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You’ll eventually ruin a good thing if you’re always questioning it.
Growing up in Longford you are conscious of the identity of this small town. A town which was stretched like a cloth in many ways and was never certain of what it wants to be. The Main Street, the Train Station, the Market Square and the Cathedral, each of the town's main focal points and civic centres all detached, becoming islands in their own right, separated by tarmac streams and rivers.
The rambling Park Road becomes Earl Street as it meets the station, then Ballymahon Street as it strides past the Market Square, and before you know it you are on Main Street with little give away that there has been any change at all; bar the street signs high on the corner buildings edges. As this long stretch of street intersects with the river Camlin it becomes Bridge Street, previously the gateway to the rest of the town, when Longford's centre was perched on the north embankment.
A path taken by many crossing Ireland along the Slighe Assail, an ancient highway running East to West from the Drogheda area, upon which the urban centre of Longphort is believed to date from. Born around the fifteenth century with its inception as a Gaelic market settlement, Longford once trickled parallel to the north bank of the River Camlin. The original town ‘square’ or trapezoid was capped by a market house, flanked to the west by O’ Farrell’s castle and St John’s Church to the East. This square, unnamed, was once the epicentre of the ‘old town’, yet now it's little more than a chicaned byroad and car parking for the solicitors and dentists which occupy the grandest buildings sitting nearby. Contrary to its place of origin, along the clay banks of the river, Longford never intended to interact with the river so intensely – it was always about overcoming an obstacle, acting as a resting stop, halfway across Ireland. A town of streets, an arguably linear settlement with unrhythmic public space due to its origination as that of a road, uncertain what its hierarchical formation is.
The development of the cavalry barracks in the early eighteenth century pushed public life south of the river, with industry and manufacturing happening along the south bank with businesses – such as a distillery, corn mill and tannery – making use of the fast flowing Camlin. But, as described in the Historic Towns Atlas of Longford, the greatest boost to the towns economic life came with the Royal Canal in 1830; in part due to plans for the canal to pass only eight kilometres from the town and local traders successfully convincing the canal company to build a harbour in Longford town. With this significant investment of infrastructure, many large-scale buildings began to pop up around the town. A new market hall, a market square adjacent and, of course, storehouses and warehouses. This area to the south of the town had at this stage totally taken over the old town as the commercial centre, as larger institutional buildings and residences were built to the north. It is these two spaces that act as the focus to this discussion, as one playfully juxtaposes the other.
The town, in many ways, is a town of urban iconography. Upon the sports shirts and school crests sits the cathedral; at the end of the main street stretch sits the Barracks wall’s and gate’s; while the market building stands free in the largest open ‘square’. Everyone knows these icons, yet rarely interacts with them, only in a way akin to how you might interact with a ruin that you might spot as you pass by. This iconography is personified by St Mel’s Cathedral, which was described as ‘an act of faith in stone’, or as I like to think of it, a cathedral at the junction of four roads. The fabric as I said is stretched, it doesn’t have a coherent pattern, perhaps why the town has behemoths like St Mel’s, the Market Square and Connolly Barracks; landmarks with such purpose that it didn’t matter where they rooted as long as they are seen to be there.
This is where I begin to wonder if it is Longford's relationship to modernity that caused the urban downfall of both the ‘old’ town square in the north and the new market square to the south. The market square could be looked at as a piece of pre-modernist planning, with the aim of creating a societal appreciation for the town's fabric through the creation of a larger, more accessible space focused on access; facilitated by barge, cart, and automobiles. It is through the use of the public infrastructure network surrounding the market square that the space thrives. Yet, it is these factors that have created its ‘island’ issue.
When I return to Longford and I walk between the Market Square and Church Street, I now realise that neither of these spaces are really working hard for the town; it is the icons that occupy them that are working hard for themselves while it is everything that connects them that is hardly working. A town born on the side of the road lost its identity somewhere along the way, and now in its hopeful adolescence, I hope these spaces can be seen, reimagined as possible palazzos, surrounded by institutions that beam the richness of the town's history. If we stop looking at these squares from the seats of our cars and occupy the street, we might really begin to understand what needs to change to allow the town to hardly work for its appreciation again.
Working Hard / Hardly Working is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2024.
All images are the author's own unless otherwise indicated.
