Architecture is widely considered to be an incredibly innovative profession. For centuries, it has played a crucial role in shaping our urban landscapes and societies. This innovation and creativity which characterise the profession is first nurtured in the early stages of education. The excitement sparked by entering the first year of university develops into a growing sense of possibility as the years progress. However, for an industry so forward-thinking, the issue of how women fit into its identity structure has very much “remained unresolved” [1].

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When I began my own career almost 7 years ago, it appeared to me that the field was largely male dominated, particularly in the way architects were celebrated and publicised. Many of the names, faces, and projects I encountered were male, which subconsciously shaped my understanding of who typically occupied positions of recognition and authority within the field. While my academic experience in architectural education has been shaped by a diverse student cohort, my professional experience beyond academia has highlighted an underrepresentation of women among firm partners, associates, and managers.

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The statistics, supported by RIAI-sponsored research, show how gender balance in architectural education unfortunately doesn’t directly translate into female representation at the top level in the country. In Ireland, only 30% of registered architects are women, with as little as 16% occupying principal or leadership roles in RIAI-registered practices [2]. The issue, however, is not the lack of ambition, ability, or women’s desire to enter the field. Recent decades have seen a growing number of women choosing architecture as a career path with Irish architecture schools achieving gender balance since the 1990s. Since “as many women as men qualify with degrees in architecture”, it's important to question where the deeper rooted imbalance, often referred to as the “leaky pipeline", comes from [2]. This metaphor is often used to describe the disappearance of women from career pipelines as seniority increases.

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Historically, architecture has been shaped by a culture of extreme working hours and a lack of flexibility, where wearing tiredness as a badge of honour is often expected. From under-recognition to pay gaps, the challenges women face within the profession remain largely unchanged. A survey discussed by Dervla MacManus and Katherine O’Donnell in the ‘I am an architect’, gender and professional identity in architecture research article reveals a clear contrast in how gender is perceived in architectural careers. While 45% of men reported that gender has no influence on their career thinking, only 2% considered it important. In contrast, 41% of women described it as extremely influential [1].

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Since “architectural practice relies on long working hours, homosocial behaviour and creative control”, many women, particularly those with caregiving responsibilities, can find the profession difficult to sustain long term [3]. Those who do reach senior roles however, often receive less recognition in comparison to their male colleagues. From precedent case study lists handed out in universities, to the industry’s most prestigious awards; female architects contributions have not always received equal acknowledgement. The case of Denise Scott Brown is a well-known example of female achievements being overlooked, as she was excluded from the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which was awarded solely to Robert Venturi despite their collaborative work [4].

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During my university exchange abroad one of the elective modules offered was titled ‘Women in Architecture’. It was a 5 credit course dedicated specifically to exploring women’s contributions to the field. I was excited to partake, however I equally found myself wondering why this topic needed to be defined seperately. Did the module come to life due to women’s work being significantly overlooked within the mainstream architectural curriculum? What stood out to me the most however, was how fast the class reached full capacity with a waitlist forming as a result. Its popularity suggested a genuine interest among students for a more expansive and inclusive learning environment, regardless of gender.

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For students like myself who seek female role models on a daily basis, representation is incredibly valuable. Recognising and celebrating women is not only symbolic, but it actively shapes the aspirations of young women entering architectural education. How we record the history and achievements of all architects, despite gender or background, not only influences our understanding of the profession today, but also advocates for a more inclusive architecture culture. Conversations like these create a future that is not abstract or unattainable, but something women can see themselves embodying.

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Experiencing representation first hand has deepened my understanding of what it truly means for women in practice. When I began my first role in the professional world of architecture, it came with the stress and imposter syndrome that often accompanies any new position, particularly your first. This pressure however, felt significantly eased after being assigned a female mentor; someone who reflected my background and experiences in a professional setting. This experience made a meaningful difference for me from the very first day. Her guidance played a key role in helping me settle in and grow in confidence. It also helped me understand the potential of my career development and the direction I wanted it to take. It allowed me to set goals that felt both tangible and exciting.

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Recognition, representation and mentorship at the top tiers of the profession carry immense value. Having experienced it first hand, I understand how powerful it can be, not only for confidence building, but also for shaping drive and ambition. An industry with a ‘leaky pipeline’ misses out on a wider range of perspectives and approaches where design can suffer as a result. I hope the topic of a more inclusive architecture culture becomes an everyday norm – particularly for those starting out as young professionals, trying to navigate the uncertainties of their early careers in the pure chaos of the world of architecture.

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.

The annual Critic’s Lecture of the Architectural Association of Ireland (AAI) serves as a mirror for architectural culture in the country. Since its establishment in 1896, the AAI has been one of the primary custodians of Irish architectural discourse. The guest critic – from Ireland or abroad – presents to the audience something special about the state of contemporary architecture, pointing us in new directions, or re-presenting something from the past in a new light. The lecture may at times seek to manifest the zeitgeist; while at others it may suggest a shift in established norms of thinking. It can present a moment of challenge to the community, questioning established priorities. The critic has tended to present an outside voice or foreign perspective; fundamental, as Dr. Ellen Rowley reminds us, due to the smallness of Irish architecture’s critical pool [1]. It exists in parallel to the AAI Awards, which is chaired by the same speaker, and assessed by a panel of architects and other jurors. The Critic’s Lecture is the culmination of the AAI’s busy programme of lectures by domestic and foreign practitioners. An antecedent is the AAI presidential address, phased out in the 1970s.

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A successful critic might be one who is considered a provocateur, someone who invites a reaction, pushing beyond the typical passivity of a lecture audience. They navigate the space between the escapism of entertainment and the concrete reality of technical instruction. The best might even agitate or inspire a call to arms. This year, Phineas Harper, architectural writer, critic, sculptor and cultural leader, was the Critic and Chair of the Jury, addressing an audience ahead of the awards assessment. Their lecture was entitled The Architecture of Softness (or why harder, faster, and bigger isn’t better). They suggested an antidote to the ultra-processed western world: an explicit rejection of our fast food, fast fashion, fast architecture and high-carbon lifestyles. Their ‘Architecture of Softness’ sits in opposition to much of the production of contemporary western building: how it is procured and financed; what it is made of; how it looks; and perhaps most importantly, how these buildings exist within their communities.

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What might an ‘Architecture of Care’ look like? Harper uses the analogy of reciprocal human relationships to re-imagine a world where individual and community have a caring – and careful - relationship with the structures that surround them. Most successful human relationships require continual, sustained care. Shouldn’t the same should be said for how we engage with our buildings: shouldn’t we pursue an ongoing relationship with the places where we live, work, and spend our leisure time? More and more, buildings are designed and built to minimise maintenance and repair. Harper champions those that actually encourage these processes. They suggest repair as a creative act; a community coming together to renew a structure; material fabric becoming ritualistic palimpsest. Here Harper develops the work of David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi in their critique of anti-time, anti-weathering buildings; suggesting a richer, deeper, more sensual architecture.

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In this, time is the necessary component. Contemporary culture and contemporary production are predicated on speed. Buildings are – by their very nature – forever incomplete, contingent and ever-changing, no matter what the Modernist doctrine – and image culture – lead us to believe. Speed of construction, and buildings whose obsolescence may already be baked in, do society no favours. Harper reminds us that we are only custodians of the buildings and environment surrounding us; our moment in space and time is just that. They curate precedents that the audience will be familiar with: Lacaton & Vassal in France; Feyferlik / Fritzert in Austria; Lacol Architecture Cooperative in Spain. But it is the examples from outside the sphere of western culture that really provoke: the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, with its in-built structure of scaffolding that allows continual renewal of the mud brick structure; or the thatched farmhouses of Shirakawa-Go in Japan that are re-roofed every generation. Closer to home, Harper uses the example of an ordinary metal palisade fence, and the environmental; and aesthetic implications of its selection, rather than, for example, the selection of a living hedge of willow.

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Harper critiques our culture of continual economic growth; especially the use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a marker of economic success. They posit the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland, and the use of confiscated Irish land to pay for the debt of the English Parliament, as an early example of the commodification of an entire country; the use of GDP as a colonial tool, translating everything into a capitalist framework. GDP continues to be the measure of, and trigger for, accelerated construction. It is a blunt tool to measure growth and its benefits to society, not allowing a proper analysis of what is actually being measured: landmine production and baby formula may be lumped in together in one finite percentage. A rising GDP tends to correlate with increasing CO2 emissions. Theories of de-growth and Doughnut Economics have been promulgated by economists and academics for many years. And like any system, economic growth has its natural limit, which may already have been reached. Our earth is a finite resource: Harper wants us to design a new economy to mirror this.

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The processing of modern construction materials is not only complicated, but their use may also suppress the use of local materials, all the while increasing carbon emissions. The processes that produce concrete, steel, brick and other materials produce economic activity and increase GDP. Therefore they are rewarded. Meanwhile, more obvious solutions, such as rammed earth or thatch, remain outliers. While – at least at policy level - this should not be the case, we seem unable to challenge this. Continual repair of buildings may actually represent a better ecological outcome than the use of a material like concrete during construction. And demolition rather than re-use of building stock – in particular our social housing from the last century – is clearly unsustainable.

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Designing the tools of maintenance into buildings can engender community and communal activity. A stone cairn, Harper shows us, is a collectively maintained landmark. They champion communal facilities rather than the atomisation of individuals, using the example of public wash houses that were provided in Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris. This is an architecture that promotes sharing and doesn’t reward hoarding of materials and of individual resources.

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We might consider some of the milestones in the critique of International Modernism: the 1960s’ awakening to our ecological impact; Bernard Rudofsky’s ‘Architecture Without Architects’; ‘Critical Regionalism’ in the early 1980s; Juhani Pallasmaa’s sensory, and contingent architecture; Colin St. John Wilson’s ‘The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture’; and recent sustainable design. Harper follows in this tradition, foregrounding the nuanced interaction between individual(s) and building over time.

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So what are some of the challenges? Scaling up the model is the most obvious. A culture of adversity to risk-taking (health and safety, insurance) dampens innovation. Professionalism and specialism (not necessarily of expertise) can promote the status quo. Who finances development, and who is the client are key determinants: the commissioner versus the day-to-day user, and the potential unbridgeable distance between the two.

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If Ireland was once the site for one of the first experiments in capitalist commodification and GDP, it might serve us well to consider where we now sit in Harper’s world. Does the mirror they hold up show us again as an international nexus, but this time a paradigm of Harper’s ‘Architecture of Hardness’? A site of globalised construction, existing mainly as a physical manifestation of international tax policy, the flow of capital, and data? Buildings that are designed for the service and digital economy; housing that serves pension funds and REITs more than its occupants? And what will the AAI Awards reveal of this world? As a leader of architectural discourse in the country, the awards have tended to favour the special and the bespoke: cultural buildings; high-end housing and extensions; provocative individual projects; research and competitions. As Rowley tell us the ‘culture of architecture then, as nurtured by the AAI, is increasingly predicated on an intellectual, a-commercial refinement’ [2]. That is somewhat understandable, and the association is not unique in this. But the audience was clearly stimulated by the possibilities Harper conjures. Outside of the lecture theatre, we are all aware of this world of hardness; what we might sniffily consider not ‘architecture’ but only ‘building’. Harper’s challenge is to explicitly turn our face towards that world and accept its challenges. Their approach starts with neighbour and then neighbourhood, individual interactions and community activism; leaving the door open to this provocative world is the first step.

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 The Architectural Association of Ireland's Critic's Lecture featuring Phineas Harper was held at TCD's Robert Emmett Theatre on Thursday 16 April 2026.

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Almost accidental, what I noticed on a long walk through Georgian Dublin during my Covid-era masters. A Joycean pilgrimage of sorts; as I referred to it at the time. The kind of walk that only really makes sense when there is no end destination or objective; head up, moving slowly, paying particular attention to things that do not obviously demand it. I was outside; the city [or even the imposed 5-kilometre radius for that matter] was the only material I had to work with.

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I began noticing them the way you notice anything in a place walked long enough. First, an irregularity; then, a recurrence; and eventually, a quiet population of peculiar instances. A small rectangle of brickwork, its colour not quite conforming with the rest of the patchwork. Mortar slightly younger, lines a little too neat. You might see it as a window that has kept its shape but abandoned its purpose. Passing it without thinking, later the eye returns; and I can’t say why. They appear the way a new word would; suddenly everywhere, in sentences you were certain never contained it before. The smallest of absences settled calmly into the streetscape, never quite dramatic enough to halt a passer-by, never misplaced enough to provoke alarm.

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What I had been calling a blocked window is perhaps more accurately described as blind. The name is more fitting than it first appears. They are not sightless exactly; they see nothing, but they are seen. They look like windows. They just no longer look out.

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Windows normally behave with discipline. They repeat across a façade with the certainty of grammar: opening, wall, opening, wall. A rhythm the eye follows almost without instruction. A blind window interrupts this established order without quite breaking it. The shape remains obedient to the pattern, but the depth has disappeared. The eye expects reflection, even an essence of interior life, but is instead met with brick where the gaze once was. The building nearly seems to mispronounce itself or stutter; you begin to reread.

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The usual explanation arrives quickly at this point: the window tax. [1] Count the openings, charge the owner, watch the windows disappear. A convenient explanation, likely even; but not the full one.

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Blind windows predate the tax by some distance. They appear in earlier European façades [2] not through force but through composition; a way of holding rhythm, completing symmetry, or resolving something that would otherwise falter. In these cases, the window never intended to open. It existed to make the building read correctly. The tax simply gave the practice a more pragmatic justification. Brick replaced glass, light was traded for economy, and the outline stayed put. Dickens complained, accurately enough I would add, that the state had found away to charge people for what nature had provided freely. [3] But the behaviour itself was already commonplace.

I believe that the important point is this: the blind window is not only something removed. It is something intentional, something designed.

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Georgian architecture in particular seemed comfortable with this ambiguity. Windows were used to complete symmetry, to maintain the rhythm of a façade even where the internal arrangement refused to cooperate. This is the part that tends to get lost in the window-tax story; the blocked opening might not always mark something lost, sometimes it marks something that was never intended to exist in the first place. Depending on how charitable you are feeling, is either an act of architectural control or a very convincing illusion.

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Some closures followed other forms of adaptation. Houses once built for single families were divided into smaller dwellings. Townhouses became offices, then flats and then offices again. Fire regulations changed [not sure if much needs to be said here, given the regulatory sphere that we find ourselves operating in], internal staircases moved, corridors appeared where rooms had previously opened freely onto one another. A window that once lit a stairwell or overlooked a neighbouring garden, simply ceased to make sense within the new arrangement of life. Cities are this funny phenomenon, whereby they rarely demolish themselves wholesale. They revise themselves instead; slowly. Piecemeal.

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Remove an opening and the room reorganises itself almost immediately. Furniture shifts. Services take the wall. Artificial light replaces daylight. The interior absorbs the loss and continues. From the street this transformation is almost invisible. The brick presents only a fact of closure, while behind it, the room has redistributed its functions elsewhere. The sealed aperture becomes less an ending and more a prompt; a small engine for rearrangement, quietly encouraging the interior to find a different equilibrium.

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On a recent project, this split between façade and interior became unusually clear. A Victorian sash window reads normally in elevation: frame, glazing, proportions intact. Behind it, the opening had been filled to allow a partition wall to bisect the room, forming two dormitory bedrooms from one. During enabling works, the infill was temporarily removed to inspect the condition of the original sash. A brief moment saw the room’s depth return. Daylight reaching the reveal again, briefly, as if it had been waiting. And just like that, the window lost its gaze again. Without, the façade never told.

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Window, wall, window, wall.

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Once this split is understood, blind windows begin to look less like accident and more like method.

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Contemporary projects use them deliberately: to maintain the cadence of a terrace where a real opening would create overlooking problems; to complete an elevation where internal planning might refuse to cooperate; to keep a building legible within a stricter urban order.

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Corner House by 31/44 Architects in Peckham [4] is one such example of this, and one I happened across by accident on a walk from New Cross to Brixton with a friend, somewhere between the second pub and a particularly tasty plate of cumin hand-pulled noodles at Silk Road. A new-build house tucked onto a side-plot street corner beyond the established building line, only ever so slightly announcing itself. The side elevation uses blind windows to turn the corner of the façade with a modesty that mimics what might once have been a full flank wall of sealed openings on an end of Georgian terrace. On the front, a shift in the depth of the brickwork above the entrance marks where the neighbouring terrace has a window and this building does not; a quiet acknowledgement of what is absent, handled with enough restraint that most people would walk straight past it.

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Robert Venturi argued that architecture is at its most interesting when it accepts contradiction rather than resolving it; when things are allowed to be both one thing and another simultaneously. [5] The blind window sits comfortably within this definition. It is a window. It is not a window. It maintains the appearance of an opening while withholding its function. From the street it participates fully in the composition; from the room behind it, it does nothing at all.

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Aldo Rossi would recognise something else: the persistence of form beyond use. [6] Elements endure even as their original purpose dissipates. The blind window is one of these persistent forms; a familiar figure that survives the loss of its original task, continuing to fulfil a role in the façade long after the room behind it has moved on. Colin Rowe's reading of the city as collage rather than composition finds its evidence here too: less a unified statement than a layered accumulation of adjustments, compromises and continuities. [7] Within that collage, the blocking of a window is a small but legible fragment; a mark where composition, regulation and use have failed to align, and have been forced instead into coexistence.

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Has what began as workaround become technique; has the exception quietly become the rule?

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It is tempting to read blind windows as signs of decline or neglect. More often they indicate the opposite. A blind window usually means the building is still being used. Someone changed the layout. Someone needed another room. Someone made a decision that prioritised the present over the architectural purity of the past. It would be reasonable to object to this, but as the ever-increasing market for retrofit and adaptive re-use has taught us, rarely is a building going to entertain its intended purpose for the entirety of its lifetime. If one is being honest, it is also largely the reason cities manage to survive.

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Walk any old street and the evidence accumulates: one filled opening in a terrace; a row of them high on a warehouse wall where floors now exist; occasionally a single upper window sealed so carefully it nearly escapes notice, surfacing only when the afternoon light flattens the façade and the blank rectangle re-emerges. Brick slightly smoother, mortar a fraction younger. The room that once looked out has long since turned inward. The building continues without complaint, carrying the revision proudly in its wall.

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The modern city is not a finished composition. It is an edited one; clauses inserted, sentences shortened, margins full of second thoughts. Blind windows are where edits remain visible: soft marks showing where the city has paused, reconsidered, and rewritten itself.

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Most of the time, nothing announces the change. You already had to be looking.

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In the spring of 2024, a housing justice advocacy group known as Shelter released a transformative new media campaign called Made in Social Housing. The campaign’s launch included a slickly produced short-form video featuring a diverse range of celebrities, each of whom was raised in a British social housing estate. As the camera pans across brick courtyards, playgrounds, and tower blocks, actors like Eddie Marsan tell of the ways in which social housing helped to shape generations past, offering security, stability, and comfort to the British working class. ‘We had these social homes’, we are told, ‘Now millions don’t. We’re building less and we need to be building more … so a new generation can be proud to say, “We are made in social housing”.’ With a nostalgia rarely deployed in social housing’s description, the short asks us to put our faith in a new and more hopeful reappraisal of modern social housing. As the predominant architecture of many working-class communities in Britain, social homes raised a nation full of people to be proud of (Figure 1). With a fresh investment, it seems to say, it could do so again.

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The necessity of such a poignant narrative shift points to the brutalisation of modern social housing’s reputation in both British and American architectural and political discourses, a process which ultimately helped to liberalise the housing market, reduce social housing stock, and exacerbate the affordability crisis across both nations today. In 1977, historian and theorist Charles Jencks famously declared modernism ‘dead’, citing photography of the demolition of an American social housing project known as the Pruitt Igoe as evidence of a failed architectural experiment gone irredeemably wrong (1977, p. 9).

Though not the first, Jencks was chief among an influential coterie of postmodern theorists whose exploitation of photography helped contribute to the so-called ‘death of modernism’ myth.

Others, including architectural elites like Oscar Newman (1976), Peter Blake (1977), and Alice Coleman (1985), decried modern mass social housing in ways which recast the modern architectural style as inherently dystopian and despotic, transforming the master status of social housing from home to slum in the process. Many of these analyses, however, relied upon overstated behavioural pseudo-science and unproven theories of architectural determinism. Critical structural issues, such as disinvestment, community isolation, racism, bureaucratic mismanagement, and rising poverty, were often downplayed or even ignored.

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Consequently, in their failure to engage with the complexity of circumstances surrounding modern social housing’s failings, many theorists incorrectly conflated estate dysfunction with architectural style, an error which continues to distort how many understand modernism today. However, it was not just their rhetoric but their use and abuse of photography that irrevocably injured the discourse. Wrenched from their contexts, photographs of struggling social housing estates were made uniquely amenable to hyperbole and ideological argument, particularly in the media (Churchill, 2024). Terry Eagleton has described this ‘haemorrhaging of meaning’ as characteristic of late-stage capitalist societies in which media consumption deliberately engages subjects subliminally rather than at consciously reflective levels (1991, pp. 37–38) . In this scenario, form, ‘overwhelms content’, inviting a passive consumption which results in a false or shallow consciousness. In other words, while seeing might be believing, it is certainly not knowing. Photography, as Susan Sontag has noted, can only ever provide a ‘semblance of knowledge’, though it’s long been mistaken for contributing something more substantial to the discourse (1977, p. 24).

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In her landmark criticism of the medium, Sontag argued, by way of a comparison, that photographs were no better at interpreting the world than the metaphorical shadows in Plato’s cave (1977). Like shadows, photography is polysemic and as liable to distort, flatten, or abstract as to faithfully represent what it appropriates. In the hands of postmodern critics, photography of modern social housing was made to naturalise architectural death because that was the narrative that was desired, though that was not what was there. In fact, what was depicted were not causes of estate failure at all but the consequences of many political choices which ultimately facilitated social housing decay – causes which remained stubbornly beyond the camera’s acquisitive gaze. Recklessly exploited as both evidence and rhetorical device, photographs thus redefined estates as dystopian slums, teaching the British public to feel poorly about the entire endeavor. What’s more, these critical documentary photographs, which often traded in nineteenth-century stereotypes about the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, also permanently stained social housing’s largely working-class inhabitants. Consequently, in its re-inscription of a paternalistic economic hierarchy, critical photography helped condemn and erode the social housing system by tarring both the architecture and the recipients of state welfarism as abject failures.

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Consequently, it seems nearly impossible now to understand modern architecture as revolutionary – a venture which many architects believed could go further, accomplish more, than even the most insurgent of political movements (Jameson, 1985, p. 71). As Le Corbusier famously observed, the early twentieth-century slum crisis animated much of modernism’s early anarchic impulse. ‘It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of to-day’, he argued, ‘architecture or revolution’ (1974, pp. 13–14). Whether in the raising of basic living standards, stabilisation of economic security, or attention to questions of civic health, social housing was a powerful democratic answer to an emerging social crisis (Hughes, 1991, p. 165). Despite its shortcomings, it was often revolutionary, both functionally and stylistically, as many of the best examples of social housing in Britain and elsewhere can attest.

Yet, in their adjudication of modern architecture’s utopianism, postmodern critics targeted social housing specifically, evaluating it against an impossibly high standard and without appropriate context, depriving modernism of its moral significance and rendering it appreciable in purely aesthetic terms.

As Frederic Jameson has argued such attacks were more ideologically motivated than was commonly appreciated at the time (1984). While disguised as a kind of populism, the movement’s embrace of a post-industrial consumer society was, by necessity, predicated upon the displacement of class struggle central to late-stage capitalist interests (Jameson, 1984, p. 55). What photography helped to declare dead then, was not so much modernist style, which has regained an appreciable following in recent years. Instead, what critics seemed to want to bury was the vein of social consciousness which coursed through the movement.

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With the rise of housing insecurity now approaching a global scale, architecture’s relevance to social equity has urgently resurfaced; ‘revolution’ is back on the menu. But to ignore the ways in which class interests were first stripped away from the modernist project is to risk repeating the same social violence that followed its reproach. As Owen Hatherley has explained, ‘There is a general conviction that the working class were slotted into a world of concrete walkways and towers when all we ever wanted were the old back-to-backs … What can’t be imagined is a context in which we might have welcomed Modernism … as part of a specific collective project’ (2008, p. 9). However, as Jameson’s argument makes plain, the attempted rupture of social concern from architectural modernism was, at least implicitly, an attack against the working class, which in its inability to practice the unrestrained consumerism required of the new social order, revealed the inequalities inherent to the entire economic system. From this perspective, we might consider the critique of modern social housing as an attempt to banish ‘the less acceptable face of capitalism’ from the built environment (Paul Trevor cited in King 2023, p. 19).

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Thus, any attempt to reform housing opportunity and achieve spatial justice must first reconcile architecture’s relationship to class. While photography may have helped to facilitate this estrangement, it may yet reconcile a reunion, as the Made in Social Housing campaign suggests. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that this process is both awkward and fraught on account of the weaponisation of class in housing history. According to the Marxist architectural critic, Manfredo Tafuri, the radical potentiality of housing was compromised long before postmodernism’s conservative attacks undermined modernist ethics; it was implicated particularly in capitalism’s appropriation of housing as a biopolitical instrument and weapon of social reform. As Tafuri famously argued, there can be no class architecture, only a class criticism of architectural aesthetics (1979). Likewise, Florian Urban has noted the ways in which housing reform movements have tended to strengthen dominant social groups while restricting the agency of those served, meting out judgement and discipline even as it grants indispensable assistance (2011). The radical openness of first- and even second-generation modernism belied a hidden ideological agenda of condescending social engineering, which could be characterized as an ‘attack on traditional working-class and lower middle-class domestic customs’, as Paul Overy has argued (2008, p. 95). This harmful class hegemony legitimised later campaigns against modern social housing, which tended to unfold in ways that ultimately undermined provisioning even as critics sought to ‘rescue’ social housing’s inhabitants from the movement’s supposed excesses.

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Consequently, attempts to reunite class and modern social housing must navigate the weaponisation of working-class identity that has undercut the last several decades of critiques. As scholars across disciplines have observed, post-war social housing was frequently exploited as the explicit architecture of a feral ‘underclass’ in print and television media (Hatherley 2008; Jones, 2011; Tyler, 2013). This toxic trope stigmatised the architecture and lay the groundwork for benefits cuts that ultimately fuelled housing’s re-appropriation by free market forces. As Owen Jones has noted, the caricature of the poor and unruly ‘council dweller’, known commonly by the derogative ‘chav’, was a deliberate by-product of Thatcher’s attacks on the Welfare State and working-class life (2011, pp. 9–10; also Hatherley, 2008, p. 10). More recently, a resurgent ethno-nationalism has also left the social housing system vulnerable to bigoted, bad-faith attacks (Thoburn, 2022a; Jones, 2011). Together, attempts to whiten and alienate the British working class have renewed historical discourses about the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor and factionalised the working class against itself.

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Nonetheless, any erasure of class from architectural analysis overlooks the ways in which the built environment has historically manifested hegemonic class interests, perpetuating inequality in questions of housing, spatial justice, and the environment, (Margalit, 2023; Campkin, 2013). In Britain, the destruction of social housing stock, which has dwindled precipitously since its height in the early 1980s, has followed directly from ‘class-blind‘ assaults on social housing’s effectiveness and perceived dystopianism. For example, policies like the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, a piece of conservative legislation which encouraged the discounted privatisation of individual social homes, has removed some two million flats from the public inventory (Bloomer, 2024). By one estimate, four in ten of those homes are now privately rented, compromising their affordability and stability (New Economics Foundation, 2024). Estate refurbishment, likewise, often results in gentrification and working-class displacement, as Paul Watt has written (2021). For example, iconic estates, such as the Grade II listed Park Hill in Sheffield, have lately been appropriated by private property developers who have displaced the original tenants and exploited the estate’s renown in a bid to attract enthusiasts of Brutalist style.

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Consequently, any attempt to stem the tide of elite appropriation must engage directly with the rhetorical theft of modernism’s workingclassness. In this, there are few better examples than the demolition and museification of East London’s Robin Hood Gardens (1972). Designed by Brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson (1923–2003 and 1928–1993), Robin Hood was emblematic of Britain’s post-war social housing experiment — the most expansive and innovative architectural project of its kind at that time. Realised two full decades from its conceptual genesis in the unrealised Golden Lane plan (1952), Robin Hood was a remarkable illustration of the Smithsons’ famed ‘streets-in-the-sky’ approach to urban sociability and one of only a few examples of their meagre architectural output. As housing, however, Robin Hood was deeply polarising and like many of its peers, struggled against the weight of disinvestment, crime, and vandalism. After a long and bitter campaign to rehabilitate it, as well as two failed attempts to list it, Robin Hood Gardens was finally marked for death less than fifty years on from its completion. Today, the estate survives as a relic in residence at the newly opened Victoria & Albert East Storehouse (V & A East), mutely testifying to both the success and failure of the modernist movement. Like a trophy mounted in a hunting lodge, its façade exists in the liminal space between life and death, celebrated and yet lamented as a curious specimen suspended in architectural limbo.

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A promotional photograph produced for a recent Guardian review of the V & A East illustrates the jarring museification of the Robin Hood Gardens Estate (Wainwright, 2025). The colour photograph, taken by Guy Bell, depicts the unmistakable two-storey, cast concrete façade in situ, which has been removed from urban Poplar, meticulously cleaned, and seamlessly integrated into the yawning 275-metre-long hangar with surgical precision. As a means of evidencing the complex’s vast scale, a young couple stands in the image’s centre, gazing contemplatively at the treasury of global goods that surrounds them from the estate’s balcony. For a moment, they appear to cosplay as two of Robin Hood’s contented former tenants. But the effect is fleeting. The estate’s façade, wrenched from its civic context, has been plunked between crates of objects filled with everything from poison darts to Frank Lloyd Wright furniture. The effect defeats the social purpose of Robin Hood Gardens as a home, sentencing the shell of what remains to perpetual confinement within a modern-day cabinet of curiosities. While conserving and preserving the legacy of British Brutalism as an architectural masterwork, the installation explicitly excises the building’s historical function as housing, thus consigning the social housing system to anthropological ‘pastness’.

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Consequently, the acquisition of Brutalism within the museal system functions as the latest in a long line of attempts to evidence the failure of modern architecture’s utopianism as a well-intended though nonetheless improbable social project. In its representational strategy of awe, the display inadvertently exploits Robin Hood’s innovative design as a means of distracting from the ethical consideration of its appropriation and destruction (Thoburn, 2018a, p. 620; Price, 2021). But to what ends? As Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner have observed, ‘What brutalism, ruins, and slums all have in common today is that they have been appropriated by the urban imaginaries of gentrification and neoliberal renewal with the express aim of financially exploiting the social and spatial challenges they contain’ (2018: 285). One might argue then that the abstraction and objectification of Robin Hood Gardens from home to ethnographic object helps ‘normalise’ a visual imaginary of gentrification, reframing the museification of modern social housing as a sign of economic progress (Lindner and Meissner, 2018, p. 280). In this way, the V & A appears to cosign East London’s social cleansing, particularly as the institution did little to help stop Robin Hood’s destruction (Thoburn, 2022b). Such exhibitions are, therefore, hotly contested as providing aesthetic cover for the Neoliberal appropriation of modern architectural style.

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Given Robin Hood Garden’s diverse ethnic composition at the time of its destruction, which consisted predominantly of Bengali immigrants, this is a charge that should not be dismissed lightly (Thoburn, 2022a). To that end, there exists several documentary projects which refute the narrative of failure within which Robin Hood Gardens was condemned and testify instead to its living, breathing presence as home to a diverse community of citizens. One such notable series, conceived of collaboratively by the sociologist Nicholas Thoburn and photographer Kois Miah between 2014–17, depicts a sense of strong social cohesion fostered, in no small part, by the design of the architecture. Through sensitive color portraits of both the buildings and their inhabitants, Miah’s photography enlivens the characteristically cold concrete of Robin Hood Gardens. Though his depiction of the architecture is uncharacteristically warm, even romantic, Miah’s most affecting photographs are his human subjects, whom he portrays as largely quiet and unassuming — in direct contravention to the unruly portrayal of ‘council dwellers’ and ‘chavs’ in the media.

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In one particularly poignant photograph, we see a modest but tastefully decorated living room interior within which its elderly occupant has settled into a bold red armchair, her hands resting neatly upon her knees. With gentle eyes and a toughness that belies her silvery hair and delicate frame, she proudly confronts the camera’s penetrating gaze. Another example depicts a ‘summer fun day’, in which a group of young children has just lost a game of tug of war while their adult neighbors look on in amusement. (Figure 2) Collapsing into a heap of giggles, the children don face paint and colorful paper crowns, symbols which testify to a day filled with joyful play. A final example features a posed portrait of three generations of the Fakamus family. Freshly dressed and readied for a morning at church, the family stands in a small living room surrounded by a wall dense with framed family snapshots. Upon a corner shelf, a small, decorative knick-knack appears to summarize the scene. In bold red letters, it spells the word ‘Love’ (Figure 3).

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What is perhaps most successful about Thoburn and Miah’s documentary project is its ability to materialize perspectives that were largely absent in the broader public debates about Robin Hood’s future (Thoburn, 2018b). Throughout the process, Miah and Thoburn extensively interviewed residents about their personal histories at the estate, conducting interviews in both Bengali and English often immediately preceding the photographic event. Thus, in their archive of photographs, representation is mediated by the residents’ quiet but insistent voices testifying to homes they’d long enjoyed. We see residents gardening, hanging laundry, playing, and embracing. Most importantly, perhaps, we see them smiling. The residents here are not beleaguered, dangerous, or strange. They are happy. They are proud. They are just like us. By emphasizing their humanity, Miah’s photography negates the tokenistic and stigmatising portrayal of estate residents as abject citizens and invalidates the loud and largely superficial critique of their home in word and image.

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Rather, the photographs suggest that the design of modern social housing, when appropriately considered, can foster social cohesion and feelings of belonging. More specifically, they illustrate how the Smithsons’ famed ‘streets-in-the-sky’ successfully integrated home and the city, mitigating the estrangement that sometimes accompanies urban life. For the Smithsons, the idea of the street was essential to society. ‘In the suburbs and slums’, they argued, ‘the vital relationship between the house and the street survives, children run about … people stop and talk … you are outside your house in your street’ (Smithson and Smithson, 1970, p. 43). Their principal innovation in British social housing was to preserve this street, elevating its inhabitants to the safety of the skies. Even in times of trouble, and amidst chronic disinvestment, the ‘streets-in-the-sky’ helped Robin Hood feel more like home, as residents like William and Laetitia Fakamus have explained. The street decks, they argued, fostered friendships, and even provided opportunities to survey the city and contemplate ‘the wonder of God’s global embrace’ (Fakamus cited in Thoburn, 2018b). As Miah has also noted, ‘Contrary to the oft-repeated story that the aerial “streets in the sky” failed as social spaces, most of the residents interviewed spoke of them with enthusiasm’ (Kois cited in Rowan, 2016).

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Against this more nuanced portrayal of Robin Hood’s efficacy, we might reconsider the image of modernism’s failure and death as it appears in artist Jesse Brennan’s (b. 1982) four-part series collectively entitled A Fall of Ordinariness and Light (2014). Produced as part of a broader community art project, Brennan’s graphite drawings depict a photograph of the seven-storey façade of Robin Hood’s west block as it endures a parody of its impending demolition in astonishing trompe-l'œil (Figure 4). In successive stages, the estate’s west block, realized in rich photo-realistic chiaroscuro, transforms from slightly rumpled to folded inward upon itself like an accordion. The title, Ordinariness and Light, refers to a key text of the same name, a book of post-war urban theory and aesthetics published by the Smithsons in 1970. Brennan’s process evokes the physical and metaphorical fall of the Smithsons’ ideas in Robin Hood’s demolition. However, her drawings also recall photographs of the spectacular trial demolition of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, which transpired just as the last of Robin Hood Gardens was going up (Figure 5).  Thus, Brennan’s drawings comment on the weaponisation of the demolition spectacle as another example of gentrification’s visual imaginary.

As Richard Martin has observed, ‘By crashing down to earth, housing estates that were ignored … became prime images of historical failure and, simultaneously, markers of today’s less naïve approach to social progress’ (Martin cited in Brennan 2015: 38).

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As a photographic event, social housing demolition thus signifies a means of easy escape from the naïve and illiberal utopianism of architectural modernism and its deference to class struggle. However, the instrumentalisation of this trope, much like modernism’s museification, diminishes social housing’s performance, obscures the system’s ‘managed decline’, and colludes in the harm that ‘regeneration‘ schemes visit upon the working class. Demolition, as Thoburn has observed, is driven not by a concern for community welfare but by a convergence of interests between the city’s need for social services savings and capitalism’s relentless pursuit of profit (2023). While advertised as an opportunity to increase density, improve building quality, or reduce social stigmatisation, regeneration frequently uproots and atomises local communities, reducing social housing supply and contributing to working-class insecurity. Perhaps, as Ben Campkin argues, regeneration is not about alleviating poverty at all but an attempt to remove its negative aesthetics to the periphery of our sight (Campkin, 2023, p. 103).

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Seen from this perspective, what the instrumentalisation of abject aesthetics in critical documentary photography helped to accomplish was not merely destructive. Rather, it was also generative. In his discussion of the oft-circulated images of the smoking World Trade Center towers, W.J.T. Mitchell identified a ‘new and more virulent form of iconoclasm … an image of horror that has imprinted itself in the memory of the entire world’ (2010: 14). Yet such iconoclasm was less a destructive than a ‘creative’ act, producing a secondary image that satisfied an urgent desire for a new and prescient icon in the United States’ ensuing ‘War on Terror’. Likewise, depictions of graffiti, crumbling concrete, and rough, aimless youths reinforced class anxieties regarding dirt and disorder, making of social housing an architectural icon of uncanny terror, the consequences of which helped to erode confidence in and support for its provisioning (Campkin, 2023, p. 10). But in its failure, modernism’s supposed death occasioned something new – an emergency which only the free market seemed poised to solve. Thus, the immortalisation of social housing’s domicide in and through photography obscures the violence of dispossession and reframes demolition as a prescient spectacle of creative destruction and renewal inherent to the capitalist system (Byles, 2006, p. 17).

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In the short film The Black Tower (1987), however, the brutality of social housing’s erasure is flipped on its head and represented as a fatal haunting. Narrated by the film’s director, the artist John Smith (b. 1952), the short film begins with a black screen and birdsong, during which Smith details a startling first encounter with a shadowy, tectonic spectre through a first-person narration. In a moment, we see the object of the narrator’s fascination, a small black peak sitting benignly behind the roofline of a line of low rowhouses – the black tower of the film’s title. The building, visible only across its roofline, is a flat, dimensionless void, but is otherwise non-threatening. Nonetheless, the tenor of the narration becomes increasingly urgent as Smith dreams of imprisonment within the tower, his body paralyzed by some unexplained terror. In confusion, he searches for the tower, only to discover that it was recently demolished. A tower block blinks into view, now in full colour, and collapses spectacularly. Confronted with the tower’s demolition in his morning paper, Smith confronts the possibility that the tower may be tormenting him. Hereafter, the hauntings increase, the tower’s featureless silhouette swelling until it swallows the screen in darkness (Figure 6). Terrified, the narrator retreats to the safety of his apartment until an ambulance transports him to a nearby hospital, where he finds the now ominous tower still waiting. An attempt to recover in the countryside is thwarted when the tower reappears and finally seduces the narrator inside to his death.

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Premised on one of the most elementary forms of cinematic illusionism, Smith’s film is commonly understood as a humorous meditation on the instability of filmic fact (Rees, 1987 cited in Smith, no date; Beckett, 2011). As Colin Beckett has argued, ‘You could understand its story as a parable of narrative film viewing, the fantasies that cinematic representation engender being, like the eponymous tower, so seductive that they continue to do psychic harm even after we know better’ (2011). To his point, the man eventually succumbs to his deadly delusions even after acknowledging the tower is imagined. However, Smith’s choice of antagonist, the ‘ghost’ of a now demolished tower block, is deserving of greater scrutiny, particularly given the animosity unleashed upon social housing during the period. In gothic literature, hauntings are variously interpreted as symbolising unresolved issues, moral transgressions, fears, and anxieties, often those brought on by a feared decline of ruling class power (see, for example, Rena Harris, 2024). From within this framework, we might also see the tower’s haunting as a stubborn act of defiance. In its refusal to succumb to its own erasure, the tower block boldly reclaims its civic space – psychically if necessary.

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In an exaggerated parody of middle-class fears, the tower block is transformed from a quiet, unassuming shadow into a figure of horror and revulsion, all in the narrator’s mind. But, like Frankenstein’s monster, the tower does not suffer its master’s rejection lightly. Instead, it unleashes the full weight of its fury upon the man, ultimately killing him. Your life for mine, it seems to say. From this perspective, The Black Tower also stands as a condemnation of our own facile media habits, in which we consumed the spectacle of social housing’s death too superficially. According to Guy Debord, the power of spectacle lies, at least partly, in its manipulation of its subjects into passive spectatorship (1970). Spectacle monopolises the argument, eliminating all opportunities to respond (Debord, 1970, p. 11). Photography, however, is never fully beholden to institutional inscription – relations between the photograph and its audience remain very malleable (Crimp, 1993). Thus, when a second narrator emerges in the film’s final moments to declare that she too has seen a dreadful black tower, Smith introduces a kernel of doubt. We have seen, but do we truly know? The Black Tower reminds us that we don’t.

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This is not to suggest that photography does not merit a place in the social housing discourse. As the examples above have illustrated, photography is not just a weapon to be feared but a tool which we too can wield against the same mythologies and systems of power the medium has historically upheld (Berger, 2013, p. 27). But photography is beautifully, problematically, polysemous, as Roland Barthes has famously argued (1980: 274). Consequently, it cannot be consumed uncritically, and it should never be taken as a given. In her landmark study of social documentary photography’s subjectivity, Abigail Solomon-Godeau called for a critical awareness of who was really ‘speaking’ in such images (1991). The photograph’s ‘reality effect’, she observes, tends to obscure the photographer’s subject position embedded within its making (1991, p. 180). The image presumes to speak for, not with, its subject. Consequently, we would be well served to remember that an ideology is always at play in photography’s perceived neutrality. Though it works tirelessly to disguise itself, ‘naturalising’ the cultural and the political, ideological effects impose not reality but meaning (Solomon-Godeau, 1991, p. 182).

Critical social housing photography has, historically, communicated an elite subject position, resulting in analyses of its failures that have reinforced narratives of class exclusion and obscured the state’s role in the system’s deterioration.

Through photography, the working class can be given opportunities to contest the record. Among the most effective examples is Grenfell (2017), a single-channel, documentary film which neatly turns the abject image of modern social housing against itself. Directed by artist and filmmaker Sir Steve McQueen CBE (b. 1969), the film’s simple title refers to what is undoubtedly among the most horrific episodes in recent British history, the Grenfell Tower fire (Figure 7). Occurring just after midnight on the evening of 14 June 2017, what began as a small kitchen fire tore through the West London tower block, killing seventy-two and injuring scores more. The ensuing government inquiry attributed the fire’s furious and deadly spread to the installation of a criminally flammable cladding produced by American metal engineering firm Arconic, which had been recently affixed as part of a broader ‘revitalisation’ scheme. However, given the state’s erosion of its social housing infrastructure, its weakening of building regulations, and overall disregard for social housing safety, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

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Much like Smith’s Black Tower, the first thing that hits you in McQueen’s Grenfell is not vision at all but sound. From a black screen, the ceaseless rush of the highway slowly washes over you, a banal symphony of tires upon asphalt. Suddenly, an image blinks into view as the camera creeps towards the horizon. Below, a rural landscape of tiny trees and neighbourhoods slowly unfold. Next, birdsong penetrates the droning din, accompanied by the whine of a passing engine, a faint but insistent horn blast, and, eventually, a wailing siren. We have some rough coordinates now; our destination is urban though sound does not yet match vision. Instead, we glide as our bird’s-eye view turns gently towards a distant cityscape. (Figure 8) The rushing air gets louder now, more urgent. We fly into the atmospheric refraction, descending gently as the city beneath begins to grow. At last, we see the source of the sound, a highway, and beyond, our destination, a tower so black it blights the skyline. Finding its target, the camera inches closer to this towering ruin, now a shadow of its former self, and begins to circle its hideously blistered façade. Sound dies away. Silence accompanies the awful spectacle, a memento of those who can no longer cry out. What was once a home is now a dreadful icon of architectural death.

