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Many perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt accumulated since the beginning of the industrial revolution. To the contrary, more than half of the carbon produced by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades [2]. To put this into context, since the premiere of Seinfeld there has been as much damage done to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain life, as the rest of the centuries and millennia of human existence combined. The most perverse aspect of this fact is that during this period we have – unlike previous generations – been acutely aware of the impact of fossil fuels on the planet.
The world’s people will face untold suffering due to the climate crisis unless there are major transformations to global society. Yet, despite the continued unequivocal warnings, a kind of apocalyptic paralysis descends on even the most conscientious of us – as is the case with any sustained exposure to the subject of climate change. ‘Human kind, cannot bear very much reality’, as T.S. Eliot muses in The Four Quartets.
In modern history, there has been an inextricable link between economic growth and increased carbon emissions, of which a key component has been the construction industry [3]. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made clear that the world has little over a decade to radically reduce its carbon emissions in order to avoid catastrophe [4]. Yet construction remains skewed towards energy-intensive, new-build development.
The Irish Green Building Council’s (IGBC) Building a Zero Carbon Ireland looks at the impact of Ireland’s built environment across its whole life cycle. It shows that the construction and built environment sectors account for 37% of Ireland’s carbon emissions – equalling that of the much-maligned agricultural sector. The IGBC have indicated that without significant changes to the carbon intensity of new construction and utilisation of existing building stock, not only will targets be missed but emissions may actually grow.
Whereas inroads are being made in the reduction of operational carbon (the energy used to heat, cool, and light our buildings), there appears to be little progress in the reduction of embodied carbon in the built environment in Ireland, which international studies indicate can result in damning consequences [5]. While government plans like Housing for All targets an upscaling in construction, the Climate Action Plan aims to halve the country’s emissions by 2030. It is impossible to square the circle without significant changes to how buildings will be designed, procured, and built. The mitigation of one crisis is likely to worsen another.
Currently the construction industry is based on a wasteful economic model which often involves tearing down existing structures and buildings, disposing of the resulting material, and rebuilding anew. Adaptive retrofit can account for substantial embodied energy savings by repurposing existing buildings – compared with the embodied energy costs of demolition and new build. The reuse of existing structures can appear to present creative limitations, however, such constraints can provide the basis for more imaginative responses. Innovative solutions can find value in the buildings that have been left behind, for example in Sala Beckett by Flores & Prats Architects, pictured below.
Encouraging the imaginative reuse of buildings has importance beyond sustainability, such as retaining social, historical or cultural characteristics of the built environment and providing an alternative to help to alleviate the wave of corporate homogeneity sweeping over the urban realm in Ireland, which is particularly notable in Dublin. In the UK, proposals to demolish and rebuild the M&S flagship store on Oxford Street has sparked a debate on carbon footprints and building retrofits, ultimately resulting in a public enquiry. The conversation on embodied carbon needs to come to the fore in Ireland.
For example, in the Angel Building, by Alford Hall Monaghan Morris, the concrete frame of an existing 1980’s office building is re-used, extended, and re-wrapped with a highly energy-efficient, glazed skin. The resulting Stirling-Prize-nominated building bears little resemblance to the original tired 80s office block, however, much of the embodied carbon of the primary structure is retained. In recent months, the reinforced concrete frame of the former DIT Kevin Street building was demolished and disposed of with little concern evident for its environmental impact. Could such the approach applied to the Angel Building have been implemented on the DIT Kevin Street site?
Where retention is impossible or unsustainable, the focus must immediately turn to low-carbon solutions. Paris-based office Barrault Pressacco are using sustainable materials as a primary element in the design of several low-carbon social housing projects. Ambitions to build with a lower carbon footprint have driven the practice towards construction with solid limestone as an alternative to concrete, and to building using biomaterials, including wood and hempcrete.
While there are some commendable low-carbon efforts internationally, the widespread favouring of carbon-intensive construction methods as the default is predictable; most systems mandate the use of concrete and steel. Typically, the pursuit of a low-carbon solution will require a monumental effort to appease and/or convince the client, building control, planning authority, fire officer, quantity surveyor, etc. The path of least resistance will be the tried-and-tested traditional methods of construction.
In order to promote the reuse of existing buildings and low-carbon construction, we need to address and remove the barriers that are currently in place. The Architects’ Journal Retrofirst campaign identifies three such barriers: taxation, policy, and procurement. Followig their suggestions, we could first cut the VAT rate on refurbishment to incentivise the reuse of existing buildings. Secondly, we could further promote the reuse of existing building stock and reclaimed construction material by introducing new clauses into planning guidance and building regulations. Thirdly, we could stimulate the circular economy and support a whole-life carbon approach in construction through publicly-financed projects [6].
The built environment sector has a vital role to play in responding to the climate emergency. Because construction accounts for such a large percentage of Ireland’s emissions, it should be a cause for optimism; it means we have the power to significantly reduce the country’s carbon footprint by changing our approach to how we design, regulate, and construct the built environment. The solutions already exist, we now need to implement them.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
“[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.
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.
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].
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.
The groping of the Molly Malone in Dublin reveals a complex new urban condition – the algorithmic production of space. Social media, viral images, new modes of capitalist production, foreground the emergence of an entirely new logic of spatial production. What does this mean for the possibility of a right to the 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.
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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