Nine captures the imagination as much for its supposed simplicity as for its anonymity. Arranged along the opposite walls are the remaining small-scale paintings.

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Overall, the layout is minimal, restrained, and, above all, allows the work to speak for itself. There are no long-winded text descriptions, not even a title to accompany each work. Just a small number pencilled onto the wall. Each painting is lit individually, although the gallery is flooded with natural light. The artificial lighting helps focus the viewer’s attention and enhances the technical detail in the works. However, the viewer can’t help but feel the juxtaposition between the dark nighttime scene and the bright sky outside.

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The paintings are intimate, which is aided by the domestic scale of the gallery rooms. Visitors can get close to the work in comfort. The compositions of the paintings also have a human scale: the tree in South Circular, seen from the underside; the corner, seen from the footpath, in Crumlin; allowing the viewer to place themselves in the scene and recognise the familiar landscape. The choice of subject, particularly in Hall, also affords a certain level of intimacy. These quiet interior scenes, devoid of people but not of life, offer a pleasant contrast to the exterior works.

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Matthews has a unique ability to make the ordinary, often overlooked elements of the urban environment extraordinary. His attention to detail and careful rendering elevate stone walls, traffic lights, and back alleys to something worth looking at. Visitors cannot help but wonder: why that junction? What’s so special about that wall? So much so that they leave the exhibition with a new appreciation for that ordinariness. The decision to immortalise a back alley, a front hall, or a stone wall is tantalising.

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The complete absence of people within the paintings allows for appropriation. Imagination fills the gaps in the narrative. This single snapshot of a junction somewhere in Inchicore has energy. These works aren’t static; they hum with life, as if at any second someone will walk into the frame. This cinematic quality is likely due to the artist’s process, as briefly described in Dr Ellen Rowley’s introductory text. Matthews always starts with a photograph, often at night, occasionally at dawn, and usually urban, though not necessarily local. After correcting the photograph’s perspective and distortion, he works within a grid system, using precise layering of thin oil paint to achieve the final effect.

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Evidence of this process can be seen in several works, giving viewers a peek behind the curtain, as it were. It reminds viewers of the artist’s hand in the work. It gives the paintings an honesty. One could almost be forgiven for thinking at a glance that these paintings are photographs; they are so hyperrealistic. However, the decision to display some of the works with the light pencil grid still visible brings home to viewers the fact that these works were created by the human hand.

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In the current climate, when we are constantly bombarded with images of all kinds, each with varying degrees of truth, the honesty of Matthews’ work is refreshing. The choice to render a photograph in oil paint allows the artist to reclaim his viewpoint. The active decision to render one photograph rather than another allows for an individual interpretation. Matthews is no longer just observing, but making a statement that something about the composition was worth painting.

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He has curated a series of moments immortalised in oil – a glimpse of urban Dublin that many never see, or choose not to appreciate. He’s giving the viewer permission to enjoy the ordinary. This allowance alone is reason enough to visit. Through the interplay of light and dark, Matthews has created nineteen works of restrained beauty for Dublin’s backlands and junctions, nineteen still lifes of a city.

Every Friday of last November, an exhibition under the name The Greek Street Flats: A History Towards Care and Repair was held at the community centre in Dominick Hall, Dominick Street Lower. The work displayed was on the social housing complex of St Michan’s House, produced by students of the first year of UCD’s Master of Architecture during the spring trimester of 2025. This event was a combined effort between the UCD School of Architecture and St Michan’s House Residents’ Association, particularly chairpersons Joanna Boylan and Lisa O’Connor.

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In recent years, St Michan’s House Residents’ Association have facilitated the visits of three cohorts of students from UCD School of Architecture to the flats, with residents sharing their time and opening their homes. The students conducted surveys, researched archival material, and documented residents’ reported experiences before reacting to the context with design proposals. After the term, enabled by seed funding from UCD, we had a chance to develop with Lisa and Joanna how the iterative process could be brought a step further. This is how the possibility to display this cohort’s work at an exhibition for the residents of St Michan’s emerged. Ultimately, the intention was to explore the questions of why we should, and how we could, care for St Michan’s.

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Often referred to as the Greek Street flats, St Michan’s House is a social housing complex containing 112 flats on Mary’s Lane, north of the Four Courts in Dublin. Completed in 1934, the flats were the first of their type to be occupied in the Free State and one of the first social housing designs of architect Herbert J. Simms for Dublin Corporation. A 2023 article by Doireann de Courcy Mac Donnell on type.ie covered this same complex, analysing it under the headings of space, access, and services, and notably pointing out in its very title that St Michan’s flats are ‘working hard, and yet hardly working at all’ [1].

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The UCD students were interested in the historical relevance of the Greek Street flats, but also in something they have in common with many twentieth-century social housing flats under the management of Dublin City Council: their state of (dis)repair and the urgent need to make them sustainable, and non-hazardous to their inhabitant’s health. In a 2023 survey conducted by St Michan’s own Residents’ Association, 88% of respondents declared issues with mould and damp, 76% identified sewage problems, and 72% expressed difficulty in keeping their homes warm due to draughts and poor insulation. The list of issues continues: pest infestations, water ingress, overcrowding, and the inaccessible nature of the design [2]. The maintenance strategy, in the past delivered by in-house professionals, now privatised through subcontractors, is overdue a rethink – a process that Dublin’s Lord Mayor Ray McAdam, speaking at the exhibition, assured residents was underway.

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Retrofitting of social housing flats in Dublin is a complex issue, both technically and socially, so the council relies on demonstration sites such as Ballybough House, Cromcastle Court, Pearse House, and Constitution Hill to find replicable solutions. BER targets are set under the Climate Action Plan 2021, which tasks local authorities with upgrading 25% of their social housing stock to a B2 BER by 2030. Until now, LAs including DCC have focused on houses, as opposed to flats, as the low-hanging fruit of retrofit [3].

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Because of its lower environmental impact, retrofit is considered by many to be the positive alternative to demolition and rebuild [4]. It also implies the retention of familiar, socially relevant, sometimes protected, structures and urban fabric. The main goal of State retrofit strategies, as evidenced by BER targets, is to reduce operational energy use, often equated with increasing the occupants’ thermal comfort. This is crucial in alleviating energy poverty, particularly in a social housing context. However, the focus on energy performance often deprioritises other aspects such as residents’ health. Retrofit practices that address isolated building elements – and therefore do not consider the building as its own sort of ecosystem – can in fact exacerbate the very issues they seek to solve, or may substitute pre-retrofit problems for brand new ones, like overheating, increased concentration of indoor air pollutants, and condensation [5].

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Collaboration as a tool beyond tokenistic participation

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‘We are always saying, there's no easy fixes. “Pull them down, pull them down” – that's not the answer we want. We like where we live, we're proud of where we live. We want to get it maintained and go forward into the future. It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.’ [6]

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Despite the flats’ issues, the residents of St Michan’s hold a strong sense of community and organise around pride and care for their neighbours and homes. Many are against the demolition of the flats and assert that a plan for retrofit or redevelopment must address the buildings’ inherent complexities. For this, they must unequivocally be included in the decision-making process. But as reported by Just Housing regarding the case of Cromcastle Court (Dublin 5), residents are too often excluded from key decision-making processes that directly affect them [7]. Taking Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation as a reference for desirable citizen participation types [figure 2], information sessions and consultations are often tokenistic exercises which do not make for a just city [8]. St Michan’s House and similar projects pose an opportunity for a truly collaborative approach: the future of the flats could be designed with and by their people.

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‘I don’t understand why there is no collaboration between Dublin and its people.’ [9]

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The fields beyond consultation in the context of social housing flats are mostly unexplored in Ireland. Broadly speaking, terms like participatory, community-led, collaborative, and co-design have been used generously, often without regard for their definitions and implications, to appear democratic and benevolent. Misuse of ‘participatory’ labels has diluted their meaning and impact while, at worst, making people sceptical or dubious of projects claiming community involvement. So, if we are to argue for a collective approach to the retrofit of Dublin flats in general, and St Michan’s specifically, crucial parameters must be defined.

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According to Pablo Sendra’s Charter of Co-Design, co-design must start before any decisions are taken, inverting the conventional process whereby people are informed of developments, with limited participation in shaping those developments. Inherent power imbalances must be addressed by ensuring that residents have meaningful and significant decision-making power. Their deeply embodied and intimate knowledge of the place, what they value in it, and their social infrastructure must all be integral to the design process. If successful, true co-design allows residents to feel ownership over a project. This practice takes time by default, as it must recognise, for inclusivity, that residents’ responsibilities – for example, those relating to the care of others – may clash with some of the collective sessions [10].

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Sendra marks trust among stakeholders as a key aspect of collective projects. In just a few decades, the inner-city area around St Michan’s has seen its social and economic infrastructure eroded [figure 3], as well as a prioritisation of profit-led development in the form of overbearing and overshadowing buildings [figure 4] [11]. Internally, the flats have undergone modifications unpopular with residents, including the addition of fire corridors to the expense of living spaces in apartments already less than 50 m² [figure 5]. The lack of resident control over these external and internal changes affecting their homes has eroded trust in the local authority.

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In a series of conversations between the UCD M.Arch group and Residents’ Association chairpersons Lisa and Joanna, it became clear that their preference is for long-term, people-centred solutions achieved through a collaborative process, rather than a prestigious, award-winning building. The commitment to education that saw them welcome students from UCD is also the pillar of the after-school club they run with charity JustASK at Dominick Hall Community Centre every Monday–Thursday, the same location where the exhibition was hosted on Fridays. This space has effectively become their community’s second home, given the lack of appropriate facilities for large groups of children at St Michan’s.

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Residents are very quick to point out what aspects of a building work and don’t work, which are uncomfortable, and which are to be prioritised for their own use and for those in their care. People, regardless of training, intimately and intuitively know about their space and need control over it. Joanna and Lisa hoped that, by opening their doors, students would not only learn about the reality of the Greek Street flats, but also internalise and carry this knowledge forward into their professional practice.

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‘When you go on [...] to architecture, no matter where yous end up, you'll always remember this. But no matter what you build, if somebody's going to live in it, think of the person. Yes, architecture is wonderful to look at. Yes, it's marvellous. It creates culture. Marvellous, wonderful. Ceiling-to-floor windows… and concrete, it's lovely. But if you're building something for people, build it for people. Not just good to look at.’ [12]

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Despite the virtues of collective thinking and designing, these approaches risk staying within Arnstein’s ‘Degrees of Tokenism’ as a form of placation alongside information sessions and consultations. Collaborative design rarely reaches the final rungs of the participation ladder – delegated power and citizen control – and while it does intend to address power imbalances, it neither seeks to examine their origin nor to structurally eliminate them. These limitations make the practice the target for well-deserved criticism from critical geographers and planners [13]. With their wider perspective, we can become aware of the limitations of collaborative practices and perhaps come to see them more as a mitigation measure than as a means to a collective end: what can we do to make the city more democratic when the right to the city is far from realised [14]?

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Architecture must be (made) accessible

Returning to our exhibition at Dominick Hall, those of us on the curatorial team realised that it must avoid remaining in the architectural echo chamber. Too often, architectural culture fails to connect with the rest of the world, denying ‘non-architects’ the possibility to engage with ideas around the built environment – something that concerns us all. We wanted to work with residents to develop an exhibition that was inclusive, accessible, and engaging for an audience beyond our architect peers. It had to be something over which, to follow the collaborative ethos, the residents could feel ownership.

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The ‘how’ of designing an accessible exhibition was not an exact science. We are used to talking of making places universally accessible, but not so much of holding representation to the same standard. In our case, the focus was on clear content organisation, generous labelling, relatable photographs, and intuitive drawings. The sections – Where We Were, Where We Are, and Where We Might Go – were highlighted, and each page had a subtitle identifying its central theme. Abundant photographs of recognisable spaces and building features, some of them while in use by the residents, made the work more approachable, as not everyone is automatically drawn to drawings. For drawings themselves, our strategies included the presence of labels and keys, the use of parallel or perspective projections to create readily legible three-dimensional views, and the favouring of heavily inhabited drawings.

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While students’ proposals were speculative, they did respond to the context and expressed needs – lifts and wide staircores for accessibility [figure 9], extensions to living rooms for shared family time [figure 10], the creation of external storage spaces, and additional community space, to name a few. The process through which the proposals were generated was not collaborative – architectural education still has ways to go – but the residents shared with us their excitement at the possibilities presented by students. Architecture contains a wealth of tools to put to paper imagined futures of care and repair, making what buildings exist work for the people who dwell in them. With design processes that are truly collectivised, architecture can empower people to express what they need with specificity and conviction. And with a higher degree of collective participation, we may just start to realise these visions.

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Looking backwards to look forwards during a time of energy and environmental crises; shifts within gender, racial, postcolonial, and posthuman relations; and rapid technological developments, these articles pose a series of questions. What, if anything, can still be learnt from the modernist project? What is its potential to address today’s wicked problems? What continuities and discontinuities can be discerned between twentieth-century modernism and contemporary and future architectural production? Do we require new methodologies to be created and deployed to assess these important questions? How do we reflect upon the lessons of modernism within a global context? How can the definitions of function and economy within modernist architecture be redefined to respond to immediate and future contexts?

Commissioning architects, historians and theorists, Modernism is Almost All Right seeks to offer new knowledge and methods to reappraise the movement’s canonical and, critically, non-canonical forms and examine how its modes of theory and practice might be expanded to address the complexities of designing the future.

Too often, there is a fissure between the architectural discourse of the academy and discussion of architecture in the public realm. Type.ie's presentation of historical documents next to other forms of essays on today’s built environment argues for the utility of a historical perspective within contemporary discourse. Through this collaboration, Modernism is Almost All Right aims to disseminate a series of referenced, evidence-based texts to a public within and beyond academia appearing, firstly at least, as a monthly online article series, parallel to the existing dogma&opinion series. What follows is the introduction to the series. While acknowledging lacunae and limitations interms of gender, race, and environmental consciousness, it scopes the achievements of the modernist project as a way of both seeing the world, and as a method of acting within it.

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The expanded field of architecture ^[1]

To counter Manfredo Tafuri, Modernism is Almost All Right presupposes that architectural history should be – actually, must be – operative. Part of its vitality and its social and cultural function lies in its ability to think about and critique the past in order to influence the future. This is particularly relevant when, to paraphrase Rosalind Krauss, architecture is understood as an expanded field. Contemporary architectural production is part of an intricate globalised matrix of flows (of labour and information, and raw and synthetic materials), operating across legislative landscapes of trade agreements and boundaries – all financed electronically and super-nationally. Accordingly, the apparently banal and ordinary that constitutes the majority of our built environment – the supermarkets, carparks, pieces of everyday infrastructures, distribution centres, call centres, speculative housing, and so on – are sophisticated and complex phenomena. As such they are not only worthy of, but actively require, ongoing architectural investigation, as Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour began to highlight in 1972. That we reimagine the ordinary through engagement with its hidden complexities has thus become an essential aspect of the architect’s and the critic’s purpose.

Despite its attendant and ongoing controversies, architectural modernism – with its social, political, and technological components – not only concerned itself closely with the complexities of the ordinary in this way, but equipped itself with the ambition, belief, and infrastructure to propose solutions, across a series of scales, to the big problems it found there. Lessons of the recent past, in the range and scope of modernist architecture, can provide useful means of seeing, and thereby defining, the near future. Modernism is Almost Alright.

Theory in the expanded field

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously lists the achievements of capitalism, insisting that the scale, impact, and complexity of the industrial revolution and wage-labour far surpassed anything realised in the previous epochs of cathedrals, palaces, slavery, serfdom, and pre-mechanised agriculture. In a section from Capital Volume 1 (1867), the wonderfully titled ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’, he underscores the extent of this complexity by discussing what appears the most ordinary of things, the commodity.

‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (p. 163).

Essentially, a commodity is anything that can be bought and sold on the market: your wristwatch, my trousers, their car. Marx is writing specifically about cotton, (he closely studied the industry in Manchester), but through the development of capitalism, his is a definition that has become more and more universalised. Henri Lefebvre (1991), for example, discusses the commodification of land as a process of disenchantment or emancipation from all previous meanings and associations into comparative, exchangeable parcels. All qualities become subsumed to quantities, homogenised within what has been described as the money nexus. While evidently this can equally be applied to buildings, it can also be extended to ephemeral as well as physical things. Commodities are complex entities, often involving large systems whose presence and qualities, conditions and means of production are discrete from and invisible within the object itself. As Marx states elsewhere, if everything was as it appears on the surface – if, in other words, everything could be intuited – then there would be no need for science (1884). But, if you look at something for long enough and through the correct lens, complexities appear. The what and the how of something like a building becomes conflated with how it is made: its means of production – industrialisation; how it is transported – logistics; where its materials come from – extraction; the social conditions of the labour force – how they live, how they are reproduced, etc. The latter recalls John Ruskin’s dictum from the ‘Nature of Gothic’ that a central question of architectural appreciation is ‘What kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy’. (Ruskin, 1892, p. 23) Writing in 1853, before Capital was published, Ruskin explodes the meaning of architecture to suggest that an ephemeral, emotional condition is both present within the form and, at the same time, discrete from it – one of a series of complex relationships that exist simultaneously within and outside the object in the conditions of its production.

Written almost a hundred years later in 1948, Sigfried Giedion’s book Mechanisation Takes Command examines the impact of mechanisation on a series of everyday items and processes. The subtitle, A Contribution to An Anonymous History, surmises a history of unknown innovators who contributed not only to the realisation of a series of what would become ordinary objects but, also, and more importantly, how these things were made. For example, Giedion tracks the evolution of farm machinery, confirming the countryside as the crucible of technological and industrial development. He devotes a whole chapter to the mechanisation of death, analysing pigs in the stock yards and abattoirs of Chicago and the de-feathering of chickens (complete with diagrams and photographs) (Figure 1) as well as the conditions necessary for their sandwich accompaniment, the mass production of bread. From here he traces how the serial killing of pigs became translated into the manufacturing of cars in the Ford factory production lines of Detroit and from there became normalised, not only in the global making of cars in Europe and elsewhere, but as a generic system of production. In the process, this connoisseur historian of architecture, and intimate of Le Corbusier et al, reveals apparently ordinary things to be extra-ordinary.

