‘It is indeed by uneasy steps that the pub has wandered through the paths of history, buffeted by storms of public controversy, assailed by the slings and arrows of temperance reformers, sometimes harassed, and sometimes supported by instruments of legislation. That it has survived in so ubiquitous a way is remarkable’ [1].

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The success of the architecture of Victorian Dublin is typically understood through the grandeur of the Curvilinear Range at the Botanic Gardens, the Reading Room at the National Library or perhaps the Museum Building at Trinity College, each an example of intricate architecture, engineering, and craftsmanship. Deane, Woodward, and Turner are rarely forgotten in the discourse around the built fabric of Victorian Dublin, nor are Harry Clarke, the O’Shea Brothers or Carlo Cambi. However, this article focuses not on such grand artefacts and their architects. Instead, it is inspired by Dublin’s sixteen remaining Victorian pubs [2].

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This visual essay takes The Swan Bar as a case study and aims to highlight the wealth of materiality to be found in these pubs, enjoyed by generations passing through. This map highlights the sixteen remaining Victorian pubs across the county of Dublin.

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‍The Sixteen Victorian Pubs of Dublin

1. The Hut
2. Gaffneys
3. Slattery's
4. Ryan's
5. The Norseman
6. The Palace Bar
7. Bowe's
8. The Stag's Head
9. The International Bar
10. Kehoe's
11. Toner's
12. Doheny and Nesbitt
13. The Long Hall
14. The Swan
15. Cassidy's
16. Finnegan's

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‍The Swan Bar (Lynch’s of Aungier Street)

The Swan Bar on Aungier Street in the heart of the city centre takes its patrons on a journey of materiality: mahogany, mirror, mosaic, clocks, brass, stained and tinted glass. Owned and run by the Lynch family for generations, the original materials which have remained in place from its 1890s refurbishment bear visible representations of the time that has passed. The tile and timber floor, patched in places, slightly sunken in others, is both a testament to its original craftsmanship and a palimpsest displaying evidence of former configurations. Quality materials not only last the test of time but often improve; a mahogany handrail is worn smooth by the million hands that have run across it. These architectural details were crafted with care and yet made to endure the thumping, scratching, cleaning, and polishing we have done for over one hundred years.

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Under the front window where there now sits a cosy snug, a tea shop once faced the street. A common feature of the Victorian pub was to lend its shopfront to the selling of groceries - further suggested by the call bells in brass on mahogany and pitch pine. Division and threshold are strong features of the Victorian pub, and The Swan is no different. Within the central aisle, a forgotten porch is inscribed on the tiling revealing a large depiction of a swan which one would otherwise encounter upon entry. This patina allows for immersive engagement with the pub's history, going beyond appreciation for the craftsmanship itself.

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It's an easy thing to romanticise Victorian craftsmanship. In reality, the maintenance of these buildings poses its issues, with contemporary publicans often having to navigate tricky legislation surrounding protected structures. The reasons for repairs vary, from obsolescence and natural decay, to wear and tear and intoxicated disregard. The manner and material of replacement speaks to the priorities, interest, and means of the owner. In the case of The Swan, the damaged yet original tile work tells of the stabilisation works undertaken beneath the ground floor, and a scratched mirror tells of blatant vandalism. While there is no lack of interest on the part of the owner, replacing triple bevelled mirrors and yellow stained glass panes, and bringing original brass pumps back into use is additional to the everyday demands of the service industry. Irish Licensing World claimed ‘A publican must be a democrat, an autocrat, an acrobat and a doormat’, in order to manage the wear of these pubs and fulfil contemporary conservation requirements; that list could continue [3].

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There is a balance to be struck between reconfiguration to fit current purposes and the erasure of former use. A surface on which to light a match can be rendered obsolete by the lighter, a cashier's kiosk by modern-day payment methods, a whiskey cask by bottled spirits. While these physical Victorian details may be anachronistic, they add to the experience, as do the clock hanging centrally above the bar and, importantly, the Scottish granite countertop to keep a resting pint cool. Whether functionally obsolete or not, their presence ought to be valued by the publican and appreciated by the patron. The decision to retain such details is not driven by nostalgia but by appreciation of craft, in seeing the hand of the craftsperson in the everyday. 

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As artefacts in themselves, in their ornamentation and craftsmanship, these pubs should be valued. The decay and destruction of the city in the lifetime of these pubs is starkly contrasted by their permanence both materially and in operation. Their provision of an ‘escape from bleak tenement life’ and ‘a surrogate domesticity’ suggest that they were as rich and lavish an oasis then as they feel today. These materials, explored in the photographs below, offer a window through which we can gain another perspective on Victorian Dublin, scarred, rounded and smoothed by time. It is through our patronage that these pubs will continue.

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In Bride Street in Dublin’s Liberties, one of the most curious incidents of Irish planning history has recently repeated itself. The striking 1970s brutalist facade of the former headquarters of architectural practice Stephenson Gibney + Associates has been retained, while the remnants of  a much-storied eighteenth and nineteenth century structure which formed a part of the same building, have been quietly demolished. In its place will be a significant new hotel, which uses the retained near-fifty-year-old facade as a contextual umbilical to the past – an arts themed relic. While the redevelopment of this site for a demonstrably more public use is certainly welcome, the brick shell will now have a merely tenuous connection to the new.

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When Stephenson Gibney + Associates acquired the old Molyneux Chapel on Bride Street in 1971, their clients and collaborators must have thought they had lost the plot. Impacted by generational poverty, planning neglect, and demolition as a result of Dublin Corporation’s road-building efforts, it must have been a considerable cultural shock for the practice and its staff, moving from leafy Dublin 6 where the studio had been spread out over three separate Victorian properties, on the site of what became the practice’s Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club in 1973. But like knights charging into a windmill bedecked landscape, Sam and Arthur clearly saw this approach as a way of spearheading a new colonisation of the city centre, which would inspire others into the same action, reclaiming one of the most historic parts of Dublin for makers and creators. And of course, it was reasonably cheap [1].  

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But what kind of practice was it, with the ambition and confidence to propose colonising this historic part of the city, with the buccaneering gumption, and not least the funds to do so?  Sam was born at 80 Manor Street in Stoneybatter in 1933, while Arthur from Fairview, was a year older. They were almost exact contemporaries of the Anglo-Italian architect Richard Rogers and his one-time partner, Norman Foster. It’s remarkable to think that Sam and Arthur’s practice was substantially more accomplished, and certainly much larger at an earlier date, than the offices of these later titans of British hi-tech. By the early 1970s, when Norman Foster and Richard Rogers had dissolved their partnership of Team 4, the high-flying Stephenson Gibney Associates had completed the ESB buildings on Fitzwilliam Street, won in international competition, and were in the midst of design work on the Central Bank, the enormous Agriculture House on Kildare Street, the beautiful School of Theoretical Physics on Burlington Road, and projects in London and Brussels, as well as working on their custom-designed offices with space to accommodate a team of 130 staff.  

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At the same time as the practice were completing Molyneux House, it was also concluding one of its more controversial developments on Hume Street near St Stephen’s Green. Having originally gained consent for a series of modernist office blocks, the practice was forced by public outcry over the loss of historic Georgian fabric, via government intervention, to amend the design to incorporate a Georgian pastiche facade. Stephenson lamented this approach as an architectural response in a historic cityscape, declaring it in Hibernia Magazine “a misguided Solomon’s judgement”, opening the door for anything to happen, as long as the external image of apparent streetscape continuity was maintained. His words would prove remarkably prophetic.

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Designed as a striking statement of intent, in a vigorous transatlantic style which referenced exemplars like Louis Kahn, John Carl Warnecke and Hugh Stubbins, the facade of heavily modelled brickwork extends about three metres in front of the existing frontage, which is retained, entombed in a brick skin. It is a remarkable brutalist essay in hard wire-cut textured masonry, carefully relating to the spaces formed between it and the gothic curiosity of the existing chapel. The facade itself was shockingly modern – aggressively so, even. Like an elaborate billboard, it heralded a world decidedly exotic, science-fiction like, most excitingly of all, American. A place where people in tan suits with wide lapels, even wider ties, and moustaches à la mode, were manufacturing a new Ireland through a haze of Rothmans' smoke, echoed in the bronze tint of the floor-to-ceiling frameless glazing. This stylish stretched veneer of modernity over the more prosaic historic backdrop, incorporated a stained-glass window spanning the first and second floors, preserved in situ as a relic behind the brick screen. The strength of this elevation as corporate identity clearly made signage superfluous. Only a small limestone tablet, insert into the Bride Street frontage, provided the name – Molyneux House – in vaguely Gothic lettering.