On the Ise-Shima peninsula in Mie, Japan, a peculiar tradition persists. For the last 1,300 years, the Ise Jingu Shrine has been demolished every 20th year, only to be rebuilt again. This process is called Shikinen Sengu, and is hard work, in the most literal sense: timber is felled, dried, cut and joined by hand, and the new shrines are raised beside the remnants of the previous shrine. As such, the shrines stand in a state of perpetual newness.
This effort goes beyond material and labour. Every step is embedded with rituals and ceremonies, and the process is carried out precisely as it would have been thousands of years ago. The twenty-year cycle allows one carpenter to learn at the first rebuild, lead the second, and teach the third. A cycle of knowledge that preserves the craft.
From a Western conservation mindset, this might seem illogical, even wasteful. In 1849, John Ruskin wrote about buildings: "Its glory is in its Age", influencing a strand of European conservation that places value in original fabric and age. [1] For Ruskin, a building's spirit came from its original makers: a spirit “is given only by the hand and eye of the workman", connecting it to the time and place of its construction. In Ruskin’s words, this spirit "can never be recalled", rejecting attempts of building restoration to do so. [2]
In the case of Ise Jingu and the Shikinen Sengu, new hands do the work taught by those who came before, allowing knowledge and craft traditions to be passed from one generation to the next. The authenticity is not material, but the immaterial practices connected to the Ise Jingu and the Shikinen Sengu, preserved through a continuous and intentional process. As argued in the 1994 Nara Document, authenticity must be judged within its cultural context, with traditions and techniques counting alongside materials. [3]
We travelled to Japan to look at traditional building crafts through the lens of Ise Jingu’s Shikinen Sengu, focusing on two of its most prominent materials: timber and thatch. How is knowledge of crafting these materials preserved through the rebuilding? And how is it reflected in contemporary building practice?
To unpack our question, we began where all building begins: with the sourcing of material. Most of the timber for the Ise Jingu Shrine comes from the Kiso region, where trees are carefully selected and managed for 200 to 300 years before they are harvested. We walked the Nakasendō trail through Kiso looking for traces of this, and found one at a small tea house. The owner showed us a photograph of villagers holding ropes in front of the logs they were about to transport down the mountainside.With no mechanical equipment permitted, the process demanded immense effort, time, and care.
We found a similar care at the Kitokura Sawmill in Takamatsu, an ordinary commercial sawmill supplying everyday local construction. Here, effort, time and care was reflected in the time consuming drying processes they used, to ensure the highest quality, and the care for all parts of the tree: nothing is wasted. From round logs to dust, every part is used on site or sold. The care shown in sourcing and processing timber, both for the Shikinen Sengu and at the Kitokura Sawmill, echoed an attitude we encountered repeatedly throughout our time in Japan: an understanding that craftsmanship begins long before construction itself.
Following the timber from sourcing to building, we next turned our attention to the tools and techniques that transform material into architecture. From the Kiso forest, we made our way to Kobe and the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum. Here we were introduced to the story of tools and traditional crafts used in Japanese construction over the past 2000 years to today, showing the linkage between traditional tools, material and the fabrication process. However, it would be easy to leave the museum thinking that craft belongs to the past as surrounding the museum, in the city of Kobe and others similar, concrete dominates. If timber is used, it is often prefabricated and machined. Housing is produced in series, much like the car industry, and few traces exist of carpentry as a craft today.
One of those few traces was the practice we observed at Tomoaki Uno Architects in Nagoya. Here, the drawing room was filled with prototype components testing traditional joinery, cut with CNC milling for the Mikagecho House. Their use of digital tools function as an extension of craftsmanship, transferring the logic of past techniques to today’s technology.
We found another trace at Takahashi Woodcraft, run by a carpenter who uses traditional craft and knowledge in his practice. Takahashi-san’s workshop was full of the same tools that we had seen in the Takenake Carpentry Tools Museum, only here, they were worn by years of use. Similar to the practice of rebuilding Ise Jingu, Takahashi-san takes effort, time, and care in his material: He stores timber for the right future project; leftover wood is used to create ornate decorations; he mills facade panelling 2–3 mm thicker than store-bought to make it last longer for the client.
While timber preservation depends on long cycles of growth and processing, thatch is preserved through continual repair and renewal. In Kyoto, we spent three days working with the thatcher Ikuya Sagara, helping to thatch an interior wall for a restaurant. Thatch is currently prohibited as a roofing material in Japan’s urban areas due to fire regulations. To prevent its demise in urban areas, Sagara-san and his three female apprentices are reimagining its future, seeking ways to bring thatch back into the city.
The wall we worked on demonstrates one such approach. Instead of using the thatch, as is traditionally common, as an external protective layer, it is used to enhance the acoustic qualities of an interior space. Alongside rural roofing projects, Sagara-san has expanded his practice to include artistic and interior commissions, allowing the craft to evolve while remaining rooted in its heritage. Traditional thatching continues in rural Japan, where techniques vary from region to region. At the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum and the Japan Open-Air Folk House Museum, we observed the distinct methods and details that characterise different local traditions. Despite this variation, as we were told, experienced thatchers are expected to understand and work across these regional typologies. This means that Sagara-san should be (and is) able to repair or construct any roof that requires his expertise. Like the timber construction at Ise Jingu, thatching survives in Japan through repetition. Unlike timber, which is often valued for its permanence, thatch is inherently cyclical: designed to be renewed, repaired, and replaced.
At Ise Jingu, the sourced and processed materials, wood and thatch, come together. During the assembly of the Shrine, each construction step is accompanied by a ritual and ceremony. Before the construction process begins, the ground must be pacified (Jichinsai); before the structure is erected, rites mark the raising of the pillars (Ritchū-sai) and the ridge beam (Jōtō-sai); and when the new shrine is finished, locals carry white pebbles to the site (Oshiraishi mochi gyōji).
The new shrine is built next to the old one, on a second, identical plot, called the kodenchi. The climax of the Shikinen Sengū is the Sengyo, a night procession that happens in silence, with only a few privileged witnesses. The sun goddess Amaterasu is moved from the old inner shrine (Naiku) to the new one, and the food and industry deity, Toyouke no Omikami, is moved from the old outer shrine (Geku) to the new one. Only after this is the old shrine taken down. Some of the timber, still in excellent condition, is reused as torii gates, or to repair other smaller shrines around Japan.
Through a Ruskin perspective, there is little authenticity at Ise Jingu: every twenty years, new material is used, and the hands that worked it are not always the same hands that worked the last. But as supported by the Nara documents, authenticity is not always embedded in the material. At Ise Jingu it lies in the act of altering it, because each rebuild is when the knowledge is used and handed on, a process which preserves both material and immaterial knowledge. Through the lens of the Shikinen Sengu, we see these different material practices as ways of preserving traditional building crafts, both through using and adapting them.
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The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Statens Kunstfond, whose funding made this research trip and the resulting work possible.
In this article, Jack O’Hagan and Bodil Eiterstraum travel to Japan to document the demolition and reconstruction of the Ise Jingu Shrine, a cyclical process that preserves traditional construction methods and subverts conventional ideas of authenticity.
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What might happen if we began to see buildings as living creatures? Would it change how we design, build and treat them? Would we choose different materials at the design stage, and put more care into their construction or restoration? Would we be more willing to maintain them, and less likely to abandon them or accept their neglect?
Once I began to learn about roof thatching in Ireland, or vernacular buildings as a whole, I started to see them as living beings, and it was difficult to unsee. Old abandoned houses were now even more heartbreaking, like seeing an animal on its deathbed. A house with its lime plaster fallen away, exposing its mud innards, now seemed violent.
Despite the effort of the remaining thatchers in Ireland and the commitment of thatched homeowners to their maintenance, working with a critically endangered craft feels like trying to wake a sleeping giant. Imagine the effort it would take to get yourself to your feet after you’ve been laid to rest or been fully buried by most people as the world “moves on”. When I see the state of some thatched cottages in Ireland, I’m often left wondering should we just let it die, regularly exclaiming “slate the goddamn thing”. But it’s so ancient it's familiar to us all, it awakens the senses through the sounds, sights and smells.
These “living creatures” shared a symbiotic relationship with their inhabitants; people built and maintained them, relying on a continued connection to their surroundings to source the materials for lime washing, thatching, and keeping the fire going, while the home sheltered the people, allowing them to gather around a fire to stay warm, cook and tell stories – to share the workload with their neighbours when the house needed thatching.