In The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969), Reyner Banham provides a humanities perspective on technological and environmental concerns within architecture. The book rubbed against conventional architectural history and discourse by discussing such things as Frank Lloyd Wright’s attitude toward central heating, the Northern Irish origins of air-conditioning, and the proliferation of the suspended ceiling or floor, complete with modular tiles as a prime mover, not only in the production of offices and other buildings, but also behind more theoretical propositions. The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2000) by Rem Koolhaas, Judy Chung Chuia, and others, focuses on another lacuna within architectural discourse. It provides an introduction to key thinkers such as Victor Gruen, inventor of the suburban shopping mall in the 1950s – based on the Ringstrasse of his native Vienna – and John Jerde, who re-invented shopping mall design in the 1970s through the introduction of theatricality inspired themes. Also discussed are aspects of the technical servicing of shopping, such as the hugely influential development of the escalator, which opened up continuous vertical flow through space; and the uses of psycho-programming, which seeks to understand how and why people buy what they buy, and to get them to buy more. Kengo Kuma’s book Anti-Object: The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture (2007) adroitly suggests that architecture should be understood as being essentially provisional. Echoing Marx’s description of the constant revolutions of change within capital that cause ‘all that is solid [to melt] into air’, under this conception it is possible to see architecture as simply a nexus of connections and ultimately, like the city, as having no fixed form (Marx, 1848, p. 83). As the twenty-first century has progressed, we are seeing further extensions of the field into both these broader contexts, but also re-examining previous histories with an expanded reference to the non-visual. Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity (2004) critiques Banham’s earlier work by examining not only the architectural shift in space and material, but also the electronic inventions which spurred on an entirely new sonic world as modernism gathered pace.

The expansion of the field also, of course, extended into new readings of modernism from post-colonial, feminist, queer, and post-anthropocene humanities thinkers, from those influenced by Edward Said’s formational Orientalism to those who have developed and critiqued Donna Harraway’s ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ (1985). Practitioners and theorists such as James Corner, Stan Allen, and Charles Waldheim called for a wider practice of architecture, capable of operating across a range of scales and complex conditions, whose output might be the definition of fields of relationships as well as, or instead of, the production of buildings. The suggestion here was the reclamation not only of territories previously lost to architecture but also the recovery of a modernist ideal: architecture as an instrument capable of transforming the human condition rather than merely expressing it (Allen, 1999).

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Practice and the expanded field

Built between 1935 and 1938, the Finsbury Health Centre by Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton is indicative of an intimate and nascent engagement between architecture and sections of society previously beyond the reach of the profession (Figure 2). It is premised on the basis that architecture could deliver, or at least facilitate, the provision of health – architecture, previously the reserve of the rich and powerful, is now placed in the position of being able to make the ordinary individual well. The scope and ambition of architecture has changed, radically, to embrace a more democratic foundation.

Also striking is another project and publication produced by the same architects at about the same time. Entitled Planned ARP (Air Raid Protection), through text, diagrams, drawings, and photographs it examines and speculates on the potential future bombing of the London borough of Finsbury in the predicted Second World War (Figures 3, 4). It provides analytical, detailed studies of types of bomb: incendiary, gas, percussion, general purpose, semi-armour piercing, and their dispersal and likely effects – impact, shock, penetration, blast, splinters, falling debris, etc. – on architecture and civic space. Against these, measures of protection – from slit trenches to the use of existing basements, surface shelters to deep excavations – are also surveyed and their attributes, qualities, and drawbacks explained and critiqued.

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Designed for public consumption, the book deployed Gordon Cullen (later of The Concise Townscape fame) to make a series of vignettes communicating very clearly and evocatively the potential scenarios resulting from the inadequate provision of shelter. Finally, responding to this amassing of evidence from the fields of aerial warfare and an informed examination of how bombing might affect the city, Tecton provides a design solution in the form of an underground shelter, accessed by a helical ramp and used in peacetime as a carpark. The form was, of course, curiously and famously, replicated above ground in the architects’ penguin pavilion for London Zoo (Figure 5).

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Of significance is that architectural techniques have been used to analyse the complex conditions of phenomena normally outside architectural discourse: aerial bombing. Architectural and other types of drawing are used to reveal its qualities and threats, communicating these things in a clear, precise way to a general, non-expert audience. Having defined the question of what the future bombing of London might look like, Tecton provide an answer – a shelter whose design responds not only to the variety of bombs predicted to fall, but also to other complexities surrounding the servicing of the facility and even aspects such as the psychological wellbeing of the shelter’s occupants, as well as its future use.

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Throughout the twentieth century, modernism’s evolving concerns continued to seek a rapprochement between developing technologies and new ways of shaping society and its institutions – through the application of big ideas. The plan drawings for the Free University of Berlin from 1963 resemble an archaeological artefact, a coded tablet offering a transcription of a densely occupied city. In fact, the proposal by Candilis Josic Woods for a radical new form of non-hierarchical university was based partly on ideas of medieval European and Islamic urban forms (Figure 6). It sought the furthering of knowledge through the spatial breaking of disciplinary boundaries – specifically between sciences and humanities – by providing an environment analogous to a city, where chance meetings encourage dialogue between individuals and groups within otherwise un-programmed space. Described by Alison Smithson as an example of, if not the archetypical, mat building – a thick inhabited 2D – it was also technologically designed to be endless, adaptable, formless: a modular system without beginning or end, a non-fixed space of knowledge exchange, as suitable for the suburbs of Dublin as those of Berlin (Figure 7).

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The architecture of the mid-twentieth century became more sophisticated in its attitude to society and more responsive, adaptive, and nuanced to criteria which modernism had previously tended to overlook such as place, site, and history. But it retained a radical agenda for remaking institutions and other spaces. In Ireland, the late 1970s mat-planning of St. Brendan’s Community School in Birr by Peter and Mary Doyle emerged out of a government-sponsored architectural competition. Birr embodies the new democratisation and secularisation of Irish education first posited in the 1960s (Figure 8). This is demonstrated in a non-hierarchical plan arrangement of courtyards, classrooms, and an internal street made possible through the application of an off-the-shelf concrete portal frame system originally manufactured for the rapid assembly of factories. Designed as inherently flexible, and described as ‘ideally of no fixed form’ by Mary Doyle, who resolutely denied any primacy of aesthetic within its design, the building is as much a political manifesto in the belief of a future Ireland as it is a piece of architecture (O’Regan, 1990, p. 14).

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Other built visions of possible futures include Piet Blom’s ‘kasbah’ housing scheme in Hengalo, 1969-73. Another mat of occupation, the entire scheme is raised on stilts leaving a free, permissive space underneath designed for children to play. Moshie Safdie’s Habitat 1967 offers a similarly dense occupation in section and a stepped and graduated relationship between inside and outside, and public and private space (Figure 9). In 1969, at a more conceptual and prophetic level, Andrea Branzi of the Italian avant-garde group Archizoom offered No Stop City, a web of networked services where people are essentially nomadic, camping between thick sectional zones of generic and universal services which look suspiciously like they belong to office space (Figure 10). In The Continuous Monument (1969) Superstudio proposes a siteless, omnipresent architecture of services where everyone is endlessly connected, apparently emancipated from previous constraints of geographical place and time but reliant on iconic landmarks such as the skyline of New York and the Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare for the potency of its messaging (Figure 11). A polemical or critical project, it is predicated on the pervasive suspended floor tile system as identified by Reyner Banham. Also in this vein, Reyner Banham himself (with Francois Dallegret), conceived A Home is Not a House (1965) which, as is well known, proposes a naked life in inflatable bubbles – albeit one with full access to essential services such as heat, water, and television.

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Architecture, communication, and the anthropocene

These last projects, and those of the first wave of modernism which preceded them, responded to the question first posed by William Morris of ‘how we live and how we might live’ (1885). However, they don’t necessarily answer the question. Rather, they tend to re-ask it while communicating the terms of reference in which the question has been framed. The communicative aspect of architecture – the idea of the project as literally projecting a future – is of fundamental importance, as Stan Allen suggests:

‘An architectural drawing is an assemblage of spatial and material notations that can be decoded according to a series of shared conventions in order to effect a transformation of reality at a distance from the author. The drawing as an artefact is unimportant. It can be just as convincingly described as a script, a score, or a recipe, or a set of instructions for realizing a building’ (2010, p. 41).

To reiterate, architects don’t actually build anything – they communicate to others to build in what Allen (quoting Nelson Goodman) differentiates as autographic and allographic practices: autographic being the drawing as artefact, and allographic essentially communicating directions for others to carry out.

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In Charles and Ray Eames’ 1953 film, ‘A Communications Primer’, they take exactly twenty-one minutes twenty-nine seconds to clarify and discuss the significance of Claude Shannon’s treatise, A Mathematical Model of Communication. In its explanation of Shannon’s often dense work, the film uses movement, dialogue, text, and music, but primarily visual images, to engage with the article’s complexity. Of significance is the Eameses’ close attention to the equation central to Shannon’s thesis – this artefact is distilled and analysed, its constituent parts broken up and its abstractions replaced by cognate, recognisable forms. Explanation becomes an iterative process where the central message is repeated over and over using a series of diverse examples involving space, movement, form, and the relationships between them.

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These are evidently constituent elements of architecture, and of interest here is how the equation is captured, mined, interpreted, and communicated by the Eameses through the use of a series of iconic forms and patterns. In the Middle Ages, as seen explicitly in examples such as Laon Cathedral, architecture was media. To reuse Shannon’s own diagram, before Gutenberg and the advent of mass literacy, the message was scriptures (and frequently the apocalypse), the signal was architecture, and the receiver was the eyes and imagination of pilgrims and church-goers – that is, just about everyone.

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In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo stressed that this is no more. Famously, he announced, ceci tuera cela: this will kill that, the book will kill the edifice. Following the invention of the printing press and the subsequent mass production of reading material, architecture was seen to have had the primacy of its communicative function severely diminished. When it did communicate, it was often reduced to an adjunct of language. And yet, at the beginning of the information age (Claude Shannon is known as the father of information theory), and in spite of their subsequent immersion in then cutting-edge exhibition techniques in their later careers, the Eameses' film uses communicative techniques that are positively medieval: resorting to the manipulation of form and space to represent abstract ideas to a chiefly illiterate audience. In the Eameses’ film, modern icons – recognisable forms from everyday life – are assembled and articulated to expand and tease out the complexities of a textual and numerical theory.

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This is the application of architectural thinking as a means of communication, architecture as an interface. The end-credits reveal the level of interdisciplinary creativity across art and science that has been effectively curated and communicated by the two designers: Warren Weaver (mathematician and colleague of Shannon); Edgar Kaufmann Jnr. (architect and son of Edgar Kaufmann, patron of Falling Water); Norbert Wiener (the father of cybernetics, feedback control, and systems theory which would dominate the development of weapons from the 1950s); Oskar Morgenstern (economist, developer of Game Theory); and John Von Neumann (mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, and polymath); and, finally, Elmer Bernstein (composer of the score for the films The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, amongst others).

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The film (and the Eameses) become the medium for the ideas and expressions of these experts because, like the example of Tecton’s investigation of bombing, this is about understanding and restating a question and widening its terms of reference. While the question shifts, and the context changes, what remains is an intimate engagement with the artefact – in this case, Shannon’s equation, elsewhere other diverse phenomena. As the Eameses famously stated, ‘design is a method of action’ (1972).  

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In 1928, Hannes Meyer stated that ‘Architecture = function x economy’.

‘All things in this world are the product of the formula: [function times economy] … building is a biological process. Building is not an aesthetic process… architecture “as an emotional act of the artist” has no justification. Architecture as “a continuation of the tradition of building” means being carried along by the history of architecture … the new house is … an industrial product and the work of a variety of specialists: economists, statisticians, hygienicists, climatologists, industrial engineers, standardization experts, heating engineers … and the architect? He [sic] was an artist and now becomes a specialist in organisation … building is nothing but organisation: social, technical, economic, psychological organisation’ (Conrads, 1970, pp. 117-120).

Far from limiting its ambitions, if a central aspect of modernism was a re-evaluation of the social and its recalibration through technology, Meyer’s conception seems to broaden architecture and the actions of the architect to facilitate a rapprochement between technology, science, and biology. As such his words seem prescient of the need for twenty-first century design to synthesise such strands as a means of coping with or overcoming the complex conditions and consequences resulting from human-activated climate change.

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The German photographer Henrik Spohler’s project In-between (2020) explores global generic logistical spaces. They are captured without the presence of local context: big sheds realised within linear systems of production and flows of goods (Figure 12). Similarly, Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene (2018) depicts vast contemporary industrial methods and systems that would be immediately recognisable to Karl Marx. As would the photographs of Sebastião Salgado (2005) demonstrating the globalised division of labour, and the inhumanity and exploitation of mineral mining in South America, for example. Burtynsky’s photographic exploration of China (2015) included a famous image of a large structure packed with workers dressed in clinical workwear, processing chicken meat (Figure 13). If there are so many workers, you can imagine the number of chickens involved. When you consider that chickens towards the end of their lives (as Giedion knew well) are fed two thousand calories a day – more than we as humans require – it becomes immediately recognisable that Burtynsky’s work represents a snapshot of a linear, energy intensive, and destructive system.

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The majority of Europe’s salad and other crops are grown in the Hook of Holland on land many metres under sea level and heated primarily by natural gas. Spohler’s and Burtynsky’s photographs of the globalised mass-production of food in greenhouses show how a repeatable generic system covers vast areas. It is the space of the near future – depicted here in fragments but already universalised in the accelerated present of fictional space in films such as Blade Runner 2049 (2017, directed by Denis Villeneuve), whose opening conveys an endless landscape of greenhouses, based on Burtynsky’s photographs.

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In 2013, in his book Weak and Diffuse Modernity, Andrea Branzi of Archizoom called for:

‘reversible, evolving, provisionary forms, architecture that is less composite and more enzymatic, [that] surpasses the limits of building as a structural and typological concentration ... becoming an open system of environmental componential work’ (p. 10).

For Branzi and other practitioners such as Stan Allen, James Corner, and Kengo Kuma, architecture in the twenty-first century must slip beyond its institutional, disciplinary, and professional boundaries to creatively engage with the larger questions hinted at by Meyer – urbanism, the global provision of food, and the equitable disposition of energy, resources, and services.

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At the end of the twentieth century, the architectural critic and technology writer Martin Pawley painted a bleak picture in his book Terminal Architecture (1998). He highlighted the amount of research and development time taken in producing a piece of industrial design – literally thousands of hours of refinement which is then invested in many thousands of units of the mass-produced thing. Pawley compared this to the production of architecture, in which research and development often or usually generates designs which are used just once, for one single building. A fetishising concern for the beautiful artefact over the system, and the bespoke over the iterative was, he suggested, leaving architecture ill-equipped to deal with the accelerations in technology, communication and, increasingly, crises which articulate the economy and indeed everyday life.

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To reiterate, architecture is adept at projecting the future if it can find the right terms and means in which to do so. These have to be broad and far-reaching, and embedded deeply within local and global conditions, pulling together and synthesising apparently disparate forms of knowledge, methods, and techniques to first understand and then hack into and replace existing systems to provide alternatives for food production, energy consumption, and environmental injustice. This is an extension of what might be described as the interrupted modernist project that proposed an architecture capable of transforming for the good the human and post-human condition during Anthropogenic times – and not necessarily by building but by deploying architecture and design methods as means to understand, analyse, project, and communicate credible alternatives. The scale of ideas, however, must be big.

Learning from modernism

Modernism has had inherent and identifiable limitations, lacunae, and blind spots. Part of this has been a consequence of how its history has been written about and described. Modernism is Almost All Right seeks to occupy overlooked territories, and to counter and complexify Western-centric, gender, class, and race-specific narratives. It begins with a rereading of the representational and political culture wars surrounding the Brutalist welfare housing project in the United Kingdom and beyond, and continues with an examination of the work and contexts surrounding the black female architect Ethel Madison Bailey Carter Furman in the mid-century southern United States. Other essays within the project's rolling monthly programme include the re-exploration of the ‘invisible landscapes’ of Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe; a repositioning of the continuing relevance and influence of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer; two examinations of aspects of modernism within India; and new thinking on the overlooked factories of Le Corbusier.  We look forward to opening this discussion to an online audience via Type.ie and anticipate an ongoing, robust re-examination of these issues with a wide audience.

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Note: The next issue of Modernism is Almost All Right will feature an essay by Sarah Churchill: '"Escaping Plato's Cave": How Photography Killed (and May Yet Recover) Working-Class Modernism'

Walking up Grafton Street in the early morning hours one can catch Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre’s dome glistening in the sunlight, a historicist mirage standing out at the heart of Dublin city. At the top of the street, cornering with the park of the same name, the building stands as one of the latest instances of the city’s tug of war with heritage preservation.

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The demolition and redevelopment proposal for the shopping centre submitted for planning permission in January 2023 prompted a group of young people with an interest in architecture and preservation to start the 'Save Stephen's Green' campaign, with the aim of raising awareness and advocating against the demolition through social media activism and an on-site protest. The redesign and the public backing of the campaign have brought the building to people’s attention, posing questions about conservation: what is historic, what is worth keeping, and what are we willing to let go of in the name of progress and development?

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Built in the late 1980s, Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre stands on a site previously occupied by the Gaiety Green, a row of Georgian houses with small shop units rented out to vendors and known as the Dandelion Market at weekends. The site was put up for sale in 1980, and closed the following year, leading to the demolition of most of the original buildings. After several changes in ownership, construction of the shopping centre began in 1986, opening to the public two years later, in October 1988. [1]

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The development came at a particularly relevant moment in the city’s history, marking the Dublin Millennium, an event that attempted to raise questions about its urban development through a series of projects such as the repaving of nearby Grafton Street, or the competition for a new monument for O’Connell Street, Dublin made a striking effort towards a change of attitude that modernised its image and public space. This milestone coincided with an urban renewal and social rehabilitation movement taking place all across Europe, and aimed to bring the city closer to other international capitals, while improving its citizen’s life quality through an array of polished and pleasant outdoor and indoor spaces. [2]

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Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, at the time of its opening, was no stranger to this context. In its design, architect James Toomey attempted to borrow some of these principles to conceive a commercial space that would recreate the feel and dynamics of an indoor street. With its winding circulation and glass-covered atrium featuring the renowned clock, the interior of the shopping centre resembled that of a 19th century train station or London’s Crystal Palace. The use of steel ornamentation continued throughout the building and onto the New Orleans style facade.

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As is common for buildings of this style, its historicist postmodernism has been used against it by speculative developers, justifying its demolition under arguments disregarding its architectural value, measuring it purely on a matter of taste. This dialectic should come as no surprise, for the debate around the value of the “ugly and ordinary” as perceived by the architectural community, has been ongoing throughout the majority of the 20th century, and continues to be a conflictive topic. Even at the time of publication of Venturi and Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas, now regarded as one of the key readings of postmodernism, their argument for studying what was then considered irrelevant or tasteless (“commercial vernacular” architecture) was strongly criticised or even dismissed by the architectural community. [3] We may therefore rescue some of their arguments to, at the very least, consider the architectural value of the shopping centre beyond arguments based merely on taste.

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Half a century later, the economic forces at play are pushing for a shift in style, entirely conditioned by the profitability of the design, and made palatable to the public under the guise of architectural prestige. The simplification that took over the buildings analysed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is common to developments at a global scale, seeking for neutral spaces that can be easily adapted at a lower cost, and blending the image of our cities into a homogenous global aesthetic in the process. The inevitability of this trend we appear to be passengers to, however, is confronted by an attitude from the public that refuses to step back and watch as it takes place. As we have seen by the engagement and involvement Dublin's citizens have taken in the Save Stephen’s Green Campaign, there is a sense of responsibility to participate in the city-making process, to make our voices heard in order to preserve and enhance the parts of our cities we find value in.

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The statement that Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is not old enough to be classed as heritage is not particular to this building, as it is a path we are going down with other 20th century buildings, prompting a dilemma to be considered by planners and developers: what constitutes heritage? The limits of what can be considered historic or worthy of preservation and protection are not based solely on a matter of age, as the Heritage Council states in its objection to the redevelopment plan, citing the shopping centre as “an iconic 20th century building of architectural interest and as a landmark building”. [4] Accordingly, other factors such as character, significance, and as pointed out by the Council, “architectural interest”, are at play in the issue of heritage.

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What is or not historic does not depend exclusively on the year of construction, a conception of ‘old’ that can and will always become so as enough time passes, and we should not lose sight of the fact that not every building has the potential to become heritage. What is potentially historic is a question concerning the previously stated factors, first and foremost the relationship that us as citizens establish with architectural landmarks of our cities.

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Will these commercialised, optimised for profit buildings ever become historic? In our campaign for the preservation of Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, it became apparent that it was precisely the least profitable aspects of the building that people were most attached to. The atrium - arguably a profitless waste of space; the feel of an indoor space with its winding and oftentimes confusing circulations. Each served a purpose that went beyond the purely commercial as they allowed visitors to establish a connection with the shopping centre. By enabling us to regard the building as a landmark and a part of our identity, the creation of experiences and memories in a space that pushed the limits of the strictly mercantile inspired a movement to save it from demolition.

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The reactions to the campaign were an excellent gauge of the public opinion, showing that while people are critical of the building’s flaws and its current state of decay, they care for it and want investment and effort to be put into renewing it, a proof that we collectively assign value to what we develop a relationship with.

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We must, therefore, find a way to reconcile commercially viable and to some degree, standardised architecture, with the city’s character. While financial viability cannot be ignored, particularly in the current economic climate, failing to address this may result in a loss of the citizen’s sense of belonging, and a deterioration of our public and urban spaces.

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In the current global situation, facing an overwhelming array of crises, both social and environmental, we cannot afford to settle for throwaway architecture. In an increasingly divided world, the processes taking place and shaping our cities demand us to take a step forward, paying close attention to them and assuming an active role in their making.

Although scattered voices have raised concerns over the years, debate within the field on the problems associated with architectural renderings have remained scarce. The heightened visibility and public concern surrounding renderings would seem to warrant greater scrutiny; yet, broadly speaking, this has not yet materialised [1].

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Instances of public critique and backlash against renderings continue to surface in public discourse. Earlier this year, an Instagram reel depicting the contrast between early renderings and photos of realised public constructs in Copenhagen received over 2.7 million views and thousands of comments [2]. Also recently viral was AntiRender, a website allowing users to upload a rendering and, in return, receive a bleak, ‘realistic’ reinterpretation of it, stripped of ‘happy families’ and ‘impossibly green trees’ [3]. In the past decade or two, more consequential cases have emerged, including instances in which renderings became central to an organised community protest[4], a pre-emptive project closure and resignation [5], and even the unlawful replication of a project [6].

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A reason for the passivity towards the responsibilities of renderings  may lie in the tendency to frame present concerns through a ‘this-has-always-existed’ lens. A recent news article on manipulative images, amid widespread anxiety over the harmful spread of AI deepfakes, illustrates how concern is raised only to be quickly shut down [7]. Its central takeaway is that manipulated images are nothing new: the author alleges such images have long existed. Attempts to discuss renderings, whose current debates on imagery deception and societal harm are not too distant from those surrounding deepfakes, are similarly curtailed by this reflex.

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This appeal to a limited interpretation of tradition is problematic. While it is sensible to situate contemporary concerns within their histories, it is specious to use historical resemblance to trivialise and undermine present problems. By assimilating current issues to past instances, the view risks turning a blind eye to key differences, such as scale and access, that may significantly alter their impact.

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More importantly, this tendency assumes that direct continuity or lineage can be traced among imaging technologies; for example, that renderings today are essentially the same as those referred to in the past as renderings. Yet, as John May argues, imaging technologies have undergone foundational transformations such that they may share ‘virtually nothing in common’ with earlier iterations of the same technology beyond name and resemblance [8]. However, making sense of what has changed, and how, is complicated. Architecture, he suggests, has struggled with this confusion [9].

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Susan Piedmont-Palladino similarly notes foundational shifts in the evolution of architectural renderings and how such shifts altered and obscured their understanding [10]. In earlier eras, she observes, architectural renderings were ‘more akin to paintings,’ but later they were more closely aligned with photography. These categories carry widely diverging public associations, with the former tending toward imaginative connotations and the latter toward associations with truth. Renderings’ sly movement between these fields has led to what Piedmont-Palladino describes as an ‘almost exquisite confusion between real and unreal.’

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Renderings became entangled in interpretive ambiguity not only through visual changes, but also through their increasing alignment with data-driven simulation. This trajectory persists today, as rendering practices rely on increasingly sophisticated digital models, environmental data, and physics-based simulations. Previous literature indicates that improvements in accuracy were often presented as a means of mitigating renderings’ ethical implications [11]. However, the realisation of such aspirations has, in many ways, had the opposite effect. By incorporating greater fact-resemblance, renderings have reshaped how seriously their imagery are perceived. This has and continues to intensify public expectations of trust and validity, raising the stakes of their representations.

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These technological and associative developments affect public judgment and understanding. There remains significant confusion regarding how architectural visualisations should be framed and how their truth-values versus their imaginative status ought to be assessed, despite their ubiquitous presence in decision-making processes. This evolving ambiguity should not be overlooked. However, ethical concerns and questions of trust surrounding renderings have become so entrenched that the topic is often treated as settled, and new calls for attention are readily dismissed. Much like the cautionary tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, concerns regarding renderings are discounted because they resemble earlier alarmism. Yet it is worth recalling that, in the tale, despite the town’s seemingly justified dismissal, in the end the wolf was dangerously real.

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In the new year I took up knitting. I had previously crocheted, but I find knitting easier, more rhythmic, and I am more drawn to the textures it produces. Recently, however, I learned that while knitting is often regarded as the more refined craft, crochet might in fact be more ‘valuable’. Knit stitches are predictable and therefore more easily mechanised. Crochet, by contrast, relies on complex, irregular knots that demand the tension and judgement of a human hand. What appears somewhat more sophisticated and polished is also more reproducible.

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When asked to reflect on my experience as a female architecture student, this question of value - particularly of historically feminised crafts - felt unexpectedly relevant. Textile work has long been associated with women and domestic labour and therefore devalued and positioned outside the realm of serious production or art. Analogously, women architects were historically steered towards domestic architecture and interior design. Stratigakos notes, it was considered that the female designer’s ‘essential womanliness’ made them naturally suited to the home, a space which was private, emotional and minor [1]. Civic or infrastructural projects were considered prestigious and carried heftier financial rewards, and as such were reserved for male architects. Qualities associated with women such as emotion, interiority, and care - domesticity, were treated as secondary and women were excluded from typologies that defined architectural ambition.

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Le Corbusier described the house as ‘a machine for living in’, prioritising standardisation, efficiency and rational function over decoration or atmosphere. The aesthetics of stark functionalism has continued to shape contemporary architectural culture. Optimised plans, clean sections, seamless renders are easily produced, easily legible, and easy to defend. Contemporary techniques of modular or panelised construction used in large office or housing blocks can feel nearly human-less, designed and assembled by ‘the machine’ - although of course manual labour has indeed occurred [2]. The new age of AI further intensifies this condition; the machine in architecture. It can generate compelling plans, sections, and images in seconds. What it excels at are the same qualities architecture has long rewarded. Yet, just as a machine cannot feel the precise tension required for a double or treble crochet stitch, it does not possess haptic perception or a true sense of scale. Juhani Pallasmaa argues in The Eyes of the Skin that contemporary architecture’s dominance of image and form often comes at the expense of touch and care [3].

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I recognise these tensions in my own education and practise. Formal strength, productivity, and technological fluency are often what succeed in crits. A rational plan can be convincingly argued, a clear section is reassuring. I have learned to provide a clear drawing to explain every essential argument or design choice. What I find harder to justify are decisions rooted in emotion; how I want a space to feel, how I imagine a body moving through it, why a corner should sharpen or curve, if a space should feel bright or dark. The more intuitive or impulsive my reasoning, the more difficult it is to articulate graphically or otherwise within a culture that prioritises efficiency and reproducibility.

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As a result, those qualities which resist such reproduction - those historically coded as feminine such as care - atmosphere and emotional intelligence have come to feel more important to me. Anyone can now optimise a plan; fewer can design for the subtle choreography of inhabitation or the quiet negotiations of domestic life. Eileen Gray argued, “A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation” [4]. These sentiments can be read in her design of E1027. For example, the spacing of Gray’s pilotis are derived from internal spatial properties rather than mathematical calculations, and, as such, are wider in public spaces and narrower in those that are private [5]. Her layered window system retains a Corbusian panoramic view while simultaneously addressing the body’s vertically [6]. Her resistance to mechanisation was not superfluous or emotional, but human.

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Architecture cannot be entirely abstracted from lived experience; it cannot be wholly mechanised. It demands a sense of human scale and feeling. This begs the question; why were care and emotional intelligence ever confined to the domestic setting? Are these not also essential skills required for the design of hospitals, schools, offices, or train stations? Those skills, historically feminised and therefore dismissed, may prove central to the profession which is being redefined in the age of AI. This renewed importance does not signal a retreat to domesticity. Instead, the craft of architecture and its attentiveness to atmosphere, material, and embodied experience gains value. What was once dismissed as soft may prove resistant.

Despite the dreary Dublin evening of now seemingly perennial rainfall, the Robert Emmet Theatre was filled to hear Neil Michels, Associate Director of Carmody Groarke, deliver a lecture entitled Value Judgements as part of the Architectural Association of Ireland’s ‘Systems and Selves – Social Agency of Architecture’ series. The series is composed of interdisciplinary talks exploring the qualitative significance of design in the public domain within the contemporary built environment. Now in their twentieth year, London-based Carmody Groarke have established themselves as one of the pre-eminent contemporary architecture practices. From their earliest work comprising impromptu and temporary installations – including collaborations with artists such as Anthony Gormley – to more recent, large-scale public projects, Carmody Groarke have developed a unique and tangible visual ethos of making buildings. Theirs is a language where formal speculation and meaning is found in the conciliation between invention and tradition; in the sympathetic relationship of materials and the understanding by which hands and tools put them together; and an honest engagement with place and purpose. The work of the practice is often epitomised by an attitude of ‘doing the most with the least’ [1], utilising overlooked materials and unorthodox construction methods to yield unexpected solutions.

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Michels began by outlining the practice’s early work via the unbridled vigour and initial sensibilities exhibited in their 2008 atectonic private underground swimming pool in Limerick, before transitioning to an onscreen image of the recently completed preservation of Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry. ‘Value judgements,’ he stated, ‘comprise the constant decisions architects make daily and over long periods of time in creating their work.’ The metric or means of this ‘value’ often varies, as illustrated in the two projects shown. The former centred on the removal of context and the formation of space through a composition of the finest materials from around the word. A very different approach was taken on the latter, listed, public building, where judgments of heritage, context, and decarbonisation became key measures of the process.

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The body of Michels’s lecture expanded upon this idea of value judgments as drivers across three recent large-scale, cultural works. Each featured cultural institution was at a moment of evolution or growth. The resulting projects adopted distinct empathetic reactions to issues of contextual intervention; public access and appropriateness; climactic response; decay; and availability of local material, while questioning sourcing and established material manufacturing processes. This process he described as 'an arc of judgements’.
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The first of the presented projects was for Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London, the world’s first purpose-built public art gallery. Interested in how a historic institution engages a modern audience and responds to the contemporary visitor’s needs, the gallery approached Carmody Groarke to design a children’s art gallery, update their considerable grounds, and gently renovate the existing John Soane-designed museum. Initially conceived as a space to protect the housed works as well as a mausoleum for the museum’s founders, the building’s defensive nature and heaviness needed to be broken down to make the gallery more inviting and open to the public. Carmody Groarke’s first move was to reconsider the approach and arrival to the site and existing galleries. The entrance was reoriented, making the gallery visible on approach to the public entrance. An additional southern entrance was enlarged, and an existing small cottage on site renovated into a public café which activates the space around it. However, it is primarily the creation of a new children’s art play pavilion, centrally located and visible on all sides in the newly opened parkland, which has gifted a publicly accessible and inviting garden meadow to a new demographic of people in London.

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While the intervention at Dulwich was centred around public use and activation, the brief for the Ghent Design Museum, as described by Michels, was that of sympathetically stitching a contemporary building onto a tight site within Ghent’s historic core. While the medieval-inspired building form, varied programmatic function, and contextual sensitivity are of note, it is the extensive material research and innovative construction of this project which most clearly demonstrate the conscious value judgements of the architects and the broader design team. Historically a city of timber structures clad in masonry skins, Carmody Groarke set themselves the task of developing for Ghent 'a new sustainable vernacular, coupling less environmentally onerous materials with more forgiving detailing’ [2]. As with most construction materials and their manufacturing processes, brick production, previously geographically and aesthetically linked to place, has become ‘mechanised' and its procurement 'increasingly globalised’ through time. A multi-year research project involving a team of architects, material specialists, lawyers, and regulators resulted in the development of a low-carbon brick for use on the Ghent Design Museum’s new wing. The resulting Ghent Waste Brick is made from 63% recycled local municipal waste, with hydraulic lime acting as the primary binding agent. Most notably, unlike conventional bricks, Ghent’s are cured and compressed rather than fired, a process which, combined with the use of recycled composites, results in a brick that the architects report to have just one-third the embodied carbon of a typical Belgian clay brick. The recycled waste product was sourced within 7km of the project site and manufactured on a brownfield site on the city’s outskirts, re-establishing the possibility of what Carmody Groarke term ‘hyper-localised construction’. Crucially, as the principle of production is not contingent on a particular mix or recipe, this technique could easily be replicated in other urban settings.

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The third and final project Michels presented was a new storage repository for the British Library’s ever-growing print collection. Occupying a 44-acre campus, the collection houses over 170 million items. In the last ten years, around seven million physical items have been added to the library’s archives, requiring approximately 8km of new shelving annually [3]. The project was for a new, fully automated storage repository to provide approximately 225 linear kms of additional capacity. Carmody Groarke’s goal was to create a modern, high-performance, airtight envelope to house the automated storage systems and passively climate-control the high-use space, thus lowering the massive amount of energy ordinarily required to operate such spaces. Their primary departure from default thinking was to challenge the assumption that a mechanical ventilation system is the easiest route to climatic control. Instead, they conceived of a building which has no traditional heating, cooling, or humidification systems; with passive climate control achieved through the building’s facade. Remarkably, an airtightness approximately thirty to forty times the Passivhaus standard was achieved, meaning that in a building the size of a football stadium, filled to bursting with twenty-five-metre-tall shelves in compact rows, the combined air loss is equivalent to that expelled through a closed domestic letterbox. Nitrogen is pumped into the space automatically, dropping the oxygen below 14.5% and so eliminating any potential fire risk. This significant shift in attitude from constant mechanical temperature and humidity control to one that allows gradual temperature and humidity changes throughout the year means a space which would traditionally cost approximately £1m a year in energy use instead has an annual inclusive running cost of £50,000. During a time of rampant soulless data centre construction, this building is vital to the discourse of architecture designed for technology, both in how it operates and in its aesthetic judgements.

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The idea of value judgements is evidenced across the three projects in three distinct manners, however, embedded in each is the throughline of care. In an essay entitled ‘Permanence is a Privilege’ for their 2023 A+U magazine, Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke wrote:

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‘Facing increasingly urgent duties to create a low-carbon future, the methodology, values and culture of architectural practice must evolve to become more empathetic, agile and resourceful towards these concerns of uncertainty... We must be receptive to diverse methods of production that balance the needs of natural and man-made worlds and arbitrate between the highly calibrated requirements of the here and now and the expectation of an undetermined future.' [4]

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 The Architectural Association of Ireland's Systems and Selves lecture featuring Carmody Groarke was held at TCD's Robert Emmett Theatre on Thursday 12 February 2026.

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‘I think of colour as a thing, not as an abstraction, Motherwell said, I do not draw shapes and then colour them blue; I take a piece of blue, a large extension of blue and cut out, so to speak, from the extension of blue as much as I want. Color is a thing for me, and not a symbol for something else, say, the sky: though associations are unavoidable’ ¹

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Robert Motherwell was an accomplished Abstract Expressionist painter, working in New York in the mid-1900s. As a loosely affiliated group, the Abstract Expressionists were dealing with the picture plane as a surface to be challenged; the illusion of forced perspective and the classical tradition were anathema. This was New York at the dawning of the atomic age: charged shallow surfaces, devoid of overt subject formed the painterly agenda. The dominance of the centre and dialogue with the periphery were European preoccupations – here, a broader assertion across the entire canvas prevailed. Motherwell did not receive the acclaim of his peers De Kooning and Newman during his lifetime, but had the innate ability to cogently formulate a theoretical position for the movement. He articulated colour as raw material, physical, devoid of association and baggage. He could extricate object from subject in a way that furthered his practice.

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The contested ground between object and subject has preoccupied philosophers and artists for generations. A gap between the ‘thing-in-itself’ and our knowledge of it was articulated by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He posited that things are sidelined to ‘discrete objects of thought’ [2]. ‘Kant’s gap’ – as it was later coined – was a flaw in his early critique of reason. However, this instinct feels intuitively like the intellectual bedrock for subsequent discourse. Philip Guston has written about this gap, and how naming is a form of masking or concealing [3]. Tacita Dean talks about naming as a consequence or response to the object [4].

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Architecture has a challenging relationship with object and subject, or, in other words, building and program. Yet there is perhaps a lesson from Motherwell for contemporary urbanity. In an age of climate emergency and urban dereliction, the embedded carbon within the built artefacts of our towns and cities requires us to look harder at what once was a department store, bank, or shop. These are simply labels applied to an assemblage of materials, gathering and framing a set of singular or collected volumes. An objective analysis of the inherent characteristics (material, spatial, structural) of these buildings would establish a number of potential lives beyond their current application. Georges Perec deployed this objectivity in the way he engaged with and wrote about the city around him. He unpacked the quotidian through straightforward observation. Such clear vision is difficult with the noise of subjectivity and latent associations often clouding our judgement.

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In this way, the age of the defined architectural typology feels outmoded. Rossi would perhaps have retorted that it is typological rigidity that gives structure to cities, and aligns them with a collective memory. Although the gestalt assemblage of pictorial city monuments still holds true, I don’t believe that the contemporary city performs in this manner anymore. Urban interiors no longer necessarily hold that which they project. And if they do – in the case of banking halls for example – their inherent characteristics have typically been buried beneath layers of intervention. Our urban realm has been so distorted by late capitalist consumer culture – and the digitisation of the commons – that the assertive associative force of typology has waned. We can and must reach for a deeper morphology within the cities and towns which we inhabit.

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I’m leaning on artists again for the heavy intellectual lifting, because their penetrating gaze and ability to look hard without the burden of function can be instructive in reappraising our built environment. Joseph Beuys would talk of ‘substance’, a sense beyond the visual or retinal that is more bodily and sensorial. He suggests that the eye lazily reverts to the function of a camera unless the other senses are engaged in communion with it.  This intensified engagement with our urban artefacts is perhaps a good place to start. The artist David Bomberg, one of the leading post-World War II teachers at the London Borough Polytechnic – his students included Auerbach, Kossoff and Metzger – emphasised the study of matter and actuality. The tangibility of spaces grasped and held by gravity.

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This approach was the basis of the ‘Building Societies’ project Sarah Carroll and I (now practising as TRESTLE) proposed as part of the IAF and the Housing Agency’s Housing Unlocked exhibition (2022-2023). Our proposal responded to Bank of Ireland’s decision in March 2021 to close 103 regional branches, fundamentally altering the physical, social, and economic landscape of Irish towns. As these unique bank buildings were parcelled up for sale, Sarah and I started to consider their legacy and latent potential. Our idea reacts to the supply crisis within the housing market and reimagines the value and currency of these bank buildings as urban vessels within which housing opportunities can be explored; firstly, for homes above the bank, and secondly, through opening up the generous banking hall as a covered freespace that unlocks backland housing sites and spaces for wild nature, play, and urban growing.

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If we momentarily step back, though, from Ireland to a geographically broader civic context, there is an inherent underlying shape to all European settlements. Although the Romans didn’t invade Ireland, the inheritance of their militarised urban planning strategy on the island’s urban grain is still apparent. This loose morphology still holds true across western Europe, and therefore a crisis of urbanity is emerging beyond these shores alone. But Ireland is blessed with another setting down of culture by her people. Original Irish names such as sliabh (hill), and abhainn (river) bind landscape features and oral culture, fostering a lore centred around place: logainmneacha. This speaks to an even deeper registration of environment: deep time. Deep time is the patient accumulation and layering over millennia to form our underlying surroundings, something we think about too little in the Anthropocene.

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The insatiable process of capitalist production and consumption has stifled our ability to appraise slowly, to think thoughtfully. This is coupled with procurement challenges, a conservative and entrenched building sector, and planning hurdles. The urban typologies which once provided the physical and programmatic structure of our towns and cities have in many cases become vacant or stripped of their original meaning. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge. In the dual context of the climate and housing emergencies, there is an ethical imperative to apply our gaze more forcefully towards the potential within the existing built fabric. Considering the collective assemblage of volumes and artefacts within our towns and cities more abstractly and substantially could assist us in discovering their latent potential and unlocking the next phase of their civic development.

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The very foundations of how we currently live seem at odds with the necessity of the moment. Historically, in these periods of flux and tension, breakaway groups form and the genesis of radical ideas are born. A classic example of such a breakaway is the ‘Commune’: "a group of families or single people who live and work together sharing possessions and responsibilities" and often presenting themselves as an alternative to the societal order that they arise from [1]. Stevens-Wood puts forward that communes or ‘intentional communities’ reflect the period in which they were formed - in the 1960’s and 70’s, a period often associated with communalism, these miniature societies were created in reaction to post-war traditionalism [2]. This was the golden age of communes, and perhaps also the period responsible for an enduring reputation of communes as, at best, unrealistic dreamers at odds with society at large and, at their worst, extreme hippy utopias restricting freedom and privacy.

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The current forms of communal living find themselves reacting not to war, but a combination of the aforementioned issues with a similar desire to create something new. The question I would pose is, are they the way forward?

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A plethora of terms exist for these alternative forms of living. Alongside communes, there are more palatable terms such as intentional communities, co-housing, co-living, and more in between. What do they all mean, and how do they differ, if at all?

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Intentional Communities is somehwat of an ‘Umbrella term’ under which falls the three other terms described below. It is a community of people that have chosen to live together for one reason or another, often choosing to pursue a collective or social vision. According to Bill Metcalf “Intentional Communities are formed when people choose to live with or near enough to each other to carry out a shared lifestyle, within a shared culture and with a common purpose.” [3] Under this umbrella term, fall communes, co-living and co-housing.

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Co-living first came into existence in the early 2000’s and picked up traction by the late 2010’s [4]. It is urban in location and offers private apartments set in large complexes offering shared spaces such as gyms, co-working spaces, rooftop gardens etc. One such example is The Collective, a co-living business founded in 2021 in London which recently received funding to expand into Europe and the US [5]. Its Acton North West London location offers 323 private apartments across an 11-storey building. Each apartment costs upward of £1,328 per month based on a 12-month lease [6]. Though The Collective describes its mission as building and activating spaces "that foster human connection and enable people to lead more fulfilling lives", its vast size, high price, and for-profit business model arguably takes the ‘intention’ away from ‘intentional communities’ [7]. In 2020, the Irish government removed co-living schemes from its permissible apartment guidelines, halting any new developments in the industry [8].

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Co-housing, though similar in ways, offers some important differences to the pricey and aspirational co-living. Its birth can be traced back to the co-ops of 1960’s Denmark, offering residents more control, and a say in its design and model. Like co-living, this model offers a blend of both private and communal space. Separating its form from the broader strand of communes, co-housing communities tend to place a stronger emphasis on "the balance between community life and the privacy of individuals and households.” [9]. Often, the legal and ownership structure of co-housing models tends to be more complex than co-living and involves a co-operative model rather than direct owner occupier or leasehold  (as seen in co-living complexes) models.

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Whilst both co-living and co-housing offer alternatives to the traditional homeownership, one seems significantly more democratic than the other - putting power in residents’ hands rather than developers. The question then, what are the examples of ‘intentional communities’ today both home and abroad?

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Cloughjordan Eco village is a pioneering example of co-housing in Ireland and LILAC (Low Impact Living Affordable Community), in the United Kingdom offers an example of an urban ‘intentional community’ breaking new ground with its ownership model.  These two examples, like the original communes, operate under systems of shared values and community led decision making, but can be seen as modern evolutions of that form.

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Cloughjordan Eco-village, based in Nenagh, North Tipperary, has been in existence since 1999 with its first residents moving in 2009. It is a registered CLG (Company Limited by Guarantee) which offers a not-for-profit structure whereby its members are its guarantors [10]. It has a population of over 100 living across 55 low-energy homes, with ecological and permaculture design principles guiding the ethos of the community [11]. Residents own their homes and also pay a fee to use the farm and reap its rewards—sustainable, organic food for the community. In 2012, it was voted one of the ten best places to live in Ireland by readers of The Irish Times [12]. Cloughjordan can be seen as a frontrunner in what may be a burgeoning future of more communal, sustainable modes of living in the country. Self-organised Architecture.ie lists four new co-housing initiatives each with their own aims of providing affordable and community led housing schemes.

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By contrast, the United Kingdom is currently home to over 400 intentional communities and LILAC which saw its first residents moving in 2013, is a relatively new addition [13].

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LILAC, based in West Leeds, is a community of twenty eco-build households built with panel timber walls insulated by straw bales. During its build, LILAC captured, and now stores, over 1080 tonnes of atmospheric C02 [14]. The community residents have their own private homes and gardens which are grouped around a separate common house. The sharing aspects of the community include voluntary communal meals twice a week as well as allotments, shared gardens, and carpooling schemes. In stark contrast to the connotations that surround communes, LILAC is ‘not immune to the real world’ yet sets out to change how people relate to their housing - seeing housing not as a commodity or a speculative asset, but an affordable space existing as part of a community and an eco-system [15]. This also means that homes in LILAC cannot be sold on the open market. The community itself functions as the developer keeping its homes immune from fluctuating housing prices and real estate value. The ownership model is based on a system called ‘Mutual Home Ownership Society’ which links housing cost to income, not market price. Residents pay 35% of their income with higher earners paying slightly more and, in return, gaining more equity. This scheme ensures that homes remain permanently affordable and also ensures that those on a lower or more precarious incomes have fair access to a home [16].

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Based on these more contemporary examples of community-based living, a lifestyle once associated with complete interdependence and perhaps a lack of autonomy has evolved. In the examples of LILAC and Cloughjordan eco-village we see the positives of community interaction offered in tandem with an ability to maintain privacy. In each example, balance between the community and the outside world is emphasised. Cloughjordan Eco-village developed alongside an original village of the same name - by integrating the two settlements, a village in decline went the other way [17]. In this sense, it is a project in ecological sustainability as well as rural regeneration.  LILAC, states on its website the importance of the wider community with the co-housing settlement situated within a “flourishing neighbourhood in West Leeds” [18].

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With isolation and loneliness hitting an all-time high, increasing worldwide by 13.4% between 2009 and 2024; a catastrophic housing crisis affecting not just Ireland, but populations globally and a climate crisis which drives up living costs, the draw to a more communal style of living is tantalising and the importance of curbing the above trends, vital [19]. The above examples offer intriguing examples of living practices that manage to do just this. Nonetheless, despite their possible best intentions, critiques of intentional communities abound, Boys-Smith states: "At its best, co-housing is bowling together, sharing skills and taking a village to raise a child. At its worst, is it creating exclusive gated ghettos of the rich able to live, work and play safely sequestrated from the wider world?" [20].

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A growing amount of literature documents similar concerns about the lack of diversity in a large number of these communal living experiments. Despite cheaper living costs going forward, often a large amount of capital buy in is needed at the beginning. In the case of Cloughjordan eco-village, buying a site alone was comparable to the cost of buying an entire home in its neighbouring village - “If you have limited means, buying a site for the same amount as you could buy a house, was a lot to ask” [21]. Given that isolation and loneliness is more prevalent amongst low-income groups, the need to ensure that housing options with a high degree of social integration and community are affordable is essential. Nonetheless, perhaps the strongest argument in their favour is their ability to promote human connection and belonging. Through living in proximity to others, we get the magic and ‘fizzy serendipity’ that urbanist Richard Sennett describes [22]. In a world that can feel more and more divided, surely the answer lies in its opposition.

McCormack’s was established in 1984, its current owner is Daire O’Flaherty. At only 18m2, this shop had a powerful presence. It poured out onto the footpath with negotiations of punctures, pedals, pumps, prices, all conducted in the plein air of Dublin's Appian way: Dorset Street. Pronounced in dublin-ese with two distinctly independent syllables:  Dor-set, the common pronunciation is miles from the English variant, and lightyears from the ancient route it is descended from: Slige Midluachra [1].

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Unlike the case of the ill-fated Delaney’s bike shop in Harold’s Cross, allegedly Dublin’s oldest [2], it was not the increasing cost of business that shut McCormack’s. Right up to its closure, this institution was hopping, with a lively mix of locals and commuters dropping by. According to the shop owner, it was closed because the landowner valued the site more highly once it was vacant [3].

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The bike shop was part of a three-storey suite of early Victorian buildings, with a modified-Georgian terrace lining the west of it. Over the past few years its neighbouring buildings have similarly been drained of residential and retail tenants. Relatively recently this city block was home to a multitude of residents and traders. Today the signature calling card of vacancy is visible: permanently-opened windows in the upstairs accommodation, allowing the elements in. Nobody lives or works here to shut them, to provide essential daily care for the properties.

Daire is well-versed and articulate in what makes a city both at the ground level and also the urban theory behind it. On Dorset street, he had a frontline view of Dublin’s traffic congestion during the morning rush hour, the worst it has ever been. He sees an opportunity in the widespread overhaul of the city’s transport system, which is being redesigned to prioritise public transport for decarbonisation and public health: more and more people are choosing bikes to get into work, and live healthily in the city. In his view bikes are a key component of any liveable city, like Paris or Amsterdam perhaps. What good will the ambition to encourage cycling be, without centrally-located facilities for bike repair and maintenance? It is akin to building a motorway without including for new garages or fuel stations.

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McCormack’s now has a premises in Drumcondra, not far from its former home. Daire has yet to establish whether business has actually improved. However the same lack of protection exists in the new premises. While there are limitations to hosting a  bike shop in a small retail unit (cycling shops are ideally suited to larger premises), McCormack’s 41 years of business clearly evidences the ability to adapt and survive in small, tight spaces. Shutting small independent retailers down will make larger out of town suburban shops more tempting to customers. It also offloads a responsibility to repair the existing urban fabric – an essential and under-practised aspect of the circular economy.

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At a municipal level, there are no obvious consequences for ousting an established small business tenant in pursuit of greater profit, nor any meaningful incentives for landlords to help their continued operation. The desire to sell off buildings with a clean slate of no sitting tenants is widespread in Dublin, and the results are most keenly felt by the communities who make use of small businesses.

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The closure of specialised small businesses, like bike shops, locksmiths, butchers, grocers, are part of a broader list of fatalities to our city, with the loss of art and cultural spaces, pubs and restaurants regularly causing public outcry. In an ecosystem of property speculation, few tenancies are safe. The liveable city we aspire to is increasingly precarious.

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While these changes can seem inevitable and often happen stealthily over time, the failure of policy to protect small independent businesses will cost the city in easily-measurable ways. Daire famously once broke up a fight between two locals arguing over money; he, and many others like him, are eyes, ears and a friend to the street. This is increasingly relevant when the media and political debate focus on inner-city crime and public safety.

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The fight for the city is not just in art spaces, pubs, heritage properties, it is the fight to protect small independent retailers and those committed to living and doing business in our city. If Dublin is to stay open for business, it has to protect them too. If indeed ‘we are Dublin Town’ let us aim to be like Paris or Berlin, with a feast of small independent retailers providing vibrancy to streets [4]. Task forces looking at the bigger picture of our urban centre, encouraging external investment in the city, need to be clear-eyed on the draining of its smaller, but equally essential, tenants. Otherwise fixing the city through grand gestures will be like trying to save a marriage, while having an affair.

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If you haven’t been to architect Mies Van Der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno, this exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square will give you all the impetus you need to get there. While we can assess, gain understanding, and measure remotely, most architects and historians will argue that the truest understanding of a built artefact arises from a visit. We cannot fully get a sense of acoustics, natural lighting, ventilation, or innocuous details without experiencing a space first-hand. This exhibition does not aim to recreate the experience of visiting Villa Tugendhat, but does something else, managing to present a forensic telling of the background, history, construction, and restoration of the house: a dissection that can be objectively presented at some distance from the artefact itself.

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This exhibition is not just about a building; it is about the concepts, lives lived, and legacies connected to that building. For almost a century, the Villa Tugendhat has captured a collective architectural imagination. Take, for example, the catalogue of the seminal 1932 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition in New York. Its cover features a black-and-white photograph of the Tugendhat House, at that time a mere two years old. With hundreds of celebrated works to choose from, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock were making a statement by foregrounding Mies’ structure, which they saw as the direction of modernity.

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While the building’s white walls, chrome-finished steel structure, extensive glass, lavish stone, and technical devices were all striking for 1930, they alone have not gifted its enduring presence. More important still is its demonstration of the new concept of theatrical living in open-plan, adaptable spaces: not just the house, but the idea of the house. With its seemingly experimental, avant-garde ambitions, this exhibition reminds us of art historian Justus Bier’s provocation: ‘Can the Villa Tugendhat be lived in?’

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I found it enjoyable to ponder this question within a restored late eighteenth-century home in Dublin. We read of Tugendhat’s interiors flooded with daylight from its glazed facades just as the low winter’s sun penetrates the portrait sash windows of no. 45 Merrion Square. We are invited to imagine the flowing living spaces of Mies’ open-plan design as we pass from lofty room to room in the piano nobile of the former Georgian home. One couldn’t imagine such different ideas on dwelling.

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The content can be explored at a number of depths: the time-pressed observer can cast their eyes over the beautiful drawings and photographs, the custom furniture on loan; someone invested in history can spend time understanding the Tugendhat family and the remarkable episodes this building lived through; and a practitioner or academic interested in the restoration of modern structures can read an in-depth overview of the scientific and faithful remaking of the house.  

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German designer Lily Reich has been largely sidelined in the popular history of Mies’ European career – a contribution that is gradually being reclaimed – and while she does gain credit in this overview, it is still not abundantly clear where in the interiors and furniture she has full or even equal authorship to Mies. However, one antidote to the often-overzealous cult of Mies is the well-balanced attention given to the building’s clients: Fritz and Grete Tugendhat. They were not bystanders to his genius, but engaged and fluent, creative and conscious in their direction. Their life stories are tragic, including a desperate flight from persecution to Venezuela, and while Grete returned to visit in the 1960s, Fritz never saw their home again.

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The intriguing black-and-white photographs of the Villa’s wartime and post-war occupation provide a complex and rounded portrait of this structure, particularly its afterlife as a dance school and, later, a children’s physiotherapy centre. An Irish audience might draw comparisons with the familiar turbulent history of Eileen Grey’s E1027, built concurrently to Tugendhat in 1928. Photographer Miloš Budík’s photograph of a group of young women in the physiotherapy centre, taken in 1956, is particularly captivating: an accidental, temporary use distils some of the most promising aspects of modern architecture: light, airiness, reflection, ventilation, to create a humanistic space for living.  

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The Villa Tugendhat exhibition – presented by the Embassy of the Czech Republic and the Villa Tugendhat – is free to enter and runs at the Irish Architectural Archive from 22 January to 10 April 2026.

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If a river could speak, what would it say? What if rivers, streams, and other waterbodies were recognised not as inanimate resources, but as living entities with their own agency? Such recognition would require a profound shift in how we regard, design, and inhabit landscapes shaped by water.

Across Ireland, rivers have shaped our cities, towns, and rural areas. They are woven into cultural identity, sustaining industrial, agricultural, and civic life. Early communities lived by the logic of water – organising around its seasonal rhythms for trade, farming, and gathering. This reciprocal relationship enabled social and economic stability. Over time, however, industrialisation and urban expansion reoriented human life away from water. Rivers were channelled into systems of economy, energy, and urban growth. As Sir William Wilde observed in his appraisal of the River Boyne and Blackwater, ‘the inhabitants of Navan, like those of most Irish towns through which a river runs, have turned their backs upon the stream’ [1]. This disconnection remains embedded in cultural perception and physical planning.

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Today, climate volatility and ecological degradation demand a re-examination of our societal relationship to water. Riverscapes are increasingly fragile; their loss would severely undermine biodiversity and ecosystem resilience. The contemporary challenge lies in rediscovering the ecological intelligence that rivers possess and reinstating modes of coexistence that value water as a living system [2].

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Rivers are dynamic environments shaped by erosion, flooding, and time – forces that, when left undisturbed, sustain balance. But industrial pollution, agricultural intensification, and mismanaged urban runoff have disrupted these processes. Such practices have wounded river ecologies and diminished their capacity for self-regulation. Nevertheless, as Robert MacFarlane’s explorations in his book Is a River Alive demonstrate, ‘hope is the thing with rivers’ [3]. Given space and care, river systems can recover rapidly. This possibility underscores the importance of stewardship over exploitation. Restoration begins with recognising the river as a partner in regeneration rather than a passive resource.

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Rebalancing human–river relations requires the integration of ecological science, cultural practice, and participatory engagement. A regenerative and reciprocal approach would prioritise both ecological function and social value. Artistic practice can serve as a mediating tool, helping communities to perceive and interpret the agency of water. The act of ‘deep listening’ – through soundscape studies and field recordings – offers a method of reconnecting with river environments and can re-sensitise us to the voices of the non-human world.

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Sound is an indicator of ecological vitality. The sonic landscape of a healthy river – birds, insects, flowing water, and wind – reflects biodiversity. There is as much to learn from silence as from sound. Using extended field recording tools such as hydrophones, contact microphones, and acoustic sensors, we can listen beneath the surface, to trees, soil, and water itself. Ecologists increasingly employ soundscape spectrogram analysis to assess habitat quality and species distribution. Publicly accessible app identifiers, such as Merlin or Biodiversity Data Capture, enable citizens to participate in environmental monitoring through listening. Thus, sound becomes both a scientific and a democratic mode of attention. These slow-observation techniques help us grasp both the strength and vulnerability of these ecosystems, enabling us to take the right actions in the right places to support the river [4].

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The ecological health of rivers is intrinsically linked to riparian buffer zones: the vegetated margins between land and water. These areas function as natural biofilters, trapping sedimentation, absorbing pollutants, and stabilising banks while providing shelter, habitat, and food for countless species. Despite their importance, many have been drained or grazed to maximise land use. Nutrient loss, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, contributes to eutrophication, whereby water becomes overly enriched, leading to a dense growth of algae and aquatic plants. These blooms reduce oxygen levels, and oxygen is required to support fish and other aquatic life [5]. Controversially, the EU Nitrates Directive has permitted Ireland to continue to exceed the standard manure limit of 170 kg nitrogen per hectare, albeit with stricter requirements to protect water quality [6].

In the Boyne Valley catchment, where agriculture is the main significant pressure, only one river is achieving high ecological status and 51% of waterbodies are at risk of not meeting their environmental objectives [7]. The River Boyne is a designated SAC and SPA, however, riparian habitats are fragmented, degraded, or absent with few native woodlands remaining. Inland Fisheries Ireland have warned that Atlantic salmon stocks have fallen to some of the lowest levels on record and important river birds such as the lapwing and sand martin are ‘of conservation concern’ [8]. The decline of these species indicates a broader threat to the entire river system. In addition, the Department of Housing has proposed to classify certain stretches of the Boyne and Blackwater as ‘heavily modified water bodies’, a move which could essentially relegate our legal obligations to restore them [9].

The restoration of riparian buffers is central to water quality improvement and climate adaptation. Properly managed buffers are essential for intercepting and reducing diffuse pollution before it reaches waterbodies [10]. Beyond their ecological function as green corridors, riparian buffers also support human wellbeing, offering spaces for play, recreation, education, and multi-sensory restoration. Walking along a river, listening to it, and observing its cycles of change can help regulate emotions, reduce stress, and elevate mood. Three recent EPA research programme studies (2014–2022) – GPI Health, NEAR Health, and EcoHealth – found measurable physical, mental, and social health benefits associated with access to green and blue spaces[11]. In urban contexts, these buffers can reconnect communities with waterways that have long been inaccessible or overlooked. Such holistic relationships with nature can foster healthier communities and help futureproof society against environmental uncertainty.

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Rezoning riparian land as cultural and ecological corridors offers a framework for integrating environmental resilience with public amenity. Public parks, heritage landscapes, and post-industrial sites can host new programmes that coexist with water while balancing protection, access, and conservation. Instead of resisting flooding through hard engineering, adaptive design can accommodate seasonal pressures through wetlands, soft embankments, and absorbent landscapes.

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The River Boyne provides a valuable case study. Along its course, several significant public sites – Oldbridge, Newgrange, Slane, Trim Castle, and Brú na Bóinne [12] – offer opportunities to lead this change. These areas, already rich in heritage and ecological value, could restore riparian zones and improve biodiversity while enhancing public space for human and non-human amenity. Similarly, the proposed Boyne Greenway between Navan and the Mary McAleese Boyne Valley Bridge could become a model of designing with the river as a living stakeholder rather than as an element of infrastructure.

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Building solutions from the ground up is vital. Local industries, landowners, and government bodies are accustomed to the old extractive land use practices. Schemes such as IRD Duhallow’s LIFE project [13] or the Inishowen Rivers Trust’s ‘Cribz’ [14] managed to bring relevant stakeholders together to highlight their role in their local river's conservation. Both projects found that community-based engagement promoted environmental stewardship and action in their localities. Artistic and cultural interventions can complement scientific approaches by cultivating empathy and imagination. Place-based workshops that integrate art, ecology, and citizen science invite participants to engage with rivers experientially, through listening, recording, and collective observation [15]. Such participatory methods expand environmental knowledge beyond data collection to include sensory, emotional, and ethical dimensions. They encourage us to slowdown, listen, and experience the river directly. These activities foster empathy and understanding, reconnecting participants with the landscape.

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Creativity can help us reimagine our systems for climate adaptation. Partnerships between artists, scientists, local authorities, and environmental groups can strengthen collective capacity for change. Local arts organisations provide platforms for dialogue and dissemination, helping to transform awareness into action. Interdisciplinary collaboration bridges the gap between ecological science and public perception, and can generate community-driven models of stewardship.  

Led by Scape Architects, the Chattahoochee RiverLands Greenway Study in Atlanta, Georgia, proposes a linear network of greenways, blueways, and parks, shaped through local interviews, immersive experiences, participatory design charrettes, and public forums [16]. Following a similar approach, Take Me To the River – a collaborative initiative between the Solstice Arts Centre and Cineál Research & Design – has been cultivating connections with the local council, water authorities, river-trust networks, and communities. Through creative, site-based public workshops and exploratory mapping exercises, the project is developing a layered understanding of the river catchments of County Meath [17].

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Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss has called for the recognition of rights of nature in the Constitution, to provide a stronger legal framework as we face accelerating species decline and biodiversity loss [18]. Assigning the concept of ‘riverhood’ to waterways acknowledges their intrinsic right to exist, flow, and regenerate, independently of human interests.

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Reimagining rivers as sentient entities invites both ethical and practical transformation. It challenges dominant paradigms of extraction and human control and instead proposes relationships grounded in indigenous and ecological understandings of reciprocity. In Celtic mythology, the goddess Bóinn’s spirit became the River Boyne, giving it associations with poetry, fertility, and wisdom.

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Restoring riparian buffers and ecological corridors can enable rivers to function as autonomous living systems within interconnected landscapes. Healthy rivers create natural pathways for wildlife, filter our water, and stabilise our climate. With ecological renewal, interdisciplinary collaboration, and creative engagement, they canal so provide us with spaces for reflection, imagination, and belonging.

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If a river could speak, it might remind us that every act of care or neglect upstream reverberates downstream and that stewardship begins with attention. To listen to rivers is to acknowledge our shared dependence within a living system.

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Nestled behind the Crocknamurrin Mountain Bog, beyond the sublime of the Glengesh Pass, lies the town of Ardara (Ard an Rátha), a rural village in southwest Donegal with a population of about 750 people. The context of southwest Donegal, like much of the West of Ireland, is characterised by a harsh environment shaped by the Atlantic coastline and its famed remoteness - factors that have long contributed to the allure and longevity of its most renowned export industry: Donegal Tweed.

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In the spirit of the series, this article looks not towards whether a place is working hard or hardly working, but instead towards what we might glean from turning our attention to spaces of work themselves; what they might tell us about the story of a place, of how an emergent rural town found itself at the heart of a thriving cottage industry, and how that legacy continues to shape the fabric of this place today.

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Anecdotal accounts refer to the sounds of working looms echoing through Ardara’s streets, where a trained ear could identify who exactly was weaving by the distinctive and unique clatter of their shuttle. A trade sustained by cottage industry into the 1970’s, looms were typically kept in working weaving sheds independent from the house – an early iteration of working from home before the concept of WFH as we have since come to know it. Separate from or to the rear of someone’s home, space for weaving has long been understood as a working shed more so than a studio space, or a place for artistic expression. 

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An informal environment, the weaving shed is carefully shaped by and for its user, with maximum practicality and ease of production in mind. What presents at first a disorderly chaos of timber sections, scrap yarns and curious tools reveals, on further interrogation, a perfectly planned and functional ecosystem. Level access is optimal for transferring heavy beams and yarns; garage doors to a laneway accommodate the proportions of double-width warp beams, and their loading in and out of trailers; 2.4m clear height allows vertical movement of the jacks, while 3.5m in width is required for swinging of the sley; a single LED light fixture plugged loosely into an extension cable illuminates the cloth beam for intricate on-loom mending, and so on. Beneath the tangible disarray of objects worn and used is something intangible – behaviours, habits and knowledge passed down through generations, linking this intimate, private space and its geographical location on earth inherently and forever to the identity of a craft. Workshop spaces like these belie the story and success of a place in ways both material and immaterial.

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Geographically, the challenging conditions of mountainous bog terrain engendered a sense of isolation that contributed to the preservation of these traditional craft techniques. This terrain also provided the natural materials and resources required to produce and dye handwoven woollen textiles in times when communities were largely self-reliant, and living off the land.

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In an economic context, Ardara’s textile industry has experienced periodic success punctuated by significant challenges. The Wool Act of 1699 implemented by the British Parliament prohibited, during a time of great success in the European market, the export of Irish woollen goods beyond the UK, to protect the English wool trade from competition with growing, colonial markets.

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Ardara’s textile industry was supported by initiatives implemented by the Congested Districts Board, established by Arthur James Balfour at the end of the 19th Century with the intention of “killing Home Rule with kindness”. It is said that a visit paid by him to Donegal, prior to his establishment of the Board, “first opened his eyes to the poverty and misery prevailing there and brought about a change of heart” [1]

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The Congested Districts Board's initiatives were designed to support local production and provide employment to areas that historically had relied on agriculture and home-based crafts. For Ardara, this took the form of the introduction of stamping high-quality handwoven goods, and led to the construction of a Mart building in 1912, where weavers would traverse from all over the rural area with their homespun frieze for inspection, storage and sale to the global market. [2]

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The Congested Districts Board was purportedly involved in the provision of an improved hand-loom for weaving, invented by Mr. W.J.D. Walker, the Board’s organiser and inspector for industries, who generously placed his invention at the disposal of the Board. These improved looms were then supplied to the local weavers on a loan installment system.

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Although it was arguably established to consolidate British influence in the region, it cannot be denied that the Congested Districts Board aided in supporting this cottage industry at a time where it was in decline and uniquely, in establishing a network between towns in southwest Donegal; linked by the spinning factory in Kilcar, to a carpet factory in Killybegs, to Magee’s in Donegal Town, to the handweavers and Mart of Ardara and its surrounds. Whether intentionally or not, this network has enabled not only the craft to endure in harsh climates - meteorological and economical - but also, the make-up of these places, how they interact with one another, and what is literally woven into their urban and rural fabric. 

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Often when looking at public space or the development of towns and their successes, with an architectural lens we look to the physical - how trade, culture, or industry have physically shaped a place. In this instance, to begin to understand this place, it is necessary to observe how these same cultural influences have shaped a town in an immaterial, intangible, maybe even invisible way. The weaving shed as it has always existed, is a fragment of industry previous; a byproduct of its environment, natural resources and the resourcefulness of the people who inhabited it and sustained a craft.

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In Teague’s pub you’ll find pillow cases handwoven by John Heena leaning against the snug at the front, and a beautiful shuttle placed above the door that once belonged to the owner’s grandfather. Ask anyone in the town and they will likely know something or have some connection to weaving, be it an old loom in their shed, or some lingering knowledge of how to construct parts of a loom. This almost inherent shared knowledge and understanding provides a mystical reminder of the vibrancy and prevalence of a once commonplace skill.

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Across Ireland we have seen a surge in the value of craft, of people returning to making things from scratch, growing foods from the earth, using their hands to create, all in response - and sometimes protest - to the mass production, consumption and colossal waste that is draining our planet’s resources. Following the introduction of power looms in the 1970’s, the industry changed, making Donegal Tweed a legitimate and successful export worldwide which continues to thrive today. On a smaller scale, we find ourselves in a different cycle of weaving, where the focus lies on the craft of weaving as an artisanal trade, rather than a scalable business model.

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What was introduced earlier in this article as a humble, pragmatic workspace presents itself now as evidence of living heritage, a fragment of an industry past and an emblem of the future of handweaving in Ireland. It prompts a wider reflection on the revitalisation of Irish towns at large, examining their interconnectedness and the intangible forces that bind and sustain them. A holistic, ground-up approach is critical to any and all revitalisation efforts, rooted in the understanding of a place and responsive to the needs of its future; remaining ever mindful to see the story behind the shed.

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Most people call it crypto but for the purposes of this exercise we’ll use the term "blockchain".

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At its core, a blockchain is simply a way of recording an event on a digital ledger instead of in a paper document. This could, for example, be a record of an agreement - the kind of agreement people have been making between one another for as long as agreements have existed. If you do X, I’ll do Y. In the past, we’d make the agreement official by signing some papers in a solicitor’s office. However, with a smart contract running on a blockchain we take a different approach: first, we set out all the conditions that have to be met before the contract can be entered into; then, instead of asking a solicitor to decide when these conditions have been met, we write the whole thing in computer code and let technology act as the referee. The terms of the agreement are implemented without fuss and in a way that’s difficult to undo. If I suddenly get cold feet about some commitment I may have made, I can’t wriggle free of my obligations by finding loopholes and stirring up trouble. That’s the first interesting thing about a typical smart contract: terms and conditions are fairly hard wired.

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The second interesting thing about blockchain contracts is the way details of the agreement are stored. Once the computer confirms that all the conditions have been met, the record isn’t just dumped onto one big central server which would be an obvious target for hackers. Instead, a copy of the entire record is kept on many different computers (nodes) spread out around the world. Each copy is kept in a series of linked “blocks” and each block contains a sort of digital fingerprint of all the verified information on which it is based. If someone tries to change even the tiniest detail in one block, the fingerprints won’t match and the change will be rejected. For extra security, large files (a good example for our purposes would be contract drawings) can be stored separately using a system like IPFS. The main block can be primed to keep an eye on these files to make sure that important material hasn’t been tampered with.

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It didn’t take long for the earliest blockchain experimenters to see how this new technology could work as a form of money. Money, after all, is just another type of agreement. And so, around 2009, the terms "Bitcoin" and crypto entered the public imagination. Almost immediately, Bitcoin became synonymous with dodgy financial dealings and the internet was soon full of stories about international criminal gangs getting around banking regulations by paying each other in this new invisible currency.

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But if we ignore all the hyperbole and look again at what an Ethereum-type blockchain involves – a system that has the same secure, tamper-proof data blocks as Bitcoin but also supports smart contracts – you can see how it might be used for things far beyond dodgy money. Anything that needs a secure, verifiable agreement could benefit from a blockchain approach, including many of the processes that underpin building and construction.

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One of the more interesting examples so far of the use of blockchain in the broader construction/real estate space has been in property transactions and land registration. Anyone who’s ever bought a house, no matter where, will know that the process is slow, bureaucratic, paper-heavy and prone to error. Blockchain offers a secure, transparent alternative. In recent years Georgia (the country, not the US state), Dubai, Sweden and other jurisdictions have been testing out blockchain systems to record transfer of title. Media reports suggest the trials have been generally successful with transactions being completed sometimes in a matter of minutes.

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In construction, the potential is just as easy to imagine. Take the example of a contractor completing the installation of a complicated foundation on a new project. Instead of waiting weeks for manual inspections to take place, on-site sensors confirm in real time that the work meets the agreed technical specification. That verification is automatically logged on a blockchain, which triggers immediate payment. Large companies like Skanska and Bechtel have been experimenting with these and similar approaches for quite some time, tracking materials from their source to their final installation as well as checking authenticity and compliance.

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Another interesting area for potential blockchain crossover is the use of BIM. In a big public building project the architect, engineers and contractors might each start out working on the same 3D BIM model. But as the job progresses, each consultant makes one tweak here and another one there and soon various "official" versions of the same model have come into existence. When a dispute eventually erupts over whether a particular detail was formally approved, no one can be sure whose version of the detail is the “real” one.

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With a blockchain-based approach, each approved version of the BIM model could be time-stamped and stored in a tamper-proof way so that a clear, verifiable record of what was agreed can be referred to. We could take this concept one step further and link the approved building model to a city’s digital twin – say, Dublin or Cork – with the building’s latest data slotted straight into the digital city model. This would mean that planners, utility providers and emergency services would have a reliable, up-to-date digital version of the building to work from. And, in fact, this is something that is already being explored in Dublin where the City Council’s partnership with DCU on creating a digital twin has received favourable coverage in the trade press.

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While there has been progress in these and other areas, particularly in the private/commercial sphere, wide-scale adoption of blockchain technology in the worldwide construction industry faces a number of hurdles. For a start, regulations vary widely from region to region, making international coordination difficult. Added to that, the technology’s reputation still suffers from its early association with international criminal activity and, more recently, its environmental credentials have also been called into question. Similar to the technology involved in AI, conventional blockchain technology depends on large, power-hungry infrastructure which raises legitimate concerns about energy use and environmental impact, although it must be noted that more recent developments in the field have significantly reduced the amount of electricity to power an Ethereum-type chain.

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In Ireland, there’s the added challenge of slow adoption in the public sector. The Government’s recently revised National Development Plan makes passing reference to AI, but none to blockchain. And while some of the important crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken have an established presence in Dublin, there isn’t a sense that blockchain technology has made an impression on the national psyche just yet. Without a clear strategy at government level, we risk falling behind countries already using the technology to speed up land transactions and improve on the construction workflow. How a more streamlined AI/blockchain approach could improve the delivery of, for example, much needed public housing is an interesting point to consider.

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This doesn’t mean we should simply bemoan our misfortune and sit around waiting for the next tech opportunity to come our way. One of the more interesting things about the rise of AI, taken in its broadest sense, is its ability to tackle problems that feel too big or too unwieldy for heavy bureaucracies to sort out. So there’s no reason we couldn’t use AI to help us work through the practical and policy challenges of bringing blockchain into our construction and property systems. If we could get the two technologies working together – AI to design streamlined processes, blockchain to guarantee their integrity – the results could be extremely positive for everyone involved. And the countries that manage to combine AI and blockchain in this way will almost certainly enjoy some real advantages. There’s still an opporutnity for Ireland to put itself out in front – but time is running out.

This year’s presidential election made visible a dynamic that is often overlooked in political analysis: how campaigns operate as a form of civic infrastructure, and to what extent design plays a role in their efficacy. Far from being peripheral or decorative, the visual strategies deployed by candidates’ structure how people encounter political life; they shape perceptions long before policy is discussed or manifestos are read. Political design occupies a unique position within democracies, somewhere at the intersection of communication, civic identity, and public trust.

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In Ireland, this relationship between design and democratic expression has been strained by a decades-long pattern of executive neglect. Successive governments have systematically deprioritised design and aesthetic quality in public communication and built infrastructure. Senior ministers increasingly frame design as an optional consideration, an unnecessary add-on rather than a fundamental part of how the State articulates care, competence, and regard for its people. As Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers stated during a debate concerning escalating costs at the National Children’s Hospital (NCH), ‘there needs to be much better discipline in cost effectiveness… That means making choices around cost and efficiency over design standards and aesthetics in some instances’ [1].

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This position, widely cited and contested, exemplifies a broader ideological shift which sees design treated as a dispensable luxury rather than an essential civic tool [2].This framing misunderstands the function of design within public life. Design, in this case, is not ornamental; it is a mode of communication through which the State makes itself legible. When design is neglected, the consequences extend far beyond the aesthetic and shape the conditions under which political meaning, public trust, and civic visibility are formed.

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In the aftermath of Catherine Connolly's election as President, commentators highlighted the design and visual expression of each candidate as decisive factors [3]. Connolly’s campaign offered me a rare opportunity to explore what an authentically Irish political visual identity might look like when grounded in cultural memory rather than branding for the sake of visuals alone. While designing, I drew directly from Ireland’s vernacular signwriting tradition: the hand-painted shopfronts, gilded fascias, and serifed letterforms that once defined the visual texture of towns and villages. These were not simply aesthetic references. They embodied authorship, locality, and a sense of civic care.

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By incorporating hand-drawn lettering, a deep green and cream palette, and a postage-stamp motif, the campaign sought to restore the tactile warmth and humanity often lost in contemporary political design. The stamp, a quiet symbol of communication and exchange, is a reminder that politics is, at its core, a conversation carried between people. This concept frames Irish craft traditions not as relics, but as living cultural practices capable of shaping contemporary civic discourse.

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In doing so, Connolly’s campaign made design itself an act of cultural continuity, a way of honouring the past while proposing a more grounded and participatory future. By the time Connolly declared on election night, “This win is not for me, but for us,” the sentiment had already been woven through posters, leaflets, and social media, a visual testament to a campaign that made the collective visible long before the votes were counted [4].

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Across the Atlantic, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City attracted attention first for his democratic socialist views. It was the striking coherence of his campaign design, however, that propelled him into broader public discourse. Not since Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster, for Barack Obama, had a political image circulated so widely. It gained the kind of immediate recognition associated with Jim Fitzpatrick’s image of Che Guevara.

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The Mamdani campaign was intentionally rooted in the material and cultural vernacular of the city itself. The cobalt blue and yellow palette was drawn directly from everyday sights in New York: bodega awnings, taxi cabs, MetroCards, hot dog vendors, and the signage of small independent businesses [5]. In this way, the campaign aligned itself with working-class infrastructure that defines the city’s public life, situating Mamdani not as an outsider but as a candidate embedded in the city’s social, cultural and economic rhythms [6]. Central to this strategy was the premise that design could serve as a communicative bridge to the constituency Mamdani sought to represent. In doing so, the campaign framed visual culture as a mode of continuity and care, a reminder that political communication can affirm belonging as powerfully as it persuades.

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Irish election materials, as well as the State's political design more generally, don't attempt to convey substantive meaning through visuals. Their long-standing reliance on formulaic portraiture, generic slogans, and minimal graphic refinement mirrors a broader campaign strategy in which candidates are packaged as approachable local figures using highly-conventionalised visual cues. This approach reduces design to a mechanism for name recall rather than a vehicle for articulating political values or fostering civic engagement. The environmental waste associated with poster production only heightens the sense of outdatedness and underscores how Irish campaign materials often lag behind the more considered, narrative-driven strategies emerging elsewhere. As such, this tradition of visual identity crystallises the limitations of Irish political branding: a dependence on repetition, familiarity, and low-risk aesthetics at the expense of meaningful visual communication.

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A strong democracy depends on sustained, accessible dialogue between the State and its people. Visual identity is structurally embedded within this exchange. Visual languages that are familiar or culturally resonant reduce cognitive load and strengthen affective engagement, whereas generic or stylistically flattened forms tend to weaken meaning-making [7]. In this sense, campaign aesthetics function as a form of civic infrastructure, shaping perceptions of authority, intention, and legitimacy before a single word is spoken.

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When design is framed as a luxury rather than an essential component of civic life, it erodes the shared visual language through which democratic communication occurs. Such an approach initiates a feedback loop. Minimal investment in design yields fewer meaningful symbolic or material expressions of public life. As these expressions diminish, the State becomes increasingly illegible to its people. Over time, the corporeal presence of the State, its visibility in the everyday, degrades. What was once a free-flowing dialogue becomes generic, flattened, and emotionally inert. Political branding therefore mirrors the State’s broader orientation toward public infrastructure. When design is treated as secondary, a dispensable aesthetic layer rather than a civic medium, its communicative and democratic potential collapses. When taken seriously, however, design becomes a point at which cultural belonging, political intent, and civic participation converge.

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Ireland’s future civic health depends not on dispensing with design but on recognising it as a central component of public life. It is the medium through which the State becomes visible, legible, and trustworthy.

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The views expressed in this article are the author's own.

Effectively a continuous zoom call encased in a three-metre tall stone frame, the portal arrived with a promise of diasporic fraternity and a message of shared humanity borne out of access to the same ‘liveness’. The project is regularly described by Gylys in profoundly optimistic, even techno-utopian terms: ‘I felt a deep need to counter polarising ideas and to communicate that the only way for us to continue our journey on this beautiful spaceship called Earth is together’, and later as ‘The addition of the Portal in Philadelphia is an exciting step forward in our mission to build a bridge to a united planet’. [1] This sci-fi language of ‘spaceships’ and ‘missions’ – that suffuses all publicity released by Portals Organization – seems to reveal that for Gylys, the specific urban contexts in which the portals are located are secondary in importance to the fact that cities have dense populations, and can therefore bring a maximum number of ‘fellow humans’ into remote contact.

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There is generosity in this goal. While Gylys may be operating from an idealised stratospheric viewpoint, the installations themselves are nevertheless embroiled in the fabric of urban life – in the politics of real estate, and bear witness to the endlessly contingent cityscapes they exist within. [2] Insofar as they present an image that is truly ‘live’, they live among us.

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In fact, their circular viewport, coupled with their stationary nature, means that the portals share something of a cultural lineage with a much older technology of civic novelty: the camera obscura. Particularly the popular Nineteenth-Century camera obscurae that were built to be public attractions on high vantage points in cities like Bristol or Edinburgh. When spending time with the images cast by both, the presence of a hypnotic and uncanny liveness – an endless, voyeuristic potentiality – can make it difficult to look away for fear of missing something.

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The portals differ from these darkened rooms however, because unlike the rarefied, sanitised views offered by these constructions they address the street at just above eye-level. In Skyline: The Narcissistic City, cultural historian Hubert Damisch outlines a divergence in the historical representation of urban space between ‘birds-eye-view’ depictions and maps that abstract and seek to rationalise cities – ‘Does the city remain “real” when considered from such distances [...]’ – and street-level depictions that present urban space as lived, contingent, and personal. [3] Damisch argues that the perspective techniques used by the painters Canaletto and Brunelleschi to produce realistic veduta paintings imply and demand a subject. [4] Veduta means ‘view’ in Italian, and there is no view without a viewer.

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Camera obscurae are distinctive today for their relative stability. Unlike ubiquitous jittery smartphone video feeds, a camera obscura will generally remain still, allowing the world outside to move silently past within its static frame. A decision therefore needs to be made about what its aperture should be trained on. Will there be enough movement and visual interest from this or that vantage point? There is a politics of performative urban representation implied in this decision. What kind of scene, what view of ourselves and of our space justifies the building of a camera obscura? A similar value judgement applies to each portal.

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Many Dubliners were initially bemused and apprehensive at the choice of location on North Earl Street. Sitting in the afternoon shadow of The Spire, and across the road from the GPO, it is placed in a historically significant part of the city, but also an area – ‘D1’ – that is notorious among locals for its high concentration of social issues. There was much talk at the time of; ‘why we can’t have nice things’, and the early weeks of the portal saw enough of what was deemed inappropriate behaviour from both cities to generate a viral international interest in the portal, and a temporary suspension of its video feed.

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It is significant that it was placed in the heart of D1, rather than an alternative, more predictable cultural hotspot. Since its installation planters have been placed immediately in front of the screen, to create distance between the portal and the crowd, and the steady stream of visitors to the portal appears to be bringing a form of passive communal surveillance to the street, along with bringing custom to the area. Regardless of the location choice however, the important thing is that the portal greets us where life happens, at street level, rather than from on high. For this reason, and despite its sci-fi billing, it enacts a useful resistance to a pervasive trend in tech ideology to operate inter-planetarily, agelessly, and it ends up doing something simple – it enables eye-contact.

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15 minutes beside the Dublin Portal, late October 2025  – Observational Text by the Author

We’re looking at a street-level view of somewhere in the UK.

        A woman in a black knee-length jacket does a shimmy dance in the centre of the circular frame while a group of tourists film her from our side.

Someone is on their phone waving into the screen, someone on screen – also on a phone – waves back.

       We’re in Poland. But this camera angle seems to be more buildings than pavement and there’s no one in view.

       Then, suddenly, we’re in Lithuania. An empty square, wet cobblestones and white street lines stretch off towards a grand seeming civic building.

There must be more than twenty people gathered here in the rain at this point, James Joyce’s hat and glasses standing only just taller than the cluster of black umbrellas.

       The square is still empty, a man with a dog on a lead walks through the centre of the frame from left to right.

       A young woman and man emerge from the bottom of the frame and turn to us while on the go, waving their bound umbrellas at us as if afraid of appearing rude.

It feels like we should see ourselves on the screen, as if we were taking a group selfie. We sense that we are performing, but we disappear at this end.

       Lithuania is busy now. It is wet there too.  

Three people here have not moved from their position at the front since I've been here. It feels like they are waiting for someone.

On our side a woman in a red velvet dress with a black umbrella pirouettes and curtseys while on her way into North Earl Street.

A seagull sits atop the portal.

Three seemingly unrelated stories caught my eye in the news in recent months. In the Dublin suburb of Dundrum, residents spoke out in opposition to a proposal to build an “aerial delivery hub” in the centre of the town.[1] A meeting organised by local politicians was attended by the chief executive of the drone company, but this wasn’t enough to convince the citizens of Dundrum that the new hub was a good idea.

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A few weeks earlier, Irish billionaire businessman Dermot Desmond was reported as having described the long-awaited Metrolink project as obsolete and “a monument to history”.[2] He argued that autonomous vehicles operated by artificial intelligence would make the rail line redundant, would cut the number of vehicles on the road dramatically, and eliminate congestion. His argument was dismissed by transport experts and citizens alike.

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More recently, in the annual scramble for housing, students in Galway spoke in despair about the lack of available accommodation, noting that there are currently over 1,000 properties listed on Airbnb for Galway, while there are only 111 properties to rent on Daft.ie (in fact, the figure maybe below seventy).[3]

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What these three stories have in common is that they are all underpinned by technologies which aim to minimise social interaction within our cities, based not on a desire to provide a service to society (whatever their proponents might claim), but to extract maximum profit by eliminating the cost of people doing real work.

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Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022 to describe how online platforms switch from serving their users, to serving their business customers at the expense of their users, to finally serving only their shareholders, resulting in a poor service that both users and business customers are locked into. A similar process can be observed in the way technology is used to deliver services in our cities.

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Airbnb is an undoubtedly useful platform for people looking for short-term accommodation for city breaks and holidays. When it was founded in 2008, it was celebrated as a means to connect individual travellers with homeowners who had space to spare, allowing users to bypass overpriced hotels and find affordable accommodation. On the face of it, this seems like a worthy endeavour, helping to connect people and to make more efficient use of available accommodation.

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Fast forward seventeen years, and the impact of Airbnb on housing availability and on mass tourism is causing a backlash in cities across the globe. Barcelona plans to ban short-term rentals from 2028 in response to a housing crisis that has priced workers out of the market. New York City has introduced laws to restrict short-term lettings and block non-residents from letting out properties. Restrictions are also in place in Berlin, Lisbon, and Athens. Elsewhere, short-term lettings are highly regulated to limit over-tourism. Rather than connecting people, the rise of short-term letting has resulted in a sterilisation of parts of our urban centres where key-boxes proliferate and visitors never physically meet their hosts.

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The plan for drone deliveries is just the next stage in a progression from takeaway restaurants doing their own deliveries, to online delivery platforms operating from dark kitchens. Again, it comes from a worthy pretext – to help restaurants connect with their customers and to make ordering takeaway food simpler for customers – but in this case, the enshittification stage results in streetscapes where restaurants no longer have a public presence, but are attended by gig-economy workers who act as intermediaries between businesses and citizens. The drone delivery concept goes one step further, replacing that human intermediary with a machine. The citizens of Dundrum certainly don’t see how that transaction is of benefit to them.

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A similar progression can be seen from the redesign of our cities to suit the private motor car and the well-documented impact that has had on social interactions in the city, to the proliferation of ride-hailing apps, and now the notion that AI-powered driverless cars are the future of urban transport. Though the ride-hailing apps promised an end to congestion and reduced car ownership, the reality was very different – more congestion and more cars – and any system of AI-powered driverless cars will be governed by the same commercial imperatives to increase car miles on city roads. Again, where, in this, is the benefit to citizens?

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A city is a community of citizens. At its core, it exists for the people who live there, and it thrives on social interaction. But what these technologies are doing, or proposing to do, along with things like self-service check outs, dark kitchens, and co-living units (which, despite their name, are fundamentally isolating environments), is to strip away that core. Removing human interaction in the name of efficiency and cost effectiveness is ultimately to the benefit of shareholders rather than citizens.

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The Dublin city motto, “Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas” (Happy the city where citizens obey), has come in for some criticism recently. The Dublin InQuirer newspaper ran an unofficial poll earlier this year to choose a new, more appropriate motto for the modern city, and the winning entry changed just one word – “Participatio Civium Urbis Felicitas” (Happy the city where citizens participate).[4] That participation should be not just in the democratic functions of the city, but in the life of the city, in the culture of the city, and in the community of the city.

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As we are assailed with technological solutions purporting to improve the lives of citizens, let’s consider them through the lens of the happiness of the city and its citizens. This is not a rejection of technology, but an acknowledgement that ultimately, technology should serve the citizens. If our cities are to thrive into the future, let’s recognise the importance of participation and prioritise measures that encourage social interaction and build social cohesion.

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Scale in street-making is often a function of the objects or beings that a street serves, and a product of the time when it was designed and built. The medieval urban street would be narrow and tight if considered in the context of the width of a modern car - it was self-evidently designed for human-only occupation. Wide urban streets are a post-industrial phenomenon, but facilitating trade was not the only cause of expansion: for instance, the importance of the Dame Street-to-Dublin Castle route in 18^th Century Dublin was emphasised by employing a wide-street design.¹ Similarly, width was considered a vehicle for improving air quality and circulation, such as with Haussmann’s 19^th century re-design of some of Paris’s most well-known avenues.²

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The process of making new spaces, including urban streets, usually begins with a shopping list of needs and requirements which mix together to inform and produce a space of sufficient scale to balance a wide range of competing interests. Urban fabric generally thrives on the variety of scales and spaces produced by this process, which helps to ground the occupier in a sense of time and place. A number of Irish examples of wide streets, however, exist with a poor or at least muddled sense of human occupation. 

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Pearse Street is one such example. Originally named Great Brunswick Street, the street is a product of industrial expansion in the Dublin Docklands during the 18^th century, and was renamed after Padraig Pearse in 1924. Its creation revitalised an area “hidden from the city by the bulk of T.C.D,” ³  and its width is an echo of the legal scale prescribed by the Wide Streets Commission in the Act of 1758, even though it was never an original target. It was, put simply, an urban trade route from the delivery point to final destination. 

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It is approximately 1.2 kilometers in length, spanning from Ringsend Road and the Grand Canal Bridge to the East, linking up with Tara Street and College Green to the West. At 19 metres wide, it is less than half that of O’Connell Street (49 metres). It consists of four lanes of one-way west-bound traffic flanked by two relatively narrow footpaths. It has few trees, central electricity poles or other vertical delineation, and mostly consists of low, slow-moving traffic and a high-level transversal Dart Bridge appearing at an angle from the upper storeys of the Naughton Institute of Trinity College.  Walking it feels like hard work, with little to no changes in its surface materiality, landscaping or any other kind of visual variety to retain a wanderer’s interest along their way. 

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Much of the southern end constitutes the perimeter of Trinity College, with relatively little life at the street level, while the northern end is peppered with a number of vacant and closed off facades. It is telling that such a prominent street and transport node, with the benefit of south-facing facades, seemingly turns its back on the pedestrian. The root of the issue likely stems from an unpleasant and dangerous atmosphere created by the cacophony of traffic, but the removal of traffic in and of itself is not conducive to a successful street. It begs questions about what interventions can be done to reinvigorate this seemingly forgotten stretch?

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Modern interventions to wide streets generally consist of two actions. Firstly, they can be subdivided with hardscaping and landscaping in an attempt to sequentially arrange the street occupation nicely for the human: if we move through a wide street like a series of mini streets and spaces, our interactions with the street will be easier; our understanding will be broken down and more easily digested. 

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O’Connell Street is one such example that has benefitted from spatial, visual and material compartmentalisation. The tarmac which is applied to the majority of the roadway is interrupted at the GPO, where a high-quality granite paving sett is used for both the road and footpath, emphasising the importance of that historic building and providing variety for the pedestrian. The width of the roadway is punctuated by a central pedestrian spine throughout, with all three pedestrian thoroughfares on the street organised around a variety of trees, old and young.

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The success of such segregation would point toward a logic that streets designed for pedestrians should therefore be similarly organised. Such an approach, however, may diminish the original grandeur and scale of the street. It can prompt wayfinding issues by interfering with the visibility of landmarks that contribute to a sense of place inherent to a city’s fabric.⁴

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The second option is generally to leave them to their original devices; the accommodation of vehicular movement. In an era where movement is dominated by the car, and the streets’ spaces are merely vehicular lanes, this makes for an element of the urban fabric, which is unfriendly and, frankly, unoccupiable. 

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“First we shape cities, then they shape us.” ⁵  Pearse Street was – finally - recently the subject of a Dublin City Council decision to restructure traffic routes, with the removal of cars approaching from Westland Row. This, hopefully, is the conclusion of the previous indifference it has suffered from - now that space for cars has been diminished, human-centred urban interventions, with a particular emphasis on variety in all aspects, should follow suit.

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“[W]asn't this all started by some terminally online moron in trinity? … Nobody gives a shite so long as the statue isn't actually being damaged” wrote [Deleted] on the reddit page r/Ireland in a thread to discuss Dublin City Council's proposals to stop the repeated groping of the Molly Malone statue on Suffolk Street —  her breasts repeatedly touched by the sweaty hands of tourists, so much so that the dark patina has been worn away to reveal the earthy metallic dark orange of the bronze from which the mythical fishwife was cast. Thousands of images of Molly #mollymalone circulate on TikTok. A group of men dressed in Jack Chalton-era Irish football jerseys stand in line to rub their faces in her breasts. In the comments section one user posts, “reminder she’s 15 in this statue,” others disagree, claiming she was older, as if somehow the behaviour would be permissible if the statue represented Molly as 17 – the legal age for consenting sexual acts. Others use the platform to protest the behaviour.

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If you ask Google’s AI Gemini about the practice, it tells you that “this practice is now discouraged by authorities for preservation reasons.” This is artificial stupidity, a view blind to a far more important problem, one that philosopher Sylvia Wynter described as an urban planning that assumes the male-coded subject as the norm, while others—women, Black, Indigenous, and colonised peoples – are excluded, marginalised, or rendered invisible [1]. For Wynter, urban space is ontologically male, in that its logics of design, governance, and belonging reproduce a gendered and racialised “Man” as the universal standard of being. Speaking to RTÉ Radio One, DCC Arts Officer Ray Yeates (a man) suggested that one solution could be to “just accept that this behaviour is something that occurs worldwide with statues” – human stupidity [2]. Perhaps Yeates might agree to a plaque being added, inscribed with a quote from Wynter: “Man …overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself”[3].

As images of the statue circulate online, they both promote and raise awareness of this deleterious practice. But this is the means and not the end of their circulation. These images turn Suffolk Street into a space for the production of a strange kind of economic exchange. With one sweaty hand on a breast, and the other on a smartphone, tourists become workers. Here, as in all of everyday life, a distinction can no longer be made between work and play. In our age of contemporary digital technology all of everyday life is a factory. To play is to work; the digital proletariat; to use a technological prosthesis is to be used by that prosthesis. These interfaces, designed for the many by and for the benefit of the few, manage life by means of ‘fun’. Spaces like Suffolk Street are, as Letizia Chiappini writes, where “[a]ffect, desire, pain, and love, are digitally mobilised for direct spatial impact” [4].

Henri Lefebvre called this abstract space – “[t]he predominance of the visual (or more precisely of the geometric-visual-spatial)” [5]. He described this kind of logic as a planetary mesh that has been thrown over all space [6]. Any space, anything, anywhere, no matter how banal is subject to this logic. 13,461 km away from the Molly Malone statue  is an underpass in the Chinese city of Guilin. Each night crowds of outdoor live streamers gather to steam content on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), their faces glowing in the phosphorus white of selfie lamps. Geolocation means that if they are closer to more prosperous neighbourhoods then they make more money from the wealthy clients who live there. These leftover urban spaces that are seen as unattractive and once disregarded in a capitalist economy have become spaces where new economies and ways of working emerge. I have written elsewhere about the disproportionate role that Ireland plays in facilitating the infrastructures that produce these kinds of spaces [7]. This is a new kind of geopolitics, one facilitated by State fiscal policies, such as in Ireland, home of one of lowest standard corporate tax rates in the EU.

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This is capitalism incarnate – capitalism become flesh. Everything has an exchange value. There is not a thing that cannot be transformed into a commodity to be circulated in an economy of flesh, thoughts, drives and desires. This is an economy governed by images, subject to what legal scholar Antoinette Rouvroy calls algorithmic governance – the governance of “the social world that is based on the algorithmic processing of big data sets rather than on politics, law, and social norms” [8]. The statue of Molly is a public surface subject to an extractive logic, via the lens she is engineered for constant circulation, interaction, and capture. The statue as code has her meaning flattened into content for the purpose of data extraction and ad revenue. This kind of collapsing together of work and leisure is a weapon of mass distraction. It removes us from everyday life,  producing what philosopher Henri Lefebvre called a “transcendental contempt for the real” [9].

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Lefebvre also called for a right to the city, by which he meant the right to the production of truly democratic space. Space that is not subject to capitalist abstraction. To what extent this is even possible in our precarious age of algorithmic governance is questionable - but nonetheless we must seek to understand, hope and act. 

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Interdisciplinary gatherings are rare, yet extremely useful because they allow people from various fields to meet, exchange information, influence each other's point of view, and to learn from one another in a way which is unique, unpredictable, and dependent upon the nature of participants field of discipline.

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For various reasons, art and design-specific interdisciplinary gatherings seldom occur. Firstly, artistic occupations are generally quite competitive, so may prove reticent to share their processes. It is unfortunate as I firmly believe the more artists that one surrounds oneself with, the more one can explore their own process, even more so when it comes to an international gathering of artists and designers who would not otherwise meet.

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Secondly, artistic communities are usually formed by a group of people interested in the same form of art, which is certainly beneficial when it comes to improving one’s technique. Nonetheless, learning from someone who is focused on a different discipline, thus confronting an unexpected perspective, is extremely useful. For instance, a painter and a fashion designer are both interested in colours: comparing their approaches can be eye-opening and thought-provoking for both. Being so rare, when people from various countries, disciplines, and professions do meet it is unforgettable and extremely enriching.

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One such opportunity is MEDS, ‘‘Meeting of Design Students’, an annual international event that unites creative students from different fields together with practising professionals to share knowledge and skills and form meaningful connections through collaboration the medium of hands-on innovative projects.

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A platform for creative and cultural exchange

MEDS is an international, non-profit, two-week event. Although adored by many international students, it is usually only through word of mouth that one gets to hear about it. This article is intended to raise awareness of this event, as it is a unique opportunity providing a wonderful and enriching experience both for students and young professionals alike to learn new skills and meet like-minded people. MEDS brings together students from various creative fields as well as professional practitioners to share knowledge and skills – “It promotes design’s positive societal impact, fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, and offers designers a platform to build connections, unlock potential and apply their talents outside the faculty” [1].

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MEDS began in 2010 and has been held almost every year since. It has been hosted in a different country every year: Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2012, Dublin two years after, and Zaragoza, Spain in 2022. The event usually spans two weeks in August and gathers around 150 participants from all over the world.

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To attend, one has to fill out an application form and complete a creative task. If selected, you become a member of a ‘national team’ including about 10 people from each particular country. Every participant chooses one of the proposed projects and spends two weeks working on it. The philosophy of MEDS rejects any hierarchy and so the tutors, who are open-minded professionals volunteering their time, and the participants develop and shape the project outcome together.

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Projects / Workshops

This year’s Meds revolved around Rijeka, the ‘City of Textures’. All projects were typically hands-on, site-specific, and responded to the city and its context.

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For instance, a project called ‘Urban Outf***ers’ led by Iva Mandurić, Vili Rakita, and Lea Mioković was an opportunity to design one’s outfit, a personal urban equipment, a public space survival kit to inspire and possibly shape one’s environment as soon as it’s taken off and left in public space. Something that was originally personal and individualistic suddenly became a part of public space to encourage interaction.

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Anyone with a project in mind can become a tutor. A project called ‘Fialaigh’ (a veil, screen, or cover) was led by three TU Dublin graduates. All three, Christan Grange, Stuart Medcalf, and Shane Bannigan, studied architecture at Technological University Dublin and came to Rijeka to guide a project that was focusing on ‘themes of vacancy, occupation, value, and ephemerality, using spatial installation and film and the interface between them to interpret, capture, express, and let emerge narratives in our work’, as the tutors put it.

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Had one wished for a building and construction-related project, one could have chosen from at least two options. The ‘Black Thought’ project proposed by designer Çisem Nur Yıldırım and the practising, Barcelona-based architect Alberto Collet involved building a sustainable wooden pavilion inspired by the Japanese technique Shou Sugi Ban. The other option offered rammed earth construction and tile production linked to themes of migration.

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‘Plivatri’ and ‘Rječina’ were projects that designed public space interventions including a floating wooden platform for about eight people to hang out on, and pieces of public furniture made of scraps found on a trash pile for people to sit, share, and interact. Two of the tutors for ‘Plivatri’, Leda and Ahmad, met during MEDS workshop in Poland in 2021. Leda is a Cypriot designer based in the Netherlands, and Ahmad is a Lebanese architect and urban designer with experience across Europe and the Middle East. Leda later met Stephanie (a Romanian industrial designer) during their studies in Eindhoven. All three are passionate about alternative paths and collaboration across different disciplines and therefore teamed up as tutors.

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Last but not least, three Warsaw Polytechnic students were the tutors of the ‘Pop Of Colour’ project this year. Although Mateusz, one of the trio, has just finished a Bachelor’s in Architecture, he is a graffiti artist himself. Inspired by numerous murals all over Rijeka as well as its industrial heritage and sea-side views, the task was to co-design and paint a mural on one of the walls of the local school gym, make a few pieces of simple furniture, and design a few playground games. The playground and gym remained open during the day allowing local children to pop in and observe the work in progress.

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The MEDS community firmly believes in involvement with local communities, and therefore organises guest lectures to foster the connection between international students and the whole community. From friendships, collaborations, and professional networks, connections built at MEDS last long after the event ends.

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Living the MEDS experience

MEDS is a purely student organisation run by students, recent graduates, and young professionals (once participants themselves) who make the event happen year by year, advocating for this broader, collaborative approach. The whole event is organised by a different national team every year and is heavily reliant on various sponsors. Accommodation is usually simple; participants and tutors stayed in the local school in Rijeka. Surroundings are different every year, but enthusiasm, curiosity, and creative energy remain. As places at MEDS are limited, there is luckily a very similar organisation called EASA (European Architecture Students´ Assembly). Following the same principles, it is mostly attended by architecture students however. MEDS is an international multidisciplinary event for art, design, and architecture students as well as practising artists, designers, and architects to broaden their skills and develop creative ideas.

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Above all, it is a wonderful opportunity to establish long-lasting connections between people, disciplines, and cultures in a cross-disciplinary, collaborative environment..

Our bodies do the work, do we think of them when they are working?

Feet ache from standing, backs tire from lifting, shoulders ache from poor posture at a desk. We sit down, stand up, take a break, take refreshment. In some workplaces, there is consideration of the worker and their body: canteens are provided, bathrooms are kept clean, and the ergonomics of a desk are contemplated. All of this relies upon the acknowledgement of, the visibility of, certain types of work and workers. If we turn our attention to the city as a workplace – specifically, the streets, thresholds, parks and pavements that make up the public realm in the city and that act as a place of work for many workers – how does it accommodate the bodies of workers? Is it hospitable?

Over time, the perceived value of certain types of work, and consequently certain types of workers, has fluctuated. When seen as essential to the economy, to growth, the needs and availability of workers are considered, and their ability to advocate for better working conditions is strengthened. This has occasionally resulted in an architecture that responds directly to workers’ needs. We might take the example of pithead baths, communal bathing facilities that were built close to coal mines in the early twentieth century. Here, miners could change and bathe; the dust and dirt of the colliery becoming the responsibility of the mine itself and not the worker and their home. In Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining and Modern Britain, by Gary Boyd, we follow the development and eventual obsolescence of this distinctive typology, pointing to the transitory nature of coal mining as one of the reasons for the short lifespan of the baths and for their fading from view in histories of modernist architecture in Britain.^[i] So we have an example of an architecture that springs up in response to workers’ needs, but that also mirrors the changing status of the workers themselves.

The value of different types of work is something that we continue to grapple with and that contributes to inequality locally and globally. Precarity is widespread.^[ii] Nowhere is the daily reproduction of the worker more difficult and given less consideration than in the city workplace. A conspicuous example of precarious and disembodied labour is the fleet of food delivery riders that has grown in response to the evolution of online delivery platforms. This new virtual infrastructure has resulted in, but takes no responsibility for, a workforce that is reliant on the fabric of the city. While there has been recent media coverage of the riders' problematic working conditions,^[iii] there has been less discussion about the pragmatic and bodily realities of their work, where they contend with weather, traffic, criminality and so on.  

In The Practice of Everyday Life, historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau sets out a model whereby power structures are discernible by the “strategies” of agencies and institutions, representatives of the state or of commercial interests; the organising logic of city planning, for instance, or the virtual frameworks that map, track, and influence. Against, or within, these strategies are the “tactics” of the other; the citizen, the customer, or, to employ de Certeau’s preferred term, the user.^[iv] If we pay close attention to the city workplace, we start to see the “strategies” and “tactics” at play, the creative and opportunistic ways of “making do” that individual riders employ in their everyday life: they rest against walls and railings; they take shelter under canopies and in ad hoc repair shops; they take shortcuts, crosscuts over rainslick tracks or in the narrowing gap between a bus and a van; they take risks;^[v] they sit on park benches and at the feet of statues.

At O’Connell Monument:

Do you eat your lunch here?

“Yes, this is my office chair.”^[vi]

A warehouse on Henry Place holds a rental and repair shop, renting primarily to food delivery workers. The building is a protected structure that is decaying as it awaits a contested redevelopment.^[vii] A single open space is divided into two zones by a low plywood barrier: public (for rental) and private (for repair). Bikes stand ready. Metal shelves along the east wall hold the accessories that might be required by a rider. In front, a desk where forms are filled and rent is paid. In a corner, some sofas face a TV screen. A fridge, microwave and kettle provide basic facilities.

On Henry Place:

Do you take a break here?

“Yes, this is the only place that we are able to eat because we rent the bikes here, so they let us use the microwave, the refrigerator... This is the only place in the city that we can have a little space together to eat something.”

On this backland site, a temporary and informal responsiveness is demonstrated. The city user improvises on the ground, while elsewhere, a debate rages about value. In contrast to the windowsills and kerbstones that are often places of momentary rest for a delivery rider, a dilapidated and impermanent structure gives a sense of shelter and retreat, making space for camaraderie and some degree of bodily comfort.

On O’Connell Street:

Do the delivery companies provide any equipment or clothes for you?

“Not exactly, once in a while they give something for free, like the bag and the jacket, but not all the time. The jacket is more for promotion; it gets wet, you get wet anyway. We have to be careful because we can get sick most of the time, because the rain makes our bodies very cold. We have to be extra careful when it’s wet.”

Where previous communities of workers had their needs considered, as in the construction of pithead baths for miners, for example, it was possible to point to a single employer with responsibility for the welfare of their workers. Groups of workers could agitate and negotiate for facilities, for practical solutions to tangible problems. Emerging from a pit with body and clothing covered in black coal dust led to straightforward questions about washing, changing, eating dinner, and storing clothes during the working day. Improvements in conditions for miners were realised because these workers were together, situated, and visible. Another historical example of situated workers’ facilities was the series of green huts built by the Cabmen’s Shelter Fund in late-nineteenth-century London. The shelters provided hot drinks and food, a place to read the paper for cab drivers, answering a series of pragmatic, corporeal needs. Like many Victorian philanthropic efforts, they came with an undertone of self-serving paternalism. Now with a protected conservation status, a handful of shelters are still in use, the interiors remaining the exclusive preserve of cab drivers.

Today, in corporate^[viii] settings, the body is considered in great detail. Ergonomic assessments are exacting in their appraisal of a body at a desk: the length of shin (footstool), the height of eye (monitor stand), the reach and range of forearm (vertical mouse). Training is provided in how and what to lift. In theory, an employer is responsible for assessing these risks to the body regardless of the location of their employee. But in an era of modern piecework, who cares for the pieceworker? And is there a parallel between the hands-offishness of employers and our attitude to city streets and passageways?  

Delivery riders are visible in the city but untethered, distributed through the network of the streets, finding their own informal gathering places. They are not employees; they are independent contractors. This status allows them to be light-footed within a network of regulations and legalities.^[ix] The subcontracting of accounts with various delivery companies, for instance, results in a grey market of official and unofficial riders. These tactics have their mirror in the ways in which riders improvise occupation of streets and pavements, and act, to a degree, on the city; they are limited, however, in how they might shape the city to their needs.

Emerging from a tradition that prioritises urban commerce and suburban living, we plan for the street as a thoroughfare, an artery, thinking mostly of flow, of efficiency. There is arguably a parallel prioritisation of the commuter worker within the workforce. Certain dimensions are assigned for cars and buses, for bicycles and pedestrians to move seamlessly from the city centre to the periphery. This diminishes the value of the urban realm as a place to be, to dwell. What if we were to see (or return to) the streetscape, the weather-world^[x] of paths, gratings and doorways, of tarmacadam and streetlights, as a single, integrated space that hosts diverse needs and functions, including those of city workers? The sense of the city as a place to move through can be challenged by an ambition to make a hospitable city: a place of rest, shelter and conversation. Acknowledging the public realm as a workplace might prove a catalyst for an inclusive approach to city-making, considerate of all bodies and all work.

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Buried deep underground, encased in two and a half meters of concrete foundation is a copper scroll. A map of the night sky is engraved on its durable surface accompanied by the following declaration in five languages; English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese:

“This building began on the 22nd day of November 1960 A.D. according to the Gregorian calendar. The planets in the heavens were as shown on this celestial map. The universal language of astronomy will permit men forever to understand and know this date.” [1]

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Replete with hubris and utopian optimism, Bertrand Goldberg, architect of Chicago's “Marina City” dreamt of a monument that would not only change the future of residential architecture but whose legacy may outlive its own material longevity. Forty floors above this map, overlooking the Chicago River, is my one bedroom apartment. However lofty Goldberg's ambitions, they did succeed in reshaping how many people live today, ushering in a new era of high rise living.

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Marina City was the most ambitious residential project ever constructed in Chicago, crucially  funded by Building Service Employees International Union seeking to reverse decades of “white flight”, the mass migration of white people from urban areas to post-war suburbs. Societal change, rather than profit incentives, was the primary driver of the project, and a radical solution to city living was required to sway public opinion in the immediate, and long term.

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Conceived as a city within a city, the mixed-use complex accommodated a range of amenities including restaurants, a theatre, a bowling alley, and an office building within two 65 storey towers housing 1400 people, the tallest residential buildings in the world at the time of its completion in 1968. [2] Although dwarfed by some of its newer neighbours, they stand more than double the height of Dublin's tallest building at 179 meters, and are just shy of the Poolbeg Chimneys. As the first major mixed use complex in the USA, it inspired a boom of inner city construction that aspired to compete with the ease and amenities of the suburbs.

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Right angles dominate Chicago; its unrelenting grid plan stretches for hundreds of square miles, and Marina City was a radical departure from the existing urban fabric. Once a student of Mies Van der Rohe, Goldberg broke from the rigid modernity of his former mentor, inspired by natural organic forms. The two towers share identical circular plans, rising from a spiralling base of open parking and topped with forty residential storeys. Each apartment radiates from the central core like a petal, culminating in a rounded balcony, giving the buildings their iconic flower shaped plan.

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Creating lasting buildings also requires cultural sustainability, and the most sustainable structures are those that are appreciated.  Marina City was immediately embraced by Chicagoans, becoming adored civic and mass media icons dubbed the “corn cob” towers.  The towers appear tectonically simple yet sculpturally complex; a monolithic cast in-situ concrete frame with steel framed glazing slotted between, separating inside and out.

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The structure holds the interior space, massive beams stem from the circular core, delineating living spaces. They sweep towards the floor at the building's edge forming columns, then arc into cantilever balconies in a display of structural grandiosity rarely seen in residential architecture. Completely rejecting Corbusier's free-plan, where structural elements can be completely freed from interior arrangements, here space and structure are in complete harmony.

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Within this rigid frame is the flexibility to adapt to changing living standards. In our apartment, the antiquated enclosed kitchen has been opened up creating a single living space. The bathroom was enlarged and the black vinyl asbestos containing floor was replaced with a warmer hardwood. At 72m2, the comfortable apartment exceeds the minimum requirement for one bedroom apartments in Ireland by 60%, its irregular plan opening up to the strangely distant metropolis forty floors beneath. Neither sky nor ground are visible from inside, the city looms above and disappears from view below.

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Residences are raised above 19 floors of parking – an unavoidable reality of 1960s America – and as the first major development in a declining industrial area, lifting the residential blocks may have given some relief from the smog and dust below. This conversely embodied a kind of “anti-urban” philosophy where multiple levels of parking dominate and “eyes on the street” are non-existent. The “city within a city” mantra perhaps becomes an island within a city. Despite its achievements, Marina City’s anti-pedestrian urban edge with moat-like level changes and large car ramps, removes any sort of meaningful presence at street level to non residents.  

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Although the area now bustles with restaurants, bars and apartments, it is far from atypical residential neighbourhood. Flanked on three sides by streets that have more in common with the M50 than most urban environments; six lanes of constant traffic, window rattling subwoofers and illegal drag racing and are common late night nuisances.

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Connection between residents can also feel strangely isolating. Elevators are not conducive to forming relationships and the curving plan allows for interaction between neighbouring balconies but doesn't encourage either. These large balconies feel like an interpretation of the traditional American porch lifted into the sky, shaded relief from the summer sun, or sheltered hideout to watch colossal lightning storms roll over the great plains and crash into Lake Michigan. They also allow you to engage in the longstanding American tradition of watching your neighbours from the porch.

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Looking across to the adjacent tower, presumably people are enjoying their balconies, but they are lost against the infrastructural scale of the complex. Voices drift across, a party far above, arguing below. If you look closely enough they start to emerge. A TV flickers on, they're watching Friends, “Brian” from the local bar waves over as he's brushing his teeth on his balcony, a couple shut their blinds after drinking a bottle of wine on the balcony. Like L.B Jeffries looking out his rear window, I wonder if I am the only one piecing these disparate stories together. The feeling is one of shared isolation rather than community, alone together high above the chaotic streets below.

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That is not to say there is no community here. A thriving residents group exists if you decide to partake. Movie nights occur weekly, taking place on the roof deck in the summer months. Art talks, game nights and seasonal parties regularly fill the shared amenity space.

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Irish perceptions of community are more parochial; passing neighbours at the front door, greeting the postman. While traditional domestic formations may be useful facilitators for chance encounters, it is naive to imagine that communities require a specific type of urban form to propagate. Communities are formed by longevity and security. Apartments here are privately owned or leased long term, but beyond that, residents are fiercely proud of their iconic modernist home. The ambition of drawing people back to the urban center was achieved by creating liveable homes. Many residents have been here for decades, some from its very inception.

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Despite the abundance of new construction in Ireland, the race to the bottom of minimum standards and the prevalence of build-to-rent schemes prevents apartment living being seen as a viable long term option. The corporatisation of housing provides neither the long term security nor exemplary housing needed to form community or societal change.  

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Similar to the Irish housing crisis, urban dereliction in Chicago was an immediate problem that needed a swift response. The architects and – crucially – an ambitious funder, understood that an exemplary project was needed to shift societal attitudes, not a short term band-aid. Marina City stands as a testament that radical solutions can significantly alter public opinion and trajectory of an urban area. This kind of thinking is urgently required, and if we must look up and abroad for solutions, then let us ponder on the porches of Marina City.

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On visiting the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, one might be struck by a couple of things. First, on entering the building, the air in the hallway is stale, a result of the inoperative original air-conditioning system. Secondly, the planning of the basement service floor is surprisingly chaotic. These two observations suggested to me a narrative about modernism’s dependence on technology and about Mies’ attitude to that technology – and the situation of architecture in general in relation to technical measures.

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Mies worked in more than one register when designing the villa. The top floor, with the entrance hall and bedrooms, is fairly straightforward: lucid and rational. The floor below, what I suppose in German could be called the Beletage, has a flowing and expressive plan comparable to his single-storey Barcelona pavilion. Like the Barcelona pavilion, it has a representative purpose: it contains spaces for entertaining, constructed with fine materials which convey the wealth of the inhabitants. The basement below is half-buried in the hillside and contains mostly service spaces. The layout of the basement feels strikingly unresolved in comparison to the other floors.

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The plan of the basement is not often published. It contains, among other things, a boiler room, a laundry room, the room-like processing chambers of the air conditioning system, a photographic darkroom for Mr Tugendhat, and a “moth chamber” where fur coats were stored. These functions are arranged in a way that is partly determined by the layout of the floor above. For example, the dumb-waiter is at the end of a narrow corridor around which a contorted storage room is wrapped. It’s as if the occupants of the basement scurry around this warren of spaces to pick up the loose ends of the freely-planned floor above. There is no functionalist virtue on display here. Indeed, the tiled and napthalene-impregnated moth chamber, accessed through the darkroom, is at the end of a chain of five rooms. It gives a claustrophobic impression tainted by the idea of moths as vermin, and of a cruel method of industrial extermination. The technology of circa 1930 is reflected in the primitive air conditioning system: a piece of apparatus firmly fixed in history, but one in service of the apparently timeless perfection of the upper floors.

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It seems that Mies did not consider the basement floor to be part of his architectural expression. He didn’t optimize it. The terse open-plan geometry of the main living spaces reflects not just freedom of movement for the inhabitants, but Mies’s freedom of design. It is simple in comparison to the complex technicalities of actually keeping the house running.

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The closest thing the villa has to a centrepiece is the orange onyx wall, non-load-bearing and composed of five slabs. While one could interpret this as a pure display of luxury, it is also an object of contemplation (or at least a talking point). The Tugendhat family were cultured as well as wealthy, and I want to attribute to them some kind of elevated curiosity about this object. What can we recover, in the way of intellectual depth, from reflecting on the onyx slabs? A suitable source might be the French philosopher Roger Caillois, who, in his book The Writing of Stones [1], discerned in geological patterns “some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.” In relation to the Villa Tugendhat, where the setting sun causes the backlit onyx to glow translucently, Caillois’s words evoke an understanding beyond the codes of architectural modernity. Mies’s obsessive refinement of his constructional poetics certainly has something to do with striving for a universal syntax, and the connotations of cosmic grandeur must have been intended as well, but the awkward, “puny” insignificance of humanity, in contrast, doesn’t seem to find a direct expression in his design. A stone is an indifferent thing.

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Caillois wrote “Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.” [2] Although Caillois did not have architecture in mind, these vivid words evoke, in contrast to the timelessness of the onyx wall, the more fragile reality of the Villa Tugendhat, a reality of uncertainty that undermines Mies’s confident form-making. At the most basic level, the presence of humans means the presence of water vapour and all manner of microbial impurities. These are perennial problems for the architect: problems of climate control and hygiene. The handling of the response to them (the concealed inventions and intricacies of the air conditioning equipment) is arguably a truer token of humanity than the stony perfection of polished onyx panels.

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The flight of the Tugendhat family from Brno in 1938 in the face of the impending Nazi occupation is emblematic of the precariousness of civilization and of an industrial society gone astray. The grand formal spaces of the villa have an appropriately monumental character, as Mies intended, but the technical floor tells another story of historical contingency, unresolved difficulties, and of all the problems we try to sweep under the carpet.

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Editor's Note: An exhibition on the architecture of the Villa Tugendhat will run in the Irish Architectural Archive from January to March 2026.

Yet in Ireland today, the built environment is too often defined by crisis; housing shortages, vulture funds, stalled planning, delayed public infrastructure, and sprawling suburbs with inadequate public transport. Across these challenges, one pattern is consistent - people’s needs have been systematically sidelined in favour of economics. This raises two critical questions; how did people become invisible in planning, and how has this eroded public trust?

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To contextualise this argument through a recent controversy, the proposed redevelopment of Sheriff Street has been presented as a scheme designed to ‘regenerate the area’ and tackle underdevelopment. Yet, Rainbow Park, a green space in the heart of Sheriff Street, remains untouched despite long-standing calls from residents to transform it into a vibrant hub. According to Mark Fay, chairperson of the North Wall Community Association, residents were also blindsided by the announcement, revealing how little meaningful consultation took place.

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Urban theorist David Harvey has argued that regeneration often masks gentrification, where the well-being of current residents is sacrificed to increase property values. The office blocks and luxury apartments planned for Sheriff Street are designed for people largely ‘unindigenous’ to the neighbourhood, while those already living there risk cultural erasure. This is part of a larger pattern of gentrification dressed as renewal, sanitising inequality rather than addressing it.

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So how might architectural practice move away from this cycle and begin to approach the built environment in a genuinely democratic way?

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Public consultation has been offered as a solution, but in practice often amounts to little more than a box-ticking exercise. Public forums tend to come late in the design process, when decisions have already been made, leaving residents feeling duped. In order to truly facilitate democratic design, communities must be involved from the very beginning, when needs and opportunities are first identified. This must then be followed by genuine co-authorship, where residents have a real stake in shaping outcomes. And even this is not enough if architects and planners fail to develop empathy for the people behind the feedback.

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This is where the act of ‘writing people back into design’ becomes important. ‘Fictional Narrative Writing’ is a methodology that I have developed which merges writing, storytelling, and narrative empathy, helping designers to integrate people and identities into their work. This involves creating characters and scenarios drawn from what is learned in the early stages of design development, and then designing through their eyes. Imagine Susan, aged forty-six, recovering from a hip replacement, needing to move comfortably through a building or public space. Or Steven, aged sixteen, with little money and nowhere safe to gather with friends. How might a street, square, or public building serve both of them? By imagining these lived experiences, architects are forced to consider how spaces perform for different people, ensuring that those consulted at the start are not only listened to, but remain present and visible in every stage of design.

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By embedding empathy in practice, designers begin to understand diverse people’s needs, desires, and vulnerabilities, while the public sees themselves reflected in the design process. This mutual recognition rebuilds trust, transforming the built environment from a top-down imposition into a shared project of social life.

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Above all, this methodology requires us to acknowledge that architecture is never neutral. Every design decision is a social, and therefore political, decision. This is not a plea for grand gestures, or expensive experiments. Often, small interventions can transform how a space is experienced. A family-friendly bathroom that gives independence to children. A sheltered bench that restores dignity to those waiting for the bus. Free, accessible indoor spaces that provide refuge to teenagers who have nowhere else to go. Inclusive facilities that allow people to exist without fear of scrutiny. These are not luxuries. They are the basics of a society that values its citizens.

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Ireland is at a crossroads. The choices we make now will determine whether the built environment continues to alienate, or whether it begins to reconnect people, and foster a sense of community. We can persist with Tetris-block developments dictated by developer economics, or we can restore architecture’s social purpose. The shift will not come overnight, nor will it come through tokenistic frameworks. It requires a change of mindset, to see people not as passive recipients but as co-authors of the places they inhabit. It requires putting dignity and a sense of belonging on equal terms with cost and efficiency. It required introducing empathy as a design tool.

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If we succeed, trust can be rebuilt. Our cities and towns can become places of pride rather than disillusionment, and the phrase ‘built environment’ can return to its true meaning: the collective spaces where people live - and live well.

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It is time to write people, community, and democracy back into Ireland’s built environment.