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Southside block
Take one block of the Dublin Docklands (known as City Block 11 in the Dublin Docklands SDZ): bound by Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Lime Street, Cardiff Lane, and Hanover Street East. It’s an architectural casserole of historic, Celtic Tiger, and contemporary architecture. Five of the recent additions have been designed by one architecture firm, who I work for — Henry J Lyons (HJL). This hasn’t resulted in a uniform language across all four buildings. Each brief called for a distinct solution, each design was a different experiment. Walking around the block in preparation for this article, I can associate the architectural moves and material choices with individual designers in our practice.
The view from Samuel Beckett Bridge showcases this collage of varied architectural styles. The newly-unveiled shipping office on the corner of Lime street and Sir John Rogerson’s Quay by HJL adds a splash of colour and acts as a marker to the boundary of the SDZ. The protected structure of W.H. Byrne’s British and Irish Steam Packet Co. from 1910 is a contrasting remnant of the docklands’ industrial heritage. The ‘3’ building at 28-29 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, designed in 2005 by Burke Kennedy Doyle, evokes similar Celtic Tiger developments along the Liffey. The Tropical Fruit Warehouse of 1852 has a contemporary form floating above a former industrial edifice. To the bookend of this composition, The Ferryman pub is a thriving descendant of a once working-class institution.
The vista along Misery Hill consists of a jagged series of angles, providing landscaped niches to the streetscape. To the southern edge of the site, a newly formed pedestrian route has been created from Grand Canal Square to Townsend Street. The landscape flows from Hanover Street into the urban block and internal public realm, forming Whitaker Square at the centre. As set out in the SDZ, a new pedestrian connection is formed from Lime Street into the block. This additional permeability effectively means the side-streets act as an extension of the pedestrian realm. This encourages the public to meander through the city streets and explore their surroundings. Vehicular access points to service the buildings are limited to the perimeter of the block, enhancing pedestrian safety.
Northside block
A comparable block on North Wall Quay is bound by Commons Street, Mayor Street, and Guild Street. It includes Clarion Quay, an architecturally acclaimed development completed in 2002 by Urban Projects. Clarion Quay won a silver medal for housing from the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) in 2004. The award statement read “The result is a fine example of the art of place making which integrates subtle security within an appropriate urban design strategy” [1].
Much of the city block retains its original charm; however it can be argued that the place making intent of Clarion Quay is lacking in other parts of this block. Excise Walk has a pleasant rhythm of building volumes, balconies, and window openings that animates the street. Mayor Square features at the centre of the development as the primary public space. While it is neatly formed on plan, the pedestrian experience is somewhat cluttered in reality. On the ground, a significant emphasis would appear to have been placed on the flow of vehicular traffic. Street furniture and bollards are strategically placed to accommodate and direct the movement of cars.
As I walk around the perimeter of the block, it is clear the focus for public interaction is on the primary streets and spaces only. At times, the architecture directs you to one location or route, only for this to be cordoned off by a defensive gate. The secondary environment of side streets is functional and has the car at its heart. Nondescript streetscapes provide multiple car access-points to private basement parking. They have little to engage public interest and appear as an inner service-route to the buildings. If anything, the abundance of CCTV posts creates a sense of discomfort, prompting one to exit onto the main thoroughfares again. This inhospitable design, the ‘one street deep’ approach, is widespread in development of this era, as Andrew Kincaid noted of the redevelopment of Smithfield in Post-colonial Dublin: "The housing is also, not surprisingly, faux exclusive, with its fortress architecture, apartment buildings overlooking private courtyards, roof gardens for residents only, and high-security electronic gates, all of which feed into the logic of a pioneering entrepreneurial class". [2]
The future city
The redevelopment of the Dublin Docklands promised a new type of urban living environment, an alternative to urban sprawl that would breathe life back into the heart of Dublin. The DDDA described it as "a world-class city quarter paragon of sustainable inner-city regeneration". [3] After fifteen years of gestation and the added vision of the SDZ objectives, this is becoming closer to a reality. It may only work, in part, because Dublin has enough well-paid workers able to afford a high-end living experience in the Docklands, but the public components of their neighbourhood have become a gift to the whole city. For example, Grand Canal Square has become a destination in Dublin to rival some of its historic parks, one of the surprisingly few areas where people can relax in well-designed public space free from traffic. It is less traffic-centric in design than Mayor Square. Crucially, with new development in the Docklands SDZ, there is a continuity of high-quality public realm beyond the main streets, to side-streets, alleyways, and publicly accessible courtyards. Hopefully this ethos will inform how we maintain and adapt all our city in the future.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
1. Clarion Quay: Residential Development (2003 - 2004), [website], 2004 Clarion Quay: Residential Development | RIAI.ie (The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland), (accessed 9th October 2022).