“The use of local building materials meant that they fitted into landscapes of which they were literally a part, their clay or stone walls gathered from the earth on the spot, their timbers dug from the bogs, their thatch harvested from the fields.” - E. Estyn Evans, 1957 [1]
Old thatched houses have a presence to them, it can feel like encountering a giant beast, and thatching them can feel like giving it a new shaggy coat for winter. Dressing up weather wounds when its base coat has become exposed can feel like a surgical procedure. Examining the condition of the roof structure in the attic feels like glimpsing into a dusty ribcage made of bog wood and branches, sometimes coated with fibrous scraw (the top layer of the bog), or thatch tied directly to its skeletal structure with handmade sugán rope. Smoke blackened by the well-tended hearth beneath, like the lungs of a lifelong smoker. Hearing ghost stories about the house; as we expose the historic layers of straw we disrupt ancient dust, wondering if we are at risk of being haunted by its spirits.
There are many reasons for the drawn-out death of thatching, the obvious being the lack of thatchers. The ancient craft has been struggling to survive for the last 70 years or so, despite it being a distinguishing feature of Irish vernacular architecture. As a result, we often encounter them in a state of emergency, with not enough time or support to save them. It’s a beautiful thing to work with a compostable material, but not when it’s composting on top of someone's historic home.
Ceann tuí (head of straw) is the Irish term for thatched house, indicating how common straw was as a thatching material. But the term became less and less appropriate over the last century for various reasons. When combine harvesters convenienced our world, it rendered straw unsuitable for thatching. Also, the adoption of more wind-resilient varieties led to shorter straw, too short for thatching. This contributed to the significant decline in the number of iconic thatched houses across the country. Northern Ireland, for example, had 40,000 thatched buildings in the 1950s, but today has only 180. [2]
People's perspectives on thatched buildings can sometimes feel reminiscent of the way the Irish language was viewed for so long: something that should be left in the past, that we didn’t need, associated with poverty, peasantry and tough times. It feels as though something is shifting with the Irish language in that regard. Could the same be happening for our endangered heritage crafts? With the urgency to adapt a carbon-heavy, wasteful industry that relies heavily on imported and non-biodegradable materials, and to create more climate-resilient homes - under which we will need to escape rising temperatures - could thatched roofs make a comeback? Or could they be seen as even more of a fire risk, when wildfires become the norm for us in Ireland, any more than a timber-frame house insulated with Kingspan?
There’s talk of the tourism industry in Ireland adapting to the changing climate with the installation of air conditioning in accommodation. It seems unfortunate and disjointed that this is the solution to climate resilience for an industry that gives visitors a glimpse into Irish culture.
The stark reality is that today in Ireland even roof thatching is significantly reliant on imported materials to keep the craft alive. The recent fuel strikes this year, however, reminded us all how precarious the global supply chains are, for food and many other imported goods. Thatching material is now imported from as far away as China, and we would have little backup if the supply ceased entirely.
Though there is a supply of Irish thatching materials, it is very limited, and nothing should be in endless supply if we are to live within planetary boundaries. Water reed is still harvested by hand around the Shannon Estuary among other places, an ancient trade in itself, and there are a few farmers still passionate enough to grow heritage grains for thatching straw. But the challenges around growing straw or harvesting reed put most off. The health of our soil and rivers deeply affects the quality of the materials too, which shortens their life on the roof.
Ultimately, growing a building material has multiple ecological and environmental benefits: water reed, for example, is a regenerative plant that absorbs carbon, helps clean water, provides habitats for birds and insects, and the fresh growth of a managed bed is more climate resilient than an unmanaged reed bed, as it holds more water. Its byproduct is a building material that keeps a home's internal atmosphere regulated at different times of year. It also provides a habitat on your roof for insects, sometimes even bees or birds. Though that could be still seen as a negative to some.
Today there is an expectation for a roof to last a minimum of 20 years. And despite there being grants available for homeowners, the price to thatch a roof today would mean you’d want it to last at least that. We have collectively forgotten these skills, perhaps by design, where something that was once common knowledge is now a specialised skill.
The modern world's expectation to have longevity, consistency and convenience has infiltrated a craft that would have used straw from the field next door and shared the work with the neighbours, and if it lasted a few years, that’d do…
Fear of maintenance influences our approach to modern design and construction, and seems to be steeped in an embedded colonial fear of nature, and the need to suppress it. That buildings must remain static and more machine-like. The maintenance of vernacular buildings, however, required a continued connection and familiarity with the place from which it was built and its local materials.
