In the first weeks of architecture school, I remember the exact moment the idea of ‘a building’ stopped being the point. Someone had pinned up a project and there was a plan and a section that looked almost standardised. Then the tutor, Dr Sarah Lappin, started talking through it: where the air would move, where water would go, what would fail first, how a single woman might feel in this space versus an elderly man, and what would cost more later if it was done cheaply now. The building on the wall did not feel like an object anymore, but felt like a set of choices that would land on other people’s lives [1]. Until then, I had assumed architecture was the finished building or the clean photograph. In that room it became obvious that the polished image is the last and least informative part, and that the real work is the ecosystem underneath it: constraints, trade-offs, and the consequences that fall out from them [2].

If you ask someone what an architect does, it’s the object that they usually describe – they see the hero photograph or the glossy image on socials. What they rarely see is the true medium of the profession: a long chain of decisions, made under constraint, where every move has consequences and every consequence has a constituency.

Tom Wujec’s ‘How to Make Toast’ exercise names the gap with disarming precision [3]. Ask most people to draw toast and they sketch a simple sequence: take bread from the bag, put it in the toaster, press the handle, butter, plate, eat. Ask someone trained in architecture and the drawing expands until the toaster no longer sits as an object on a counter, but as a node in a network: wheat and soil, labour and logistics, the power grid, packaging, waste, failure points. Toast stops being a standalone entity and becomes part of a vast system [4]. This is the professional superpower that architecture rarely admits in public – we are trained to visualise what other people cannot see. We do not draw objects alone, we draw relationships: heat, airflow, risk, access, time, cost, maintenance, politics – and in doing so, make the invisible visible. It’s also a friendly way into wicked problems [5]: the moment you draw the system, the task stops being linear and becomes an argument about priorities.

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And yet, when architecture speaks to the public, it tends to speak in a single dialect [7]: the finished image. This is where the profession accidentally strengthens the narrative it claims to hate. If the public mostly encounters architecture as a final render, then ‘design’ looks like surface. It reads as aesthetic preference with optional flourish, the kind of thing that can be value-engineered away when budgets tighten. That is precisely the logic underpinning TD Seán Canney’s dismissal of ‘an architect’s ego going wild’ as the source of budget overruns in the run-up to last year’s revised National Development Plan [8]; design is reduced to image, indulgence, and unnecessary cost rather than understood as the thing that shapes how a project actually works. When political and media voices frame design as an impediment to progress – as expensive, slow, unpragmatic – the profession often retreats into technical language or internal reassurance. Architects talk to one another, roll their eyes, and leave the story to be written elsewhere. There is a communication failure here, where the profession keeps showing the toast and hiding the system.

 Publish the thinking

There is a simple corrective to this failure, and it does not require a new software subscription or a public relations agency – it requires a shift in what is considered ‘the work’. Or, the decision to replace the hero render with a public diagram pack, and to treat that pack as participation infrastructure [9]. The point is not to simplify reality, but to communicate complexity legibly so that non-experts can participate in it [10]. Perhaps this participation could happen not via more finished images, but with a small, repeatable set of drawings that every project publishes early, updates openly, and revisits as the design evolves.

Five drawings are enough, if they are honest, and always published in the same order. They could look something like this:

(1) A Toast Map: what the project touches.
(2) A Risk Map: what harms it prevents.
(3) A Trade-off Receipt: what was chosen, what was sacrificed, and why.
(4) One Honest Section: how the project actually works.
(5) A Timeline of Consequences: who pays later if we cut corners now.

When it matters, add a sixth: the Public Redline, i.e., what changed after feedback, and why. ‘You said X; we changed Y,’ or, ‘we did not change it, and here is why’. Either approach makes the project more legible as a process. This is the point where objections and misinterpretation are not abstract risks, and a Trade-off Receipt can become a headline, a Risk Map can be read as an admission, or a Public Redline can be weaponised by actors who do not want the project at any cost, or by stakeholders who want a project quickly and cheaply and will use the drawings to shame any attempt at durability.

But the cost of hiding the thinking is not neutral, and when architects do not narrate the system, someone else will narrate it for them, usually as waste, delay, red tape, or taste. In that story, design becomes an indulgence and the public becomes a passive audience that could not possibly understand what is going on. However, in reality, the public is not an audience, but the stakeholder that lives inside the consequences. This is where the digital world becomes inevitable, and social media becomes the drawing language of that world, making futures visible before they exist: prototypes, promises, narratives. The app’s feed then functions like a public drawing set and quietly decides what counts as real.

A comment thread will not produce a perfect public, and will result in noise, conflict, and probably trolls. But treated with seriousness, it can surface the kind of local intelligence that formal processes routinely miss [11]: the wind that funnels down a street, the place that floods every winter, the doorway everyone avoids at night, the stair that becomes a barrier.

There is a reason, beyond reputation, that this inclusion is important: if architecture wants to defend its value beyond the profession, it cannot do so by simply insisting that design matters. We must demonstrate what design does: how it prevents harm, redistributes comfort, manages risk, and builds long-term value, not at the pretty ending, but at the beginning and in the messy middle, through a clear narrative of decisions. This is also how architecture can move into the mainstream agenda, as Phineas Harper has argued in different contexts: urban issues are political issues because they determine how people live [12]. These kinds of conversations should sit on Question Time, Newsnight, or Primetime.

Design is a shared attribute, and if people are to see the value in it, they need a stake in more than the finished image. They need a story that can be argued with, because if the profession keeps showing only the toast, we should not be surprised when people assume it simply pops out.

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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‘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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