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Though criminal responsibility remains blurry (and still years away from resolution), Grenfell constitutes a vital record through which justice may yet be served, as McQueen has explained (McQueen, cited in Serpentine South Gallery pamphlet, 2019, p. 10). Produced at the start of the seven-year government inquiry and filmed just a few short months following the deadly fire, the film stages an intervention in the historical record of modern architectural ruin. By returning to the scene of the crime and engrossing us in Grenfell’s ghastly corpse, he prevents the evidence from fading from memory and defends against attempts to hide abjection from our sight behind pristine white hoarding. Shot simply from the respectful distance of a hovering helicopter, his aerial footage speaks to the kind of slow social violence to which it is all too easy to become inured. Covering twenty-four floors in twenty-four minutes, McQueen spares no detail in his forensic documentation. His unmitigated attention honours each life destroyed by corporate greed and bureaucratic indifference.

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According to Paul Gilroy, the Grenfell disaster demands a contemplation of which lives matter and just who can behave with impunity (Gilroy cited in Serpentine South Gallery pamphlet, 2019, p. 12). The power of McQueen’s memorialisation of the fire, however, implies we already know how to answer these questions. Haunting in its simplicity, Grenfell explicitly refutes the death of modernism's myth as inevitable. Instead, it insists we more closely examine and attend to its causes and human consequences. Perhaps the ultimate power of Grenfell, however, lies in its ability to replace the most consequential icon of architectural death that preceded it – the Pruitt-Igoe demolition photograph. What unites the deaths of both estates is an indifference to those communities social housing serves. As the Grenfell inquiry revealed, some eighty-five per cent of tenants who died in the fire were people of colour. Nearly all were working-class. In this, Grenfell Tower and the Pruitt-Igoe share an affinity beyond their own untimely ends. Part of broader investments in post-war housing construction and slum clearance in St. Louis, the Pruitt-Igoe was also home to a majority Black, working-class population. And like those at Grenfell, its residents were exiled to a place where concern could not reach, marked as failed citizens, and deemed unworthy of dignity or respect. As Susan Sontag famously argued, ‘Let the atrocious images haunt us,’ remind us of what our fellow human beings ‘are capable of doing…Don’t forget’ (2017, pp. 147–48). McQueen’s Grenfell guarantees we won’t.

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Every history, as Mitchell has argued, is really two histories – ‘what actually happened’ and ‘the history of the perception of what happened’ (2010, p. xi). In our own time, both events and their perceptions are heavily mediated by mass media representation, our national narratives litigated in the gaps that exist between image and interpretation and debated endlessly across various social media channels. The housing discourse, particularly, remains woefully surface level, particularly for those most alienated from its problems – the middle and upper classes. Consequently, even such a slick and stirring media campaign as that proffered by Shelter risks becoming but one more shadow in ‘Plato’s Cave’. Because the campaign fails to reckon with the mythology of failure that compromised modernism’s moral concern for working-class life, it remains circumscribed by the false belief that the problem is buildings at all.

Perhaps what efforts to change the official narrative of modern social housing most require then are not less images but more.

When brought into dialogue with a broader canon of imagery, we might understand Shelter’s campaign as but one part of a new, class-conscious visual politics of modern social housing that includes works like those by Miah, Brennan, Smith, and McQueen. Taken together, these films, drawings, and photographs constitute an indispensable counter-archive, which turns the abject spectacle of modern social housing’s demise against itself to reveal a painful truth about who regeneration is and isn’t for. As Alice Compton has argued, photography was both complicit in and yet also revolted against the kind of ‘aesthetics of social abjection’ that eventually killed social housing’s workingclassness (2016). The aestheticisation of poverty and social dysfunction, as Tyler also notes, cuts both ways, dehumanising subjects by participating in the right’s weaponisation of ‘revolting aesthetics’, and yet also functioning as an instrument of political resistance (Tyler, 2013, pp. 4–10). The counter-archive, which includes both fine art and community-focused documentary photography, effectively seizes authority from modernism’s critics. In so doing, the works explicitly materialise the various subject positions of those directly harmed by modern social housing’s abjection. Much like the second narrator of Smith’s Tower, such works invite scepticism about those stories we’ve been told and those we continue to tell about those most unlike us.

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Through the marriage of critical photography and the rhetoric of death, social housing became a cypher for social deterioration and political failure in Britain’s broader economic downturn. Its weaponisation helped to drastically curtail the Welfare State and consign the modernist project to history’s dustbin. However, photography may yet play a role in working-class modernism’s recovery, reminding us that we have not only the right but the responsibility to bear witness, particularly when the question of accountability remains unresolved (Azoulay 2012). ‘The right to look,’ Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, ‘confronts the police who say to us, “Move on, there's nothing to see here”’ (2011, p. 474). However, the new visual culture of working-class architecture must not shy away from the image of death with which modern social housing has formerly been associated. Rather, we must linger there, meditating on modernism’s untimely demise as a critical means towards understanding better who (or what) was served by its attempted execution. On the relationship between death and photography, Barthes has observed that the medium’s propensity to emote while nonetheless providing eidetic testimony renders photography an ideal means by which to face and thus ‘resolve’ death’s presence in our lives (Barthes, 2010). Through photography, we can reframe social housing’s death as a preventable social violence and begin to dismantle the myths that may yet threaten working-class security in the future. Then, and only then, can we escape the illusions shaping modernism’s perception in Plato’s Cave.

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The author gratefully acknowledges the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for their support of this research and wishes to thank Shelter, Kois Miah, Nicholas Thoburn, Jessie Brennan, John Smith, Steve McQueen, and the Thomas Dane Gallery for the use of their art and images.

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Our present unequal urban structure is not accidental, but by design [2, 7, 13]. It emerges from systemic failure to acknowledge the needs of women and other genders that do not conform to the heteronormative, able-bodied white male default. This is evident in the restricted mobility of women in the city, the scheduling of the workday that often interferes with caring responsibilities and the threat of Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) [1] that exerts control over women’s bodies and how they inhabit space. Darkness alters perception, diminishes passive surveillance, and reshapes social dynamics, often concentrating alcohol-fuelled economies and male-dominated activities in specific zones. After dark, streets feel dangerous, spaces of refuge are inaccessible, and mobility options are more complex. The mental map of the city shifts according to the geographies of fear and perceived unsafety. [2, 3] 

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Women’s mobility becomes constrained not only by physical design but also by cultural expectations, risk calculations, and the burden of self-protection, the all-too-familiar and emotionally exhausting ‘safety work’, such as altering routes to get home safe, keys in the pocket, private taxis at night to avoid public transport, and journey-tracking text messages. Feminist scholars have described this as a temporal injustice: access to the city is structured not only by where one can go, but when and under what conditions [4, 5]. The “right to the night” thus extends Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city into the temporal domain, asserting that equitable urban citizenship must include a safe and meaningful presence after dark [6]. Lefebvre imagined the city as a process, not finite, which aligns with Doreen Massey’s consideration of urban space as dynamic “never finished, never closed…as a simultaneity of stories-so-far’.

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Caroline Criado Perez exposes the pervasive gender data gap, which perpetuates the gender inequalities and promotes a neoliberal agenda which seeks to protect male supremacy [7]. She argues the lack of sex-disaggregated data results in a world designed by and for men, effectively rendering women invisible and creating significant, often dangerous, inequalities. Architecture, urban design, and planning have historically privileged male norms of movement, visibility, and occupation, resulting in nighttime landscapes that intensify vulnerability for some and enable freedom for others. Can we play a role in addressing this inequity of freedom by reflecting on the status quo and challenging the lived reality that restricts women at night?

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Through a radical feminist lens [8], which understands intersectionality [9] and seeks to dismantle patriarchy as the social system of women’s oppression, we can reframe our approach to designing public spaces to promote greater social justice. Emerging feminist research positions co-design as a gender-responsive architectural method that can translate lived experiences into spatial change.

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Rather than treating participation as a procedural requirement, these examples advance co-design as a supportive knowledge-producing practice that can challenge the male-normative assumptions embedded in briefs, standards, and spatial typologies. Feminist urbanism has long argued that everyday experience - particularly the embodied, emotional, and temporal dimensions of navigating the city - constitutes a form of expertise [8]. Women’s diverse narratives of fear, avoidance, and adaptation are spatial data that reveal how environments function in practice. This data then emboldens architects and urban designers to act with purpose, respectful of the needs of those the public space will serve.

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What methodologies might we employ to understand lived experience at night? One such critical framework is Doreen Massey’s theory of Power Geometry [10]. Massey argued that space is constituted through relations of power that enable some groups to move freely while constraining others. Applied to night-time urbanism, Power Geometry reveals how the ability to inhabit darkness is itself a privilege. Men, particularly those aligned with dominant social groups, often move through nighttime space with relative autonomy. In contrast, women, girls, and other marginalised groups experience heightened surveillance of their own behaviour and curtailed spatial freedom. 

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Co-design, a participatory design approach, when informed by feminist principles seeks to redress gender inequality and elevate lived experience as design expertise, redistributing epistemic and spatial power. When women and girls participate in defining problems and generating solutions, they expose the micro-geographies of safety and danger that conventional planning overlooks: poorlylit desire lines, bus stops without escape routes, dead frontages that eliminate refuge, or thresholds where harassment routinely occurs. Translating these insights into architectural parameters can reshape environments in ways that support presence rather than avoidance. Importantly, such changes are not limited to token gestures like brighter lighting, increased surveillance or police presence. Feminist design emphasises relational safety: the presence of other people, diversity of activities, and spaces that support care, waiting, and rest.

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Massey’s framework also cautions that co-design does not automatically equal empowerment. Power relations persist within participatory processes themselves. Whose voices are heard, whose knowledge is deemed credible, and who ultimately controls implementation remain critical questions. For co-design to translate into spatial change, it must occur early enough to influence briefs, budgets, and land-use decisions, and must be supported by institutions capable of acting on its outcomes. Otherwise, participation risks becoming symbolic, leaving the underlying geometry of power intact. State systems must support the opportunity for meaningful engagement and the dynamism that is required for context-specific approaches to emerge, led by the community [11].

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Architecture has the capacity to materialise social relations. Nighttime environments are not neutral backdrops but active agents shaping behaviour and perception. By treating women’s diverse lived experiences as architectural knowledge, designers can move beyond security-driven responses, applying defensible architecture strategies [12], such as Safety by Design, toward supportive environments that promote inclusivity. Democratic planning processes in the form of gender-responsive co-design do not simply act as a tool for consultation but a mechanism for producing new forms of space - spaces where the right to the night is not aspirational but meaningfully constructed. Co-design then becomes an architectural practice of spatial justice, promoting equitable access to the city after dark.

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The architecture crit as an assessment format has remained largely unchanged since its inception. Conceived in the 1850s by the Beaux-Art School curriculum, it marked a shift from apprenticeships at ateliers toward academic degrees at University [1]. Despite the profession itself undergoing numerous transformations, this aspect feels stuck in time. When asked to write a piece about my experience in architectural education, ‘crit culture’ immediately came to mind.

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Ahead of presenting in front of a review panel, there is a feeling of discomfort. A mental note to speak loudly, stand tall and stay concise, all while getting your concept across. The week before a review becomes a drawing marathon, racing to complete and pin-up the ‘finished’ product. The dread of the crit is experienced by all students, but there is an unstated imbalance between male and female students.

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It is undeniable that students learn important life skills through preparing for a review, such as public speaking and presenting under time constraints. However, the crit environment emphasises a particular kind of thinking where students are encouraged to present as the ‘masters’ of their project [1]. It is formal and declarative. By contrast, design work is rarely this way. It is a slow process that emerges from continuous iterations and thoughtful decision making. It is often difficult to portray the experiential intentions of the project during a review. It is much easier to defend a rigid master plan than it is to discuss the way a space feels and the material process behind it. These are gendered qualities of architectural presentation. Masculine ideas perform well in crit environments; they are more structured and easier to make coherent in a drawing. Whereas the feminine attributes fall to easier scrutiny; they are attributes rooted in process, feeling, and care.

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During a crit, your work is performing and you become part of the performance to the audience of jurors. In this becoming, there is an inequality between male and female students. As the body plays a part in this performance, it is worth analysing the historical role of the female body in visual culture and performance. There has been a gendered dynamic present throughout visual culture in western society. Laura Mulvey diligently outlines this in her work ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ [2]. She describes how men are accustomed to seeing themselves portrayed as the protagonist and driver of the narrative, whereas women are accustomed to seeing themselves as the spectacle. These dynamics are internalised and can affect the way in which each gender approaches a review.

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The lack of female role models in architectural discourse feeds this narrative. For decades, we have idolised the ‘starchitects’, who are predominantly male. It is no wonder women have trouble self-identifying with the protagonist in this profession. Typically, architecture schools place female students standing before a predominantly male, seated jury. This has a significant impact on female presenters, as it reinforces a spatial hierarchy where emphasis is placed on performance and presentation, rather than broadening conversation and engaging with people on a horizontal level. This structure is another aspect of the crit that is culturally coded in gendered norms of masculinity.

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Established in an all-male environment, the review feels outdated and disconnected from the realities of working practice, where design is collaborative and dynamic, and involves multiple actors working together. The crit forces women to bend our femininity to fit a system that has historically excluded it. It perpetually legitimises gender norms within the realm of architectural education. With this, we lose an opportunity for critics to establish a self-identity with us and our work, and this generates a bias. I experience an immediate wave of calmness on review day when a female reviewer is present. It marks an opportunity for self-determination.

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Elisa Iturbe said, within her paper ‘Women & The Architectural Review: the Gendered Presentation of Architectural Work’, that “Our femininity is rejected when we must speak loudly and boldly to an audience of predominantly men” [3]. In feminist pedagogy, relationships between teachers and students exist on a less vertical plane. Power and knowledge become shared [4]. Last semester, instead of the standard presentation format for our Architectural Technology module, a group of 4 female students, Julia, Róisín, Ciara, and I, came together to create a podcast to share our work with each other and our peers. This conversational and collaborative discussion was deeply beneficial to all of our learning. It removed the hierarchy associated with a presentation, and felt rooted in feminist pedagogy.

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A crit established in an all-male environment is adversarial and performative, favouring bold ideas, structured drawings, and encouraging a ‘master’ mindset. A crit reimagined by an all-female group of 4 becomes a collaborative dialogue for sharing ideas. Hierarchies are removed and time is given to explain process and materiality. Architecture itself creates the physical and cultural framework in which we as a society exist and progress. Architectural education should be no exception. No aspect of it should perpetuate gender biases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Collaboration as a tool beyond tokenistic participation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Architecture must be (made) accessible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The expanded field of architecture ^[1]

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

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

Theory in the expanded field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Practice and the expanded field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Architecture, communication, and the anthropocene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning from modernism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       Lithuania is busy now. It is wet there too.  

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

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

A seagull sits atop the portal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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