2. A. Kincaid, Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial legacies and the built environment, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 185.
3. Dublin Docklands Development Authority, [website], Dublin Docklands Development Authority | Dublin Docklands, (accessed 9th October 2022).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Editor's Note: An exhibition on the architecture of the Villa Tugendhat will run in the Irish Architectural Archive from January to March 2026.
Throughout its evolution, architecture has been required to engage both with imperfect technologies and the contingencies of life. This is clearly evidenced in Mies Van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat. The villa has a public face of rare perfection, but other aspects make one wonder about the architect’s ethical stance in relation to functionalism and humanity.
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Of the many predicaments facing humanity today, arguably the most difficult to make sense of is the housing crisis [1]. Certainly, natural disasters, pandemics and wars destroy homes, disrupt supply chains and labour markets, and drive mass migrations. Population growth increases demand. But housing crises are not in the first instance created by these events. On the contrary, I argue, they are a matter of design [2].
In economic terms, housing is often framed as a simple problem of supply: If we just built enough homes, there would be no crisis [3]. This argument will be very familiar to anyone attuned to the current debate around housing in Ireland. Under a market-led paradigm, however, the construction industry can never build enough homes to meet demand because, if it did, their product would lose its sale value and they'd go out of business [4]. So really our problem is one of distribution, not supply, and its resolution therefore is a question of will, not fate [5].
In making sense of social and political problems, appeals to the laws of nature can be compelling – after all, they have a ring of truth about them: we don't control the weather; we never know when we'll be struck down by illness, injury, or death; violence and our vulnerability to it are unfortunate but inevitable by-products of our hapless existence as human animals [6]. This is a routine intellectual trick performed by liberal economists when they discuss the principle of the free market as though it were something akin to Darwin's theory of natural selection. The argument goes something like this: in the existential competition for scarce resources, there must be winners and losers ('survival of the richest,' if you will) and any attempt to artificially level the playing field is an unwarranted interference with Nature. The inevitability implied by this argument is exemplified in the notion of 'the invisible hand', Adam Smith's classic conceptualisation of market forces, describing how individuals acting in self-interest might unintentionally produce effects that benefit society as a whole [7]. Providing an apparent justification for the unfettered pursuit of profit, the invisible hand was famously adopted by proponents of laissez-faire economics [8]. However, these later theorists took the phrase out of context: the so-called 'grandfather of modern economics', Smith was in fact expressing his concern about the social, political and moral distortions produced by unregulated commerce [9]. The invisible hand may be rational, but it doesn't have a conscience.
A considerable body of research has examined the causes and effects of Ireland's emblematic post-2008 housing crisis. Much of this work focuses on how global processes of real-estate financialisation and the neoliberalisation of urban governance have intersected with the local dynamics of a parochial democracy suffering from a post-colonial property complex [10]. This research illustrates that, rather than expressing some uniquely deep connection to the land of our forebears, the emphasis on homeownership in Irish housing policy simply reflects the status of private property as the primary financial asset in a system of wealth accumulation upon which our economy depends [11]. This is reflected in a suite of government schemes that attempt to guarantee continuous growth in property values along with ever-wider proprietorship.
Deregulation, tax breaks, and development subsidies like the Croí Cónaithe (Cities) scheme seek to reduce supply-side costs and minimise risk in order to encourage investors into the market and thus deliver more housing. Meanwhile, demand-side rent supports and help-to-buy schemes, along with loosening mortgage lending criteria, ensure that consumers have enough cash to keep up with ever-higher prices. These measures are based on the seemingly logical assumption that boosting construction and putting money into people's pockets will improve affordability [12]. However, supply-side savings are rarely, if ever, passed onto consumers, while greater availability of capital on the demand-side simply drives inflation. In any case, what does it say about the market if both buyers and sellers require some form of state intervention in order to engage in trade [13]? Is this not precisely the kind of unnatural interference that Adam Smith's disciples warn about? Perhaps the invisible hand is fudging the numbers.
More importantly, what does it mean for a society in which self-worth is measured by one's ability to independently purchase a home, if most people can't manage to do so [14]? The late anthropologist and historian of debt David Graeber argued that, in contemporary western societies, the traditional hierarchy of value has become disordered such that the symbolic or cultural value of home, as well as its fundamental utility as a place to live, have been subordinated to its exchange value [15]. Put simply, we have come to confuse value with price. Often, questions of affordability are met with appeals to viability, a byword for profitability. Yet the assumptions that underly viability calculations – land and construction costs, contingencies, profit margins – are rarely interrogated. Instead, we question the protective, democratic mechanisms of planning and building control, subjecting them to a persistent smear campaign designed to pressure the state into underwriting an ever-greater share of development risk.
So what would it look like to meaningfully commit to the vision of a society that provides housing for all? The Irish Cities 2070 group points out that securing the health, wellbeing, and prosperity of Ireland's rapidly growing population – as well as achieving our ambitious and necessary sustainability goals – is entirely reliant on creating and maintaining attractive, compact, well-designed and connected urban settlements [16]. Yet, by centring commercial viability in debates around housing as though it were as natural a consideration as safety, comfort, beauty or belonging, we privilege the needs of enterprise over those of the people it ultimately serves. Perhaps a first step, then, is to question our assumptions about the nature and causes of housing crises – are they just unfortunate by-products of an otherwise reliable system? Or have we in fact designed a system that reliably produces crises? Most critically, we must ask: who benefits from the whole situation?
In considering such questions, rather than being led by an invisible hand, maybe it's time we followed our gut.
While issues of climate change, disease, or even conflict may be explained away by sceptics as natural phenomena, the global shortage of accommodation can only ever be man-made. This article considers the contemporary discourse around housing in Ireland, calling attention to inherent contradictions both in our diagnosis of the problem and in our prescribed treatments.
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Perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, our peatlands are an active cultural landscape. [1] Liked or loathed, most people have experienced ‘a day on the bog’, [2] time spent with neighbours and extended family that has created a strong emotional tie to peat cutting. The state has encouraged this too: the establishment of Bord na Móna in the 1940s created whole new communities, building housing and fostering economic development. [3] Coupled with the economic necessity of a cheap fuel source, a desire to be self-sufficient, and the sense that a way of life is being brought to an end without consultation, significant resistance to peatland restoration has emerged in the midlands.
Ireland’s peatlands contain 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon, [4] but 1.9 million tonnes are lost every year as drained, exposed peat releases stored carbon into the atmosphere. [5] Left alone, the peatlands would continue to contribute hugely to our carbon emissions, and fragile, scarce habitats would continue to vanish. Doing nothing is not an option. Restoration requires huge work: drains to be blocked and filled, invasive species to be removed, sphagnum inoculation, and monitoring of biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions. People are needed.
However plans for much of the peatlands see rewilded landscapes combined with wind or solar energy parks powering data storage. [6] These futures show the bog returned to an imagined natural state, a depopulated wilderness, all trace of its unique industrial heritage removed. It would become a place devoid of people, aside from those passively using the bog as a recreational amenity.
Against this narrative of wilderness stands a history of vernacular architecture and construction in the bog. Relatively unsuited to human beings, bogs have forced us to employ technology, tools, and architecture whenever we encounter them. The nature of that construction can tell us about our changing relationship to these landscapes.
Throughout prehistory, timber toghers (causeways), platforms, and crannogs were built in the bogs. The toghers sometimes crossed the bog, but often stopped abruptly in the middle. It has been speculated that as well as a means of crossing from one side to the other, they may have provided access for foraging, or even spiritual labour, many toghers contain or are surrounded by ritual deposits. [7]
There is also much documentary evidence of Irish society’s changing relationship with the bog over the past 200 years. Accounts of people evicted from their houses finding temporary refuge on the bog are common; houses built from the barest of materials: the turf itself, brushwood, and sometimes even using the facebank of the bog as a rear wall. [8] Photographs from the nineteenth century onwards show woven creels and slide cars, turf barrows, footings, clamps and ricks. [9] Carefully assembled, temporary constructions for the processing of the turf as fuel.
From independence onwards, the government sought to use the bogs as an indigenous source of fuel, and for economic development of rural areas, finally establishing Bord na Móna in 1946. This period saw the bog itself transformed as a built artefact, a rural-industrial landscape of parallel peat fields and deep drains, a network of railways connecting to power stations and factories, workers’ housing and facilities, huge chimneys and cooling towers visible for miles around. Irreparable damage was done to the bog, but a physical legacy of a unique industrial vernacular was created, much of it now threatened or sadly already gone. [10]
The architecture of the peatlands is ingenious and economical, made from the materials at hand, and often designed to be easily dismantled or moved. It reveals that our presence on the bog is temporary, peripatetic, but at times it has also been a place of a place of refuge. We are guests of the bog. But for the most part we have also come to the bog to work, to forage it, or cut it for fuel, our relationship with the bog is defined by labour.
It is difficult to imagine a future where whole communities are again employed by the bog, but it is not difficult to imagine one where they maintain their emotional relationship and physical connection to the landscape. Across the midlands, community groups are engaging with one another and discussing ways to maintain their stake in their bogs, many are fully aware of the contradiction they face in trying to preserve the bog for future generations while still cutting it for economic or emotional reasons. Some are forming meitheals to engage in the work of peatland restoration and citizen science, importantly they seek to continue active roles in the stewardship of their bogs.
These are inventive and ingenious communities. At the outset of industrial harvesting, technology and expertise from across Europe was brought in, loanwords like ‘ganger’, ‘bagger’, ‘haku’, and ‘peco’ became part of a midlands vernacular, the imported technologies and machinery were reproduced and transformed in the Bord na Móna workshops to respond to the needs of specific landscapes and times.
The labour of the bog was supported by social spaces created by the workers, buildings known officially as ‘production centres’ are colloquially known as ‘tea centres’, likewise the mobile staffrooms on rails or sleds known as ‘tea huts’. These objects, sitting somewhere between machine and building, are made simply and directly using the materials and techniques available in the workshops, the design language of industry was domesticated by the workers, with spaces for sitting by a stove, making tea and frying sausages. [11] Regional variation emerged, with some structures common on the Longford / Roscommon bogs being unknown in Offaly.
Can this vernacular architecture be transformed from an agent of the exploitation of the bog, to an agent for its restoration? The truth that restoration of the peatlands will be labour intensive suggests that it could be. The communal nature of this work will require social and support spaces as peat harvesting before it did. Spaces for communities to gather that might partly replace the social function that peat harvesting currently provides; places for shelter for those visiting the bog or to safely pass through it; places that make space for people; and secure our bogs as living cultural landscapes.
Ireland's peatlands, covering 20% of the island, are in a state of massive change. Essential natural restoration of the bog comes with narratives of rewilding, a prospect that has prompted many midland communities to feel left behind. The architecture of the peatlands reveals a rich story of peoples’ presence in this landscape. Can these buildings help us reimagine our relationship with the bog?
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