They are more than just our built heritage; more than a picturesque cottage on a Fáilte Ireland postcard. It may seem like a small issue amongst the many issues we are facing, however, these are often peoples homes, protected structures, and our last remaining heritage buildings and examples of Irish vernacular architecture.
It seems their fitting into the landscape so successfully has caused them to be overlooked or undervalued as examples of sustainable architecture. That these simple structures can just dissolve to the earth gives me a feeling of hope. Containing clues to the past, they act as libraries of ancient attunement and understanding in how to truly build sustainably and in harmony with nature. Perhaps this is not an end to, or death of, something – but the last phase of a cycle. If we were to cast ourselves forward, what might the new cycle look like? And might it weave us back into the delicate tapestry of land, nature, and human connection?
Reflecting on her time spent thatching Irish homes, Alice Bowler considers what an endangered craft might teach us about care, materials and building in step with the land.
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My first job in architecture was with a small practice in the Wicklow village of Ballyknockan. I spent three summers designing one-off houses across the county's hillsides and valleys. Working within the stringent requirements of Wicklow County Council, in a landscape designated as an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ [1], demanded careful negotiation between planning policy, client ambition and the landscape itself. Occasionally that process produced inventive architectural solutions. More often, however, it resulted in another familiar bungalow, little different from the one that had secured permission for the previous generation.
Towards the end of my time at this firm, I noticed an increased client workload. There was an ever-growing appetite to pursue constructing a new dwelling on family lands, in some instances by people who, like me, were in their early twenties. Initially, I was surprised that so many people were seeking to build on family land in rural Wicklow. I had spent my entire adolescence listening to siblings and peers alike voice their eagerness to move to towns, cities or abroad, anywhere with a more vibrant social scene than our village of eight hundred people. Looking past the naivety of youth, the true reason for this change was obvious. Spiralling urban house prices, remote working and changing attitudes to where people could live had transformed the economics of rural life.
It is a combination of the above factors that instigated the resurgence of the rural one-off house we are currently witnessing. This residential typology has been under scrutiny for some time, and perhaps rightly so. [2] They undermine the towns and villages they surround, promote car dependence and make their mark on the natural landscape. [3]
During the Celtic Tiger era, there was an effort to manage the spread of this typology with the government introducing the Sustainable Rural Housing Guidelines for Planning Authorities (2005) [4]. Local Authorities attempted to limit their construction to those with a strong tie to said rural areas and only when they could demonstrate an economic or social requirement to build them. The criteria to qualify had become laborious requiring various verifications to demonstrate qualification such as proof of, at a minimum, ten years living in the area, or alternatively, strong connection to the agricultural industry.
The restrictive nature outlined above inevitably led to an increase in planning refusals, prompting calls for an ease of planning restrictions from local communities. As the government looks to meet its housing targets, it seeks to diversify how it can reach them. One avenue they have examined is the rural one-off house, which is having its policy reviewed for the first time in twenty years. A new national planning statement is being prepared. Included within is an upgrade to the rural guidelines, aimed to improve transparency and certainty for people applying to build their own home, enabling more consistent decisions between various local authorities and supporting balanced rural development aligned with national policy. [5]
The outcome and success of this proposed legislation is yet to be seen. Despite the bureaucratic blockades on getting approval for rural housing, the stock that is currently produced tends to be subpar from a design perspective. If we are about to witness a new era of rural development, can we encourage thoughtful design and prevent a rerun of bungalow bliss of the 1970s or the explosion of McMansions we witnessed during the Celtic Tiger years? Local Authorities across the country currently provide design guidelines [6], but what we tend to see is house after house sitting on a one-acre site with the usual unfinished hardcore drive, concrete kerbing and a severe lack of biodiversity in landscape design.
If we are to see an increase in rural housing stock, how do we improve design quality while mitigating its environmental impact? Perhaps the answer lies not in inventing new suburban hybrids, but in looking back at how rural settlements naturally formed.
The traditional Irish Hamlet, or Clachán, was an organic cluster of dwellings that minimised landscape disruption, consolidated services like wells and drainage, and naturally concentrated movement into localised nodes. [7] By planning for multi-generational living from the outset, this model could provide a dignified, cohesive framework for families to adapt over time, replacing the current ad-hoc reality of ribbon development with high quality, landscape led architecture.
In my experience surveying farmyards that were being prepared to make way for new dwellings; what struck me was how carefully they had been sited. Buildings leaned into hedgerows for shelter from prevailing winds, stepped with the contours rather than against them, and formed sheltered yards at their centre. There is something worth recovering here, not simply the appearance of traditional farmyards, but the logic that shaped them. [8]
Where suburban estates attempt an awkward compromise between the urban and the rural, importing standardised road geometry, concrete block boundaries, tarmac turnarounds and uniform setbacks into open country; the clustered farmyard layout, by contrast, is wholly rural. It draws on the spatial principles of landscape led design where varying building volumes step with topography, lean into existing hedgerows and share a central courtyard.
The modern take on the farmyard layout is well positioned as a potential multi-dwelling solution for rural contexts. This format allows families to collate and pool financial resources to create a home, and provides the potential for multi-generational living. The layout allows for different typologies to exist in a cluster. Families can rotate through units as they progress through their life. The family live in a main house; their children grow up and use the smaller adjacent buildings to establish their own independent households away from the main homestay. As the parents age and look to downsize the family rotates, parents use the smaller dwellings, thus the cycle continues. This avoids the building of suburban style bungalows in a back land fashion; it keeps development compact and rural in character.
This format is not just suited to the nuclear family, but also provides potential for households in various formats, the variation in dwelling provides options for diversity, single households who wish to remain in a rural setting but find it difficult to find stock that is suited in size. This provides variety.
A study undertaken by Teagasc and the Heritage Council [8] documented the various typologies of farmyard layouts, which offer options and formats depending on the user’s needs:
1. Scattered Farmyard:
Traditionally found within the mountainous districts, particularly in the west of Ireland, where level ground is in short supply.
2. Small courtyard:
Buildings on three sides; the fourth side is a boundary wall. The dwelling faces the road. This layout is particularly common in Ulster, Western Connacht or south-west Munster.
3. Half Courtyard:
Buildings form two ranges at right angles to each other.
4. Full Courtyard:
A range of buildings close off all four sides of a rectangular yard.
5. Extended Farmyard:
Found mainly in the northern half of Ireland, a single row of buildings.
6. Detached Courtyard:
Mainly associated with the landlord estates of Ireland but can also be found on some of the larger traditional farms.
These layouts provide both a historic precedent and a viable spatial framework, the scattered farmyard, for instance, offered tailored response to sites with challenging topography. Most importantly, all these formats generate an informal, shared public realm, delivering an open space at a proportion and scale that avoids the sprawling, ecologically sterile lawns of modern single dwelling builds.
In effect, this approach delivers on the original, unfulfilled promise of suburbia, a synthesis of rural landscape and neighbouring community, but without the suburban sprawl. It opens a form of “micro-suburbia” accessible to those who wish to live rurally but lack the vast resources or family land required for a standalone “McMansion”.
Critically the barrier to this model is not that it is strictly prohibited by planning law, but that it lacks any administrative template or active promotion. Current local authority guidance remains fixated on regulating the individual detached house, offering no path or precedent for clustered development. Reimagining rural housing requires overcoming not just policy inertia, but a deep-seated cultural obsession with the isolated gated homestead. By shifting our perspective, we can demonstrate that shared courtyards and close neighbours do not compromise rural privacy, they build genuine, resilient communities.
Some readers may highlight what I am describing is a village and that rural villages are in decline and arguably the way to cure this is to bring people back into them. However, as is the case with Carnew and Dunlavin in South Wicklow, there are caps on the housing stock that can be developed in many of these areas - limiting population growth from the outset. How can we expect these communities to grow and thrive when their development is being hampered? [1] As well as this, both had new schools proposed and granted full planning permission back in 2023 but as of 2026 both projects are stalled in Stage 2b. (9) This demonstrates the systematic challenges of reinvigorating our rural towns and villages, it will take time for them to accommodate their growing populations.
The debate surrounding one-off housing has too often been framed as a choice between preservation and development. It need not be, If we are to reimagine and move forward with contemporary notions of rural housing, a more considered and holistic approach is required than the all or nothing rhetoric that often dominates the discourse. If Ireland is entering a new chapter of rural planning, then architecture has an opportunity, and a responsibility, to shape it differently. The success of the next generation of one-off houses should not be measured by the number of permissions granted, but by whether they strengthen communities, respect the landscape and create places worth inheriting.
In this article, Joseph Kavanagh explores the resurgence of the rural one-off house, its polarising legacy, and whether the typology could be reimagined as a vehicle for collective living to support rural communities.
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