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Much more nuanced than often credited, the facade treatment extended downward into a carpet of pavement finish, and smaller protective pyramidal forms, a kind of undulated brick carpet which remade the street edge robustly, terminating with a single specimen tree planted in the protective niche formed to the adjacent Victorian houses. The entrance sequence, lost in 2001 in favour of a car park, must have been a dramatic, even flamboyant space. Entering via a narrow passage between towering flanks of brickwork, with the obligatory chamfered corners and parapets so redolent of the period, the visitor entered a release space protected from the harsh environment outside. It was filled with a feature planting scheme and a waterfall, enlivened by the play of light entering from the west. Even the adjoining perimeter party walls were finished a textured brown render, colour matched to the ubiquitous brick finishes which continued unbroken from courtyard into the reception space adjacent. A remarkable introduction and one of the most extraordinarily theatrical spaces ever designed by an architect for their own use.

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It couldn’t last, of course. By 1974, a collapse in the property market had already impacted on the work of the practice, eroding the kind of projects that had kept it so busy over the previous fifteen years. This pre-empted Arthur’s departure from the partnership in 1976, keen to practice in a smaller organisation, leaving – according to Sam – on the same good terms that they started together. The construction of Canon Court, across Bride Street, obscured the view of the cathedral from the upper ‘periscope’ viewing room, decontextualising the reason for the facade. In the 1980s, Sam moved much of his practice to work on London-based projects from both Dublin and a new base in London, having arranged a merger with commercial architectural practice Stone Toms. Another downturn in the early 90s in London, resulting in the sale of the building, provided the impetus for a new owner to erode the key components of the original, in search of more standard spaces. The process of denuding the qualities of the original work, had already begun.

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Molyneux House represented a particular time in Irish architecture, reflecting the vigorous confidence of a brave new republic full of the optimism of the times, before the first vestiges of the energy and environmental crises of the 1970s closed the door on this period. As a bespoke environment for an architectural practice, it was absolutely unique in the country, with a facade albeit skin-deep, boldly proclaiming brutalist modernity. 

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In a world of city planning increasingly obsessed with the value of image as opposed to content, how do we decide what to protect? This is a particularly difficult question, given modern architecture’s supposed ambivalence to context, in contrast to the gentle formalism of classicism, which ensures that individual buildings are less important than the effect of the unified streetscape – despite being what Sir John Summerson described in the Georgian Society Bulletin as “simply one damned house after another” [2]. In addition to the obvious imperative for retaining carbon-rich structures for new uses, the bluntness of our Protected Structure system will need to be better refined, to allow status to be conferred on particular building elements of significance, rather than on a blanket basis. In the case of Molyneux House, perhaps the most humane thing would have been to allow it to go, rather than endure a slower, undignified demise.

In contrast with the theatre of practice it once contained, it is now sadly a pantomime mask. The personages behind the facade, along with their pioneering spirit, are long gone.

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I would like to explore the potential synergy between architecture and theatre by drawing on two examples of experimental practice which highlight their effective combination. The Parliament of the Species (POS), a performative event in Norway, and the second, Home Sweet Home, an immersive installation which has toured four continents over a period of sixteen years.

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The Parliament of the Species

The Parliament of the Species (POS), a multi-species place making event, used the theatrical technique of role play and applied it directly to the realm of urban planning. Fjord City, one of the largest and most ambitious waterfront developments in Norway’s history is described by Oslo’s government as aiming to "create attractive common areas and good vibrant urban spaces that are inclusive and accessible to the urban public" [1] yet at the same time, through concrete dominated landscapes and landfill operations, the natural habitat of marine organisms is threatened with destruction by the construction of the scheme [2]. The creators of the project, two artist scholars – Cecilie Sachs Olsen and Elin T. Sørensen – wished to challenge the development’s stated commitment to sustainability by experimenting with a more authentic engagement with the "non-human" stakeholders of the site. The result was a multi-species "parliament event" which included a group of fifteen to twenty participants representative of different ages and backgrounds, thus deliberately broadening the vary narrow definition of "expert" often used in urban planning contexts [3].

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To facilitate expression of the non-human voices, the participants were split into three groups and asked to find multi-species "stakeholders" of the site. These inhabitants included: the swan family, the common periwinkle, the acorn barnacle, the grey alder, and the bedrock. Once each group’s stakeholder was identified they were asked to "get to know it better" including identifying its concerns and requirements for the site in question [4]. A democratic council session ensued in which the human participants gathered and acted as spokespeople for the multi-species stakeholders.

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The theatrical tool of role-play worked to highlight the plurality of stories that exist in any one place and urban planning context. It effectively recast the dominant story of Kongshavn from a wasted or "empty industrial site", to a site beloved and inhabited by a multitude of species who use it as a "refuge" and a "shelter" protected from humans [5].

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POS was positioned by Sachs Olsen and Sørensen as an "experiment" into the potential for this kind of work, using theatre as a forum to listen and account for the multitude of narratives present in planning contexts [6]. In this case, a very specific form of role-play helped to initiate and form connections and insights hitherto impossible to reach by a practice working in isolation.

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Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home by artists Abigail Conway and Lucy Hayhoe is described as a durational, live-art experience that is spectator-led. In its essence, it is a "miniature flat-packed cardboard town" [7] which has life breathed into it as residents, in this case participants of the project, step into and engage with the installation. At the beginning of each installation, a large white canvas is set up featuring the bare necessities of the town or area it is being held in. These will include the pre-marked boundaries of the town, key geographical features and infrastructure like unmarked roads, streets and, importantly, the plots for future residents. This decision allows audiences space to "reimagine their city, to really have fun with what they think it needs or could be" [8].

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As the cardboard town expands with more and more dwellings, neighbourly interaction begins to take place and citizens are encouraged to communicate and to take advantage of the services available which include a postal service, a local radio station (Residents FM), the community noticeboard, and the local council. It is through these conceits, facilitating interaction, that the life of the piece "really begins, the stories really begin to grow" [9].

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Home Sweet Home’s relationship to the built environment is recognised by those in the profession: "architects see it as a model for an exchange of ideas between citizens and designers" [10]. Its connection to architecture is found not just in its ability to act as a conduit of ideas but also its ability to include and facilitate place-making for people who are "often excluded or oppressed from the architectural project" [11].

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The project’s flat-packed cardboard dwellings are also uncannily reminiscent of the scale models used in architectural planning. Urbanist and critic Jane Jacobs famously felt that these scale models worked to conceal the necessary messiness of urban life and the "complex social intricacies that make the city work" [12]. Perhaps the brilliance of Home Sweet Home is its ability to replicate these ‘social intricacies’ through immersive theatre and interaction, while still maintaining the nostalgic vision offered by the scale model.

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I would contend that through Home Sweet Home’s unique aesthetic and its invitation to imagine and to create, it has the capacity to interrupt the seemingly "fixed geographies of scale" of which we find ourselves a part [13].

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Locating an urban future that works for us all, human and non-human will require interdisciplinary work. Ideas and practices are not rival entities, but tools to be harnessed and reinforced with one another. I believe that this collective energy and imagination can be translated into better urban planning in the future through the performative and transformative elements of theatre. At the heart of this is a call to action: to play, design, disrupt and imagine, combining the world of the stage with our city stage. For social and spatial justice let us apply theatre to the city.

The immediate presence of the Atlantic Ocean is felt on any exposed edge of Ireland’s 7,678km coastline [1] where sea winds force their way many kilometres inland.

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Physical systems acting on the geology of the western seaboard – from Malin Head, Co. Donegal to Bandon Estuary, Co. Cork – have created indentations which account for approximately 75% of Ireland’s coastline. These western indentations hold 203 of our 250 saltmarshes [2]. A saltmarsh is a low-lying distinct ecosystem in the upper coastal intertidal zone that is regularly flooded and drained by salt water carried in by tides.

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Approximately half of Ireland’s salt marshes occur on the north-west quadrant of the island, from Malin Head to Galway Bay. Along this stretch, counties Mayo and Galway share the most indented coastline, with ninety-one saltmarshes.

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Many of these saltmarshes are on mud or sand, but almost a third are on peat. This is highly unusual, both nationally and internationally. Examination of these peat substrates – usually two metres deep and often embedded with tree stumps – suggests these landscapes were originally freshwater-fed blanket bogs fed, but rising sea levels approximately 2000 years ago altered their composition, creating saltmarshes. These wetlands are constantly being authored by myriad forces: physical, cultural, ecological, geomorphological, technological, and political. They are dynamic landscapes, always evolving to become something else.

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In a thriving saltmarsh, sediment carried in by the tide becomes trapped by grassy swards and peat soils accumulate as plants decay, allowing the saltmarsh to rise in tandem with sea levels while absorbing tides, attenuating waves, and buffering the coastal edge. This process supports a carbon sequestration rate of 218 g/m2 per year (In comparison, a forest sequesters 4 g/m2 per year) [3].

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Recently, however, saltmarshes have become anthropogenic landscapes. Humans have adopted the role of time and two resultant accelerated changes are at work: overgrazing is causing saltmarshes to sink, and climate change is causing the tide to rise. When we thoughtlessly speed up and slow down natural processes, the effects cascade through time.

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Today, sea level rise is surpassing sediment building or ‘accretion’ capacity, and saltmarshes are ‘drowning’. When this happens, grassy swards die, habitats disappear, wetlands holding 40% of the world’s ecosystems tumble, and saltmarshes become mudflats, before disappearing beneath waters of expanding bays. The weight and force of the sea then breaks the sub-surface, releasing millions of tonnes of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere.

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Studies show Ireland has already lost 75% of its coastal wetlands [4] and we can lose no more. The saltmarshes come closer to vanishing with each tidal wash. This is a time of unprecedented change and urgency. Taking the view that problems get the solution they deserve, according to the terms by which they are created as problems in the first place, humans must repair what we have damaged and intervention is required. However, we must move away from our historic tactics. To quote architect and cultural geographer Dr. Anna Ryan Moloney, ‘when we see change happening, our language and actions tend to emerge from engineering. We try to “protect” our land and use “armour” to “defend” ourselves from the sea’ [5].

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The Anthropocene demands a freshness of seeing and new ways of working. If we continue to adopt the role of time and if speeding up and slowing down landscape processes is a design challenge of our time, we need a structure through which theory and practice directly respond to each other. Interdisciplinary research should guide design-thinking when intervening in physical and cultural landscapes, or what sociologist and academic Barbara Adam calls ‘timescapes’ [6].

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I am developing this theoretical and pragmatic structure while studying and working with the community in Mulranny – a historically, geographically and culturally significant village located on an isthmus between Clew Bay and Blacksod Bay in County Mayo. As a pilot Decarbonising Zone [7], Mulranny must reduce its carbon emissions by 51% before 2030.

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Analogous to many coastal towns and villages, Mulranny’s coast has become culturally and physically estranged. Its saltmarshes, sand dunes and machair are depleting, and its pumphouse, causeway, bridges and pier have fragmented through neglect. Both as independent pieces and as a collective system, the wetlands and the associated infrastructural assembly have been pushed out of sync by anthropological forces.

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However, there is still time for innovation. As a first step, I conducted a site-specific M.Arch. thesis which examined how Mulranny’s historic coastal infrastructure could be used to help natural processes in the wetlands meet decarbonisation objectives for the future. This ‘one good idea’ was explored by mapping, modelling, drawing and photographing the relationship between the seascape and technical infrastructural details, which contain embedded ideas from generations within the community and thus represent ‘material culture’ [8].This approach sought to balance Mulranny’s cultural and physical context to help the community meet its objective of creating a thriving biosphere for future generations to build on.

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The proposition saw conservation interventions, guided by local ancestral constructive-logic, intended to attune the existing coastal infrastructure to today’s environment. For example, extending the pier landwards to protect a drumlin from tidal undercutting; raising the causeway level above spring tide; and fitting cross-drains to prevent saltmarshes from being flooded. Proposals at the bridges included flap sluice gates which mediate between, and respond to, the weight and force of the sea and river on either side, while mixing freshwater and seawater to form brackish water for the saltmarshes to thrive on.

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These protection measures represent a starting point for more work to be done. There will be no ‘one-size fits all’ ­solution to every coastal challenge presented, as all landscapes, communities and built environments require their own site-specific approach. However, lessons learned from this thesis can be carried forward.

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The protection measures demonstrate that when coastal challenges arise, rather than building imposing seawalls that stop the sea from entering the wetlands, or standing back and hoping natural processes repair human damage, we need instead to consider alternative protection measures which, in performing their function, could balance the cultural and physical context to ‘provide new spatial forms and experiences that combine use with beauty in ways paralleled by the historic lighthouse, harbour, pier, and promenade’ [9].

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The pervasive belief that owning one’s home is the only path to qualitative living has not only hindered the emergence of alternative forms of tenure, but has influenced the under-reform of the rental market for decades. Why is it that in a post-modern world, in which so many resources no longer have to be owned, but can be shared or rented, homes still have to be owned to feel truly ours? It is worthwhile taking a step, back and above, and looking at how homeownership ideology has served a precise purpose in governments’ agendas. 

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As seen over and over throughout history, the link between politics and housing is an untieable one. During the twentieth century, governments began to market the ownership of one’s home as a basic need of society. Interestingly, as Richard Ronalds writes in The Ideology of Homeownership, there is no evidence to suggest that owning one’s home is an indigenous need of the modern individual [1]. Rather, it consists simply of a preference, forged by policy-making and social norms. The consolidation of such preference and the marginalisation of other forms of housing provision through specific policies can be observed predominantly in anglophone countries in the latter half of the previous century. In England, the Conservative movement recognised the full potential of homeownership as an activator of social stability. For a citizen to own one’s home meant having an active stake in the state and an invested interest in maintaining lifelong employment. The owner-occupied home becomes the only other space in which the labour class spends time outside the workplace, and family life inside the home becomes a societal ideal. Homeowners, through their choice of tenure, were believed to form an instantaneous conservative constituency [2]. Moreover, Kemeny (1992) contends that the preference towards homeownership stemmed from a re-moralisation around privatism and individualism. 

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Both Protestant and Catholic beliefs favoured a tenure that facilitated privacy and family life, reinforcing the perception that the ownership of one’s home was the sole path to virtuous living. The ‘superior’ idea of privacy materialised tangibly in the structure of the middle-class home with its dividing walls, separated accesses, series of rooms, gardens, and hedges. Private property was seen as an individual right and homeownership ideology became intrinsically linked to class perception, exacerbating class differentiation. Additionally, rented tenures became stigmatised as precarious and ontologically insecure, further solidifying homeownership’s superior status. The marketed idea of owning one’s home becomes an obdurate ideal and a “self-fulfilling prophecy” [3].

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With the commodification of housing, from being a tool for social stabilisation, the purchase of one’s home brings forth another phenomenon: the mass entrance of the population into the financial sphere. Arguably, the government's push for privatism in housing could be attributed to its desire to distance itself from housing provision responsibilities, capitalising on the public’s inclination towards homeownership. With homeownership becoming the preferred form of tenure, and with a significant part of the population becoming homeowners and entering the financial market through private mortgages, housing prices start to soar. As housing became closely tied to processes of consumption, the market became the primary agent that facilitated the freedom and progress that the middle class required. Saskia Sassen [4] writes that the financialisation of mortgages for modest-income households becomes a circuit for high finance for the benefit of investors, with a total disregard for the homeowners involved. The appreciation of housing becomes interlinked with the foundation of the global economy [5]. An additional bias is made through the middle class’s perception that estate assets would be of eternally growing value and that investing in a home is not a mere need but an opportunity to store wealth. Owning one’s home is now perceived not only as preferable but also as highly desirable because of the monetary gains associated with it. The idea of a ‘home of one’s own’ was no longer simply seen as a practical necessity but also as a marker for self-identification and self-realisation [6]. As a result of these complex, somewhat stochastic processes, the rented market lost all desirability and remained under-reformed.  

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Since post-war times, homeownership ideology has grown roots so deep in the public imagination that despite it now being financially impossible for a new middle-income family to purchase a house in a larger city, the paradigm remains unquestioned. In Ireland, The recent unsustainability of homeownership and the shortcomings of the market-based provision of housing are evident in the numbers contained in a recent report by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) [7]. The report states that, in Ireland, while 80% of adults over forty years old own the home they live in, only a third of adults under forty are homeowners. 

High rents, precarious contracts, and a shortage of rental housing make it virtually impossible for young adults to make consistent plans for their futures. The imperialist manner in which homeownership-centric policies have dominated the public and private housing provision system has resulted in a residualised rental market and a deeply undiversified housing landscape. The trajectory that homeownership ideology has traced in the twentieth century tells a compelling story of how policies influence preference. The problem of the persistence of a preference becomes evident when the ideology gains so much ideological weight that it becomes self-evident and perceived as ‘natural’ (Kemeny, 1995), not allowing other strategies to even be considered or imagined. Architects must detect the fallacies of the standardised ownership-based housing system and advocate for additional ownership solutions, to create a counter-speculative strategy for housing. 

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Architects and housing experts must not limit their focus solely on typology, because the systemic issues embedded within the housing crisis will not be improved by alternative typological formulas alone. We need a fundamental revaluation of how we own and access housing, not solely relying on a bottom-up process through the work of building cooperatives, but also through the development of national frameworks for alternative ownership models. By challenging the entrenched preference for homeownership, we can begin to imagine forms of tenure that truly meet the needs of our diverse society.

Plans for transportation or public realm enhancement, and initiatives like the government’s Town Centre First programme, are delivering real and tacit change in the Irish context, creating the conditions whereby towns and cities can really thrive. With this increasing realisation and attention given to the power that transport can yield, when it comes to thinking about and setting a brief for transport changes, I think it is important to understand what makes a place ambitious.

Firstly, the places we have previously designed, the places we have created and are living in, have defined our culture. This is because the urban settlements in which we live affect our behaviour, and behaviour over time becomes culture. If we live in a town where the only way to get to the shops with any joy, dignity or ease is to drive, then that behaviour starts to define our urban experience; driving becomes, simply, what we do. A key issue here to consider, however, is that when designers of the built environment look to improve options for moving in an urban context, some people can see it as an attack on their culture. We have seen these kind of reactions globally in recent times around Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods and 15-minute cities.

To move forward, we need to reflect more on the fact that transport is a tool for us, for people and society. It should be a servant to our quality of life rather than defining us and our urban experience. The shaping of our towns, cities, and urban areas must be governed by the maximum return on investment yieldable from the space we have available, both for individual people and broader society.

That said, investment in our public realm, in our streets specifically, is uniquely placed to target an enormously broad set of issues and deliver large returns against policy objectives. In other aspects of society we do not accept poor investment of assets, so we shouldn’t accept poor investment in our streets. Investment in streets can – and must – help us better manage surface water, reducing flooding and protecting habitats. It can target the urban heat-island effect, making better places to live. Streets need to continue to be the democratic heart of communities and neighbourhoods, combating urban loneliness and isolation. We need investment in our streets to enable active travel, because inactivity is killing over five million people every year globally, and ruining many more lives. Investment in streets is needed to tackle the affordability crisis; in the last quarter of 2022, 86% of UK adults said they were concerned about day-to-day living costs; just over half (54%) said they are very concerned. However, last year the average cost of owning a car was €3,500 a year in the UK – or upwards of €6,000 for those with car finance [1]. With around 20% of people in the UK having no access to a car whatsoever, investment in our streets needs to target the eradication of transport poverty, making sure that everyone has access to opportunity in their lives, and that access is not predicated on owning a car.

Coupled with community, health, and mobility imperatives, we need investment in streets to yield economic benefits for our neighbourhoods and struggling high streets. When more space is given over to people; for spending time, walking, and cycling – and less to cars – the absence of customers arriving by car is more than compensated by people arriving on foot or by bike. For example, in San Francisco, the first trial ‘parklet’ increased pedestrian traffic in the area by 37% on weeknights and increased people walking at the weekend by 350%. A similar scheme in London increased takings in an adjacent shop by 20% [2].

The term ‘Climate Urbanism’ describes the way in which we think and act in urban areas under climate change, something we are all engaged with. ‘Climate Justice’ is the link between climate changes and social, civil, and human equity. Streets are on the front line of delivering climate justice, repairing our relationship with the environment and improving quality of life. Looking forward, we need to view our streets and transport systems as the valuable assets they are – moving away from historical views of streets as simply movement corridors – to ensure that streets are delivering a public good at the very least.

This is why programmes like the aforementioned Town Centre First are so important, giving towns and urban areas the opportunity to (re)think the way people can move about, to (re)set quality of life outcomes. Recently our practice have worked to do this at the city scale in Glasgow – developing a ten-year regeneration framework – as well as at the town scale in Roscrea, Co.Tipperary, with O’Mahony Pike Architects. Looking at the public realm and transport aspects, projects like this allow us to work with communities and afford us the space to ask, ‘What If?‘; to envision a future town or city with better a quality of life, delivering on the investment opportunities available, and developing a step by step action plan to deliver it. These strategies (re)frame the conversation so that we’re not thinking about what we might lose from making changes to our streets and spaces, rather we’re thinking about what we are losing right now in not innovating, and what we’ll be losing in the future from being left behind.

Too many builders gaze into the future and want to put a heliport on the roof, or perhaps build the guest room out of some edible material … but that sort of thing is too science-fictiony. We have to be practical [1].

If the novum [2] is the necessary condition of science-fiction, the validation of the novelty by scientifically methodical cognition into which the reader is inexorably led is the sufficient condition for SF. Though such cognition obviously cannot, in a work of verbal fiction, be empirically tested either in vitro or in vivo - in the laboratory or by observation in nature — it can be methodically developed both against the background of a body of already existing cognitions and as a "mental experiment” [3].

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Envisioning future landscapes based on scientific or technological advances, and major social or environmental changes has an anchored place in the practice of both the architect and the science-fictioneer. Given the parallels in the privacy of their devotions – each occupied with a degree of prediction, invention, and resolution – mirroring neural network profiles have surely evolved amongst these design, (r)evolution and systems-orientated fields of thought.

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A certain romance between the two disciplines has unfolded for over a century at their common meeting place: the cinema. Once science-fiction met the medium of motion picture, the (de)construction and translocation of the traditional set began, enabling a mass engagement with, and critique of, spatial and societal what-ifs. When the briefs of the architect and the director are overlaid, constellations of corresponding points emerge as often as polarities. For example, the director/audience and architect/client relationships (both critical driving forces of any project) have moments of convergence and divergence when compared with one another. Where the director may pitch pro-actively to entertain/meet the desires of an imagined, transient audience with a strategy to distribute the work to a population, the architect may operate reactively to the needs of a specific client, with a strategy, in many cases, to attract a population to the work. Both practices excel at, and are excitable by, agitation of the brief – the offerings of adroit out-of-the-box thinking, often prevalent with designers who maintain research and experimentation with existing techniques and emerging technologies.

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The works of magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès were famously disruptive in this regard, leading him to create the transcendent set of Le Voyage Dans la Lune (or The Trip to the Moon) in 1902. His 400th short, this sci-fi pioneer followed a decade in theatre and roughly six years of experimentation with illusion, scale, perspective, material, technological resourcefulness, etc. Pioneering/popularising the use of the Schufftan Process, Metropolis – considered the first sci-fi feature and a staple architectural reference – made its bold arrival in January 1927. Interestingly, the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, was released in October of this year, indicating that, following Metropolis, all major sci-fi features adapting a silent or minimalist approach to dialogue did so by design. This was notably intentional in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odessey (1968), which features no dialogue in the first twenty-five and last twenty-three minutes of the film. 1958’s Vertigo piloted the use of CGI, as well as the composition of live-action film with CGI, and by the late twentieth century, screen adaptations of sci-fi scripts and texts were no longer restricted to theatrical sets and illusionary devices.

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While Ridley Scott refrained from the application of digital effects in Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) – by some ratio of ambition and trepidation – a chain reaction of feature films followed which demonstrated the possibilities of storyboarding in the digital space. This method was well-tempered by the millennium and films such as The Matrix (1999), Avatar (2009), and Inception (2010) used CGI to depict cerebral landscapes and scenes, a possibility which neuro-imaging may already be on the cusp of today. The calibration of scales of known existence was famously captured in Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames in 1977. This nine-minute journey from the cosmic to the subatomic scale remains uncategorisable, transcending its scientific, environmental, and educational functions to become a work of timeless universality. The central, yet subtle story of the sleeping picnicker is laced into an otherwise data-driven presentation, igniting the profound perspective the film is so well-associated with. Six minutes into the film, within its unique parallactic structure, the narration creates a chokehold of architectural appreciation: “a million lightyears out, as we approach the limit of our vision, we pause to start back home. This lonely scene, the galaxies like dust, is what most of space looks like. This emptiness is normal: the richness of our own neighbourhood is the exception”.

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The influential imaginings of architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, which would inevitably inspire cinematographic landscapes, were referenced in Peter Greenaway's film The Belly of an Architect (1987) and more recently modelled (using 3ds Max) for the short film, Lux in Tenebris (2019), by experimental Berlin-based practice BBB3. Brian Eno’s 1989 Imaginary Landscapes draws on New York’s urban density ‘world-building’ with sound as material. Closer to home, Cork-based poetry filmmaker Colm Scully frames fractal landscapes found in his kitchen to achieve an ambiguity of aerial scales in Philips’ Modern Atlas of the World (2017).

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There is no doubt that the accessibility and wide reach of film equips the medium with an influential power – one vastly accelerated by the effective combination of information and poetics. Many modern architectural practices, obeying the profession’s role to be responsive and adaptive, often utilise film as a medium to engage. On multidisciplinary practices, architect, author and educator, James Tait argues that it "is not actually a decentring of the profession but instead the decoupling of it from its output. A separation of architecture from its reason for being – the building" [4]. Despite being a well-established school of thought, this deviation from traditional practice still carries stigma within the profession, as noted by Holly Lewis, co-founder of London-based architecture and urban design studio We Made That: “The dexterous, multi-faceted skills that architectural training bestows can be a great asset in so many fields, and there is so much work to be done. Rather than stand in judgement of our fellow professionals, let’s celebrate the diversity that our eclectic and wide-ranging educations have successfully prepared us for” [5].

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The architect’s potential to communicate through film remains in its youth when compared to the influence film has had on the perception of architecture, and what an architect does. The architect’s self-representation in this field is further dwarfed when television programmes are included, as well as the eclipsing consumption of content through streaming platforms, video apps, etc. Until now, these collective contents may fall under three broad production styles: the epics, the ‘glossy’, and the documentary. Though the latter injects research and reality between the dichotomy of ‘the epics’ and ‘the glossy’, it is questionable whether the architectural documentary remains a niche interest, and whether it brings enough balance to the representation of architecture on screen.

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It can be argued that this representation is within the capacity of architects themselves, given both their existing skillset to communicate visually, to coordinate teams and timelines, to direct and design, etc. This is not to strictly suggest a hybrid office. BBB3 and Scullys’ shorts demonstrate that creatively high-yielding, micro-productions have never been as attainable as they are today. The use of film and video in practice may be an under-utilised medium well within reach of the architect, and its possible applications have the potential to accelerate progress in the field. In education, for example, the sporadic site visit could be contextualised by a library of local ‘construction shorts’. Audio/visual portfolios may become a tool for the process of hiring and determining optimum professional compatibilities. The ‘project pitch’ video, seductive and utopic by nature, could more often speak openly to communities and the public stakeholders, allowing for ruminations on inventive concepts and responses in urban development. After all, critical solutions may well lie with the radical architect, drawing in a territory akin to that of the sci-fi novum.

Compared to the rigid lines and flat facades characterising much of Georgian and Victorian Dublin, the Ambassador Theatre’s sweeping tiers and colonnades give this squat building an organic appearance. Internally, intricate poché [1] spaces of niches and columns cluster in its depths, like crevices in a rock formation. The building’s natural motifs include the gaunt-faced ‘bucrania’ (a classical figure of an oxen skull) on its upper parapet; emblems of death so close to an institution of birth – the Rotunda Hospital [2].

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The Ambassador, colloquially named after its twentieth-century cinema tenant, was completed between 1764 and 1767 [3]. It was described in 1780 as ‘one of the finest and noblest circular rooms in the British dominions’ [4]. Originally it served as a paid-entry entertainment complex, hosting a variety of lavish events and performances for the general public. It was, in effect, a winter-proofed extension to the adjacent ‘pleasure gardens’ [5] of present-day Parnell Square [6].

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In its 250-year history, the Ambassador has hosted an incredible breadth of events and experiences: Charles Dickens’ last public appearance in Ireland; the Volunteer Convention of 1783; Ireland’s first ever film screening; and musical performances by U2, Van Morrison, and Amy Winehouse. At the time of writing, the theatre is usually closed. Recent temporary events have predominantly consisted of paid attractions appealing to specific audiences. For an unsettling period in 2017, a threatening prosthetic dinosaur mounted the southern arcade, a bizarre diminution of a protected structure [7].

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The lack of regular events in the Ambassador has not only taken its toll on the building’s appearance, but also on the surrounding public realm. The public space in front of the main entrance, which could have a civic function, is, instead, hard and unwelcoming. A spectacular mature ash tree is surrounded by a synthetic covering, and most surfaces are of cast-concrete. The space is hemmed in by fifteen defensive bollards and further obscured by street clutter at a heavily-trafficked intersection. There is little active frontage on the entire southern edge of Parnell Square, and little incentive for people to sit and linger, a situation that will surely require transformation if the area is to become a ‘dynamic cultural quarter’ [8].

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Meanwhile, in Paris’ 18^th arrondissement, a similar-scaled rotunda building is thriving. The Rotonde de la Villette, designed by Neoclassical architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, was completed about eight years after the Ambassador, in 1785. One of a series of tollgates at the edges of Paris allowing the Ferme Générale to inspect goods entering the city, the French building’s rotunda is eighty feet in diameter; almost identical in size to that of the Ambassador. The building sits at one end of the Bassin de la Villette, surrounded by generous public space.

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La Villette’s exterior is much busier and more ornamental than Dublin’s offering, with four porticoes and an upper arcade of twenty columns at first floor. A significant differentiator is that la Villette’s rotunda was originally unroofed at its centre. Ledoux’s series of tollgates were certainly not to the taste of many Parisians: Victor Hugo asked “Are we fallen into such misery that we are absolutely obliged to admire the tollgates of Paris?” [9]. While the scorn for these monuments was undoubtedly linked to their unpopular politics, classical architects also took issue with their style and expression. Ledoux sought to create triumphal civic gateways into the city, but critics saw them as a mixture of opposing classical languages, with over-embellished features and bold geometries: an architecture unbefitting of small-scale clerical offices [10]. Today, these buildings are admired as key experiments in Ledoux’s development of Neoclassicism.

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Offering a heartening precedent for the Ambassador, the Rotonde de la Villette has been underused or forgotten for periods. Its various uses include granary, barracks, and offices; it has endured years of vacancy and damage from fire. It survived Baron Van Haussman’s destruction of swathes of Paris and the construction of the metro below [11]. In 2011, Andrew Holmes Architectes and Lagneau Architectes restored the building, placing a glazed roof over its central courtyard. The result is a vibrant building with 24-hour uses of restaurant, bar, night-club, music and arts venue now co-existing under one roof.  

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There are lessons to be taken here for the Ambassador, but a nightclub beside a maternity hospital may not be one of them. Many past good ideas for the Ambassador have fallen victim to economic or practical concerns. In the first instance, more frequent usage as an exhibition space would be welcome, and a comprehensive renovation is surely needed [12].

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With recent widespread anxiety about public safety in the north inner city, an active Ambassador could have far-reaching effects for the city’s vibrancy. At the terminus of one of the city’s major streets, in direct proximity to a Luas stop, the building’s location would be the envy of any cultural institution. In a time where we require creative solutions to protect and enhance the arts industry, a partial expansion of the adjacent Gate into some of the Ambassador’s spaces could help the theatre [13]. With the building’s theatrical heritage, should we join Vienna, Warsaw, Munich, Helsinki and others in dedicating a museum of theatre? If not performance theatre, the Ambassador could celebrate the operating theatres of its maternal neighbour, telling the story of Rotunda founder Bartholomew Mosse’s transformative vision of healthcare in Dublin. If focused on the history of the Rotunda hospital, the Ambassador theatre could revive its original unique accomplishment, described by Maurice Craig as a “close alliance between obstetrics and entertainment” [14].

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Flexibility to accommodate multiple retail and cultural uses, such as cafés, studios, and exhibition spaces would help with the venue’s viability. The longer-term answer is not one good idea, but multiple good ideas in one.

Diversity is an interesting word in relation to Ireland. We are not a very diverse country. 77% of us identified as ‘White Irish’ according to the 2022 census, and this figure inflates when we account for UK/USA/Australian and other white European dual citizenships [1]. Although our towns and cities are becoming more ethnically diverse – and this is important to address – we seem to have bypassed gender and, more specifically, class equity. This interconnected web of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender, create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage – textbook intersectionality. 

Architects, as a profession, are finally addressing gender disparities due to the wonderful work of ‘Gender Equity in Architecture’, a project by Dr Dervla MacManus at UCD. Despite the fact that for decades there have been as many women as men qualifying with degrees in architecture, only 30% of registered architects in Ireland are women. What percentage come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, we do not know, but many underrepresented groups do not understand nor value the architectural profession. This stems from a lack of personal exposure to meaningful architecture, the inaccessibility of architectural education, and the perceived instability of architecture as a viable career.  

Income inequality is higher in Ireland than in any other EU country [3]. Economic policies since the 2008 recession have worsened wealth inequalities, with a shift in income towards the top 10%. Between 2015 and 2017 the bottom 50% of people experienced a 2% fall in their share of gross income, while the top 1% saw their share increase by 27%. Architecture as a non-essential professional service is one utilised by the middle and upper classes. The bread-and-butter of Irish architectural design: domestic extensions, renovations and one-off houses are a privilege few can afford. If you are not from these classes chances are you have never enlisted an architect, nor personally know of any. 

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Architecture is an upper-middle-class game. To be an architect you must study for seven years minimum, five of which are full-time. There is no flexibility to study part-time or spread out your required classes, or indeed any sort of apprenticeship programme where you can earn and learn. You must have access to a decent laptop with all the necessary program licenses, and additional money for supplies such as model making and printing. Additionally, all prescribed degree programmes are located in major cities, each facing a housing crisis. A year of third-level education living outside of the family home can cost anywhere from €8,000 - €20,000. God forbid people have more than one child. 

Scholarships and bursaries, while generous, are rarely mean-tested in terms of necessity and are often offered to the best students as deemed by results, but beware the false promise of meritocracy. This playing field was never even. Nepotism, access to family contacts, opportunity to live at home, ability to endure low-paying internships, and not having to work during studies all perpetuate a system that penalises marginalised people who originate far from university towns. Many talented under-represented students who do consider architectural careers ultimately detour to other professions that seem more financially stable such as engineering, surveying, project management, or data science. 

The profession does little to introduce, attract, or retain diverse talent; a problem that both mirrors and worsens the profession's separation from general society. We talk about access, inclusion, and diversity – but the easiest way to gain access to a community is by already being a part of it. True representation can help alleviate the dubious data mining, coercion or implicit power differentials that sometimes take place under performative consultation programmes. No matter how well-meaning, people from lower socio-economic backgrounds often defer to others, due to deeply ingrained insecurities, power structures, systemic biases, or learned and enforced helplessness. When you have never been permitted a voice or agency, you don’t know how to advocate for yourself. 

To mend gaping disparities, the architectural profession must take stock of its practices. We must address the shortcomings within our regulatory bodies and offices, and imagine alternative routes to registration. We must eradicate social and financial barriers, increase engagement, and attract a wider cross-section of society so that the profession may reflect the skills, knowledge, and experiences of a truly diverse society. 

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Ireland has had a rich history of stone construction, with some of the most impressive surviving limestone structures in the world, dating as far back as 4000 BC. From the many fine examples of corbelled round towers, to the dry-stone walls of the Aran islands, stone structures in Ireland span from the monumental to the ordinary. Prior to the introduction of cement and concrete, it had been one of the most popular and valued materials to build with. One historian described how in Irish antiquity it was "regarded as the best material of all. In general, all other materials were considered far inferior to stone and lime mortar" [1].

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The status and power stonemasons wielded in Irish society was encapsulated in an old Irish proverb: "Captaen ar an gquarter, nó saor cloiche ar an stáitse", equating to "a captain on the stern, or a stonemason on the scaffolding" [2]. With the introduction of concrete as a cheap and readily-available alternative, structural stone has become less widespread. Today our preference for stone is typically for rainscreen cladding, external paving, or as a luxury feature in building interiors.

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The energy required to process stone for construction is far less than steel and concrete as there is no heating required. Other materials require a significant amount of energy in their extraction, processing and transportation. Cement, for example, uses carbon-intensive clinker, which releases large amounts of CO2 in the kiln-heating process. It has been ascertained that making stone can be about half the carbon footprint of concrete [3]. Furthermore, limestone, sandstone, marble and granite are all readily available in Ireland, there are approximately 209 large commercial quarries operating throughout the country [4]. 15% of these quarries supply large pieces suitable for structural use.

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The Irish government has recognised the need for low-carbon construction materials; Ireland’s Climate Action Plan 2023 aims to decrease embodied carbon in Irish construction materials by a minimum of 30% [5]. The sheer ambition of this goal is staggering when one considers the deadline: 2030, a mere seven years away. For context, currently just 25% of our new buildings in Ireland are built from timber, while most of our construction still elicits carbon-intensive block, steel or concrete [6].

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We need only look to projects like the restoration of Longford’s St Mel’s Cathedral, completed in 2014, to see how we can quarry in large quantities of stone in Ireland today. After devastation from a fire, the restoration this Cathedral is an homage to stone and traditional craftmanship. At least five different species were used in the rebuild, including Bath stone, Carrara marble from Rome, Jura and Dolomite limestone for flooring. The dark-grey limestone that formed the central colonnades was sourced and supplied from a quarry in Co. Carlow, demonstrating the capacity of Irish quarries to provide structural limestone in significant quantities [7].

Stone structures are being explored and used in surprising new ways; the Clerkenwell mixed-use building in London by Groupwork utilises a limestone exoskeleton that supports the building. The coarse limestone columns reduce in size and weight on each upper level, lightening the resultant structural load on the limestone. This solution provides cost-efficiency by shedding the need for a rainscreen cladding, the rough surface limestone performs as cladding and structure all at once. Following this success, Groupwork are now constructing a ten-storey tall residential building with a basalt structure. This would be a notable demonstration of lower-carbon material like basalt as a solution to the challenging technical requirements for medium-rise residential buildings.

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We are seeing a revival in mainland Europe and the UK of the use of stone as an alternative to carbon-intensive steel and concrete. Ireland has the resources to provide structural stone, if clients and architects begin to specify it and collaborate with the supply chain to promote its usage. Projects like St Mel’s Cathedral restoration demonstrate the potential successes of such a collaboration and the opportunity for us to revive the craft of the stonemason into the future.

From dereliction being a non-subject in Ireland, and considered normal, there has now been continuous media coverage for over two years, to the point that the story has also been featured regularly in international outlets, covering a wide range of aspects including its scale, impacts (including it significant impact on Ireland’s housing emergency), and untapped potential and solutions, of which there are many proven options waiting to be implemented with the right cultural and political will.

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Starting with a single tweet on 24 June 2020, our emergent systems design approach of protest, practice, and policy not only started a national conversation, it also changed how we collectively view dereliction. A daily dose of dereliction for one entire year (focusing on a 2km radius of Cork city centre) was combined with a first of its kind, and largest study of, dereliction in Ireland – all based on publicly available information. This resulted in the self-funded This is Derelict Ireland report that debunked ten common myths of dereliction, which quickly got people looking up and questioning what they were seeing. There was a societal realisation that Ireland had been conditioned to accept this unnecessary waste and vandalism for too long. It was finally time to end this ridiculous epidemic.

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What emerged next was transformational. Dotted across the country, grassroots, self-organising communities formed. Their purpose is to shine a light, challenge and show there are alternatives to this epidemic. Our first festival of dereliction, held in Cork city, sparked off a flurry of other activities including dereliction-inspired art, music, poetry, and conferences. Meanwhile, our anois agency submission to the Houses of Oireachtas offered a toolbox of practical policy solutions, based on international best practice, made national headline television news. This work inspired a series of policy changes, including a vacant homes tax (VHT), which the government had said they would never introduce, as well as stricter enforcement of the Derelict Sites Register 1990, new ‘Croí Cónaithe’ renovation grants, updates to the 'Fair Deal' scheme, as well as planning exemptions for commercial to residential conversion.

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Now this is all very positive, but it does raise many unanswered questions. The harsh reality is that dereliction has cost lives and traumatised multiple generations for decades in Ireland – you could argue since the foundation of the state and well before. Yet, it should never have been let get to this point.

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Take for example housing. We are currently experiencing our worst ever housing crisis. Tackling dereliction provides a unique opportunity to provide homes in high-demand locations at lower costs, lower carbon emmisions, and the use of less materials than new-build homes.

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There have been estimates of over 160,000 vacant houses from the CSO [1] and 22,000 derelict houses by Geodirectory, spread right across the country. The highest rates of unused houses, where we should be encouraging everyone from an eight to eighty-year-old to live, are in our towns and city centres. Take for example towns like Wexford, where one in every five homes lie empty. This does not account for the large amount of vacant and derelict commercial properties, again many of which make up the historic streetscape of our towns and cities. If renovated, these would be more sustainable and less expensive than new-build homes, and crucially, they would help transform our urban centres – all the while maintaining our unique built heritage. Yet, we have largely ignored them as a meaningful part of the solution to the housing crisis.

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We started this conversation in June 2020. The media took it on, communities responded, then the policy makers. Dereliction is no longer accepted as being normal in a functioning and healthy society. Now we need the built environment professionals (e.g. architects, designers, planners, estate agents, surveyors, developers, builders, etc.) to make this more sustainable approach a desirable reality. Their leadership and expertise can play a crucial role in ending this epidemic of dereliction and ensuring vacancy is kept at acceptable levels (given that vacancy is the gateway to dereliction). In doing so, they need to challenge the prevailing rhetoric that traditional buildings are energy inefficient, too expensive, too small, and that urban living is unattractive by proving that these myths are not true. Simply, the most sustainable building is the one that already exists. Bringing existing properties back to into occupation would be transformative to our urban environments.

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Professionals need to innovate around material choice and construction methods, in particular in areas such as adaptability and repurposing to ensure buildings are climate-ready and prepared for ongoing and future material shortages and cost inflation. They need to create a culture change that ensure our heritage is protected for future generations – its value goes far beyond a balance sheet. This will include ending violent demolitions that not only destroy valuable buildings, but also destroy the resources within, which at a minimum (if the building can’t be saved) need to be salvaged and repurposed. As a community, we need to make urban living the most attractive and affordable option, where the public realm is prioritised so that urban spaces can act as communal living spaces, as is common across Europe.

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The challenge has been set.

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The opportunities are immense.

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Just imagine if our villages, towns, and cities are revitalised so that everyone from an eight to eighty-year-old can rest, play, and work.

There is a phenomenon called Shifting Baseline Syndrome, first documented by marine biologist Daniel Pauly, who observed that each generation of fisheries scientists accepted the environmental status at the beginning of their careers as the baseline from which to measure change [1]. Over time, a depleted ecology is considered the norm. Shifting Baseline Syndrome distorts our understanding of the land and by consequence, how we treat it. There is a creeping loss, as once-familiar landscapes disappear with each generation: forgotten – not missed – never existed. Also absent is cognisance of what came before the familiar; that which precedes human memory or settlement. In land development today, we place our baselines firmly in the present, the ever-shifting ‘existing’, with destructive effects on our urban ecology.

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Rudimentary nature is far from what we crave, but evolutionary psychology suggests that our distant past – some 50,000 generations of pre-civilisation – still impacts our psyches. We once lived in the natural world, as wildlife, and the legacy of that connection endures within us [2]. But our contemporary urban landscapes are worlds apart from our historic wilderness. This imbalance is exemplified in the term ‘built environment’, which feels somehow at odds with itself. It implies a decoupling of nature from urban space. ‘Built’ is to the fore, the higher objective, though of course the natural ‘environment’ – wilderness – preceded it. While this is ostensibly a semantic argument, the subconscious effect of the phrase is to define nature as an entity separate to the ‘built’. It detaches the human environment from the natural environment. However, humans are not separate from nature, in fact the future of the human population is inextricably linked to ecological resilience [3]. Unfortunately, rather than promoting resilience, our current practices and systems are instead causing large-scale environmental damage [4].

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The natural baseline in our cities, towns, and suburbs typically presents as parks, gardens, and managed green spaces. These landscapes tend to be carefully maintained and vastly different to any native habitat. Ecologically, they are ‘blandscapes’ – comprised of pruned, mowed, and homogenised vegetation, sustained by a standardised approach to design and maintenance [5]. The consequence is habitat simplification and a uniform landscape which accommodates only generalist species, depleting urban biodiversity.

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Encouragingly, there has been a notable shift in recent years towards alternative management strategies for our urban green spaces, to promote greater biodiversity. Bees are often the catalysts for this approach, as protagonists of the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan – an ambitious and effective project which has transformed much of the urban landscape [6]. Countless verges, roundabouts, and lawns are now cheerful displays of dandelion and clover in springtime: havens for hungry pollinators, with other species benefitting from the knock-on effect. But can we go further? Beyond shaping nature to suit our needs, further than fitting it into gaps and leftover space?

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What the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan shows is that we do have the power to reimagine our systems. Nature in our urban areas is currently suppressed because we don’t accommodate or embrace it: we 'manage' it. But given space, nature can flourish, and that is a wonderful and hopeful reality. Nature’s ability to recover can be seen in the city of Chernobyl. Following a devastating nuclear disaster, in less than forty years, the exclusion zone has become outstandingly rich and diverse, and is now the third-largest nature reserve in mainland Europe [7]. We can sometimes feel despair in the face of the biodiversity crisis, yet nature’s powerful capacity to re-establish can be seen all around us, peeping though cracks in walls and footpaths.

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To envisage a new potential future for our cities, we need to consider a fresh canvas to work from. Picture a typical OSI map: a bland affair with a few lines for buildings or walls, maybe some hatches, perhaps a site boundary delineated in red. We currently see these buildings, walls, and roads as our baseline. We see empty sites. We don’t grasp the ecological richness that is latent in the existing condition. Now, consider that every square inch of the site map, if treated differently, is a potential nature reserve. This underlying value goes unrecognised because we are restricted by the limits of our memories, rather than inspired to imagine new possibilities.

There is a parallel reality, where instead of a blank map with a red outline, we see a wealth of information, not just about a particular site but about the landscape beyond; about the connections, the habitats, and the life contained within. What if we overlaid the map of Dublin with a rainforest? Our Irish rainforests are beautiful: damp, mossy, and teeming with life [8]. Next, add the layer of the city – make space for ourselves – but do this by strategically peeling away at, rather than suppressing nature. Carefully carve into the precious habitat, taking the minimum we need. Our new – shifted – baseline can become future potential value, reframing the ‘existing’ by imagining our cities as nature reserves and working backwards.

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It is not that we don’t live in nature reserves, it is that we don’t let them live. We can start today by choosing nature: not bland lawns, not car parks, not concrete. Look out the window and imagine a rainforest. Then, how to create it: the new baseline.

As a platform for new and archival journalism, TYPE was established to add to the national conversation on architecture, planning, urban design and landscape architecture. As part of this, the article series Working Hard / Hardly Working endeavours to discuss and draw attention to design features in our everyday urban environments; calling on contributors to identify two examples of a design move - one which works well, and one that hardly works at all. While typically the series title was applied by holding two spaces in direct comparison, this article instead considers that much of our building stock is working hard, while not really working at all. As is explored in this essay, a space can be manifested using typically successful design principles, with a dedication to the experience of the end-user, but through the barrage of time, modernity, and reality, can still become a less than successful space to be in. Casting an eye across Irish towns and cities, this contradiction is palpable in many a built form; from the Georgian terrace to redundant mid-century office blocks and social housing flats. And what frustrates those of us with affection for the built, is that many of these buildings hold such potential. However, with an obligation to make all built form accessible, insulated and fire-proofed, the task of refurbishment can become insurmountable (i.e. too expensive). The knock-on effect on our urban realm is that this refurbishment doesn’t happen, and the building persists and struggles to work hard for its inhabitants, while ceasing and ceding to work at all. Nowhere is this more apparent than the flats of St Michan’s.

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Completed in 1934, the St Michan’s scheme – known also as the Greek Street flats – is embedded within the north-inner city of Dublin. Found a block north of the Liffey, the St Michan’s social housing apartments are four-storeys tall and contain 112 flats divided across three blocks; two west of Greek Street and one east of Greek Street. The scheme is understood to be one of the first of twenty-something social housing blocks designed by H. J. Simms as Dublin Corporation Architect in the mid-twentieth century. According to minutes from a meeting held by Dublin Corporation on 14 August 1931, the approval for flats to be designed and erected on Mary’s Lane was granted. The record highlights that this type of building – four storeys tall and approximately 80m in length, with two circulation cores – was hitherto unknown and “not manufactured in the Free State”. This tiny record – just another note among thousands in the many dusty green leather volumes of the archive shelves – signifies the architectural heritage and importance of the Michan’s blocks. While the flats in the twenty-first century have become an emblem of built apathy and slow dereliction, this does not reflect the intent of the 1930s. These schemes represented an ambition to provide high-quality, liveable city homes to replace the squalor of tenement Dublin. St Michan’s flats (recorded as Mary’s Lane flats at this time) were the first of its kind in the republic – something reflected in its simplistic ornamentation and crude construction. Following widespread slum clearance, the flats represented a new way of living. St Michan’s are just one of the many original ‘Simms blocks’ that are falling into dilapidation – in dire need of considered refurbishment and attention. For the purpose of this article, the flats were analysed under the headings of space, access, and services.

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SPACE

Only through knowing the intersection of our buildings’ historical, geographical, architectural, cultural, urban, and sociological heritage can we assess and value our existing building stock. Looking at plans and sections alone, the obvious conclusion is that the 1930s flat blocks are no longer fit for purpose. However, assessing the building as a series of stacked homes / refuges / dynastic legacies, it is clear that they work very hard indeed. An expectation that our spaces should serve us was a standard set by the architects from the scheme's inception. Through drawing, anecdote and archive, we know that Dublin Corporation, with Simms at the helm, asserted that these stacked homes should be equal to their two-storey terraced neighbours. Skirting boards throughout were insisted upon. Every flat had its own WC with a small window. While the hearth continued to act as the focal point, each flat was equipped with a separate scullery. Measuring under 6sqm, this represented a psychological move of the place of the kitchen within the home from a secondary, ‘serving’, room to an everyday space with light and functionality. While it is clear that these flats represent an endeavour to provide homes of value (sections drawn of the Cook Street flats scheme from the same time depict detail such as fold-up counter tops and coat hooks), where the corporation failed the residents was in understanding the size of families who would reside in the flats. As opposed to the three or four-person units the flats were designed for, families were more likely to have eight or ten members. This is a problem that persists today. The flats are too small for the number of occupants they hold.

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The plan above is a survey of a resident’s apartment. Joanna lives here with her two adult daughters. The plan closely represents the suspected original layout – two bedrooms and a scullery off a main living room, with the 1930s coal shoot and WC converted into a bathroom and shower. There is no space for a dining table. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, Joanna’s girls completed a Leaving Cert and third-level degree sharing just the small make-up table in their bedroom. Even the depth of the walls is paltry: next door drilled straight through when hanging a painting. Storage is a limited luxury.

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ACCESS

At each level, the flats are accessed by a gated deck off a central stair. Delineating the brick facades, the external decks are a quintessential feature of these blocks. Typically there are four doors per deck. They are a fundamental extension of the floor plan; used to store bikes, buggies, and laundry. The decks act as private outdoor terraces for the residents who have bedecked the walkways with compact outdoor furniture, and, most importantly for the residents, they enable the community to monitor the comings and goings of the scheme. Visting the flats, no sooner have you turned the corner when you are beckoned from one height or another. Their children grow up as children of the flats, loved and looked after by many – not just direct family members. This passive surveillance allows for both the casual monitoring of the children playing below, and secures their private world within the city.

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Yet, using these decks is a daily drudgery. The drawing above depicts an occasion where baby was enjoying the view, as he was precariously lifted over a clothes horse. Having a baby in a Michan’s flat involves lugging a buggy up and down the four storeys several times a day, navigating the bikes and laundry. There are no provisions for limited mobility. 

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SERVICES

From surveying Joanna’s flat, the room that frustrates its family the most is their tiny bathroom. A shower has been added to the original WC by eating space from the master bedroom. However, the head height is too short to fix the shower head to the wall, and so you must hold it aloft when showering.

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There is no storage and no space – the girls stick a leg out onto the sink to shave their legs. Worst of all is the noise that travels – if someone in the flat below is having a rough time, you know about it. The single waste pipe runs vertically from the top floor to the bottom. If there is a plumbing issue or problem on one floor, there is a problem on every floor. It is the same for the drainage in the kitchens. The services to Michan’s were not designed to cope with everyday modern life. The washing machines cause water to come back up into the sink – a resident explained that she can’t leave while her washing is on as she spends the spin cycle running to and from the kitchen sink, emptying buckets of water down an external drain. There is only a countertop fridge, with just a freezer shelf. Even an air-fryer can’t succeed in Michan’s; it blew the sockets and almost went on fire.

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What links this essay to all other pieces in this Working Hard / Hardly Working series is that there are but a few minor moves that will take this building from hardly working to one which is a successful home for its residents. Flats could be amalgamated or extended to create a suitably sized apartment [space]. The whole building would be dramatically improved should the pipework and electrics be re-done [services]. An elevator would make the scheme navigable, and an extension of the deck would only enhance the precious external space already enjoyed by the residents [access].

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The architectural principles of the building are strong – the flats were designed to have minimal internal corridors, are all dual aspect, and with a maximum of four doors per deck access, they hug the street edge to create generous interior courtyards. These buildings work hard for their residents, and in turn, they the residents do the same for it. You cannot leave the flats without feeling the depth of pride towards the homes and communities made. The residents who live here overcome daily physical obstacles in order to maintain their flats. And through this careful care, the home-makers also act as cultural custodians. But they can only do so much; the building cannot continue to work so hard. The Michan’s scheme and others of the same age need to be refurbished: for the residents, for the city, for our environment, and for our architectural heritage. 

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The public release of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Chat-GPT has recently brought AI to the forefront of the public imagination. Alongside mass fascination with its capabilities and potential uses, its rollout has been accompanied by ardent discussions around the legibility, trustworthiness, accountability, and even agency of AI programmes. For specialists, these issues are far from new, and the design-inflected question of AI explainability has been a pressing concern for programmers and user-interface experts for some time [1].

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These recent debates have seen a resurfacing of the language of ‘black boxes’ in a broad public forum. In this context, the phrase is often used critically to conceptualise an understanding gap between a system and its users. It refers to an unknowable space that emerges when a system cannot easily ‘show its working’ to either its users or designers. For many, an accusation of a platform either being or incorporating a black box relates to the impossibility of full control or oversight over it. This typically arises from a lack of comprehension of the inner workings of that system. Prompts go into a black box style algorithm, and information comes out, but the connection between the two cannot be fully understood, even by its programmers [2].

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In other words, the computational metaphor of a black box is not associated with colour or form, but with the notion that a system’s output can not necessarily be deciphered by analysing its inputs. It operates as an unknowable function in the passage of information. The sense of it performing like a ‘box’ has little to do with storage, but rather relates to an intractable containment of hidden knowledge that creates ethically-significant problems of causality (cause and effect) and accountability. For similar, largely symbolic, reasons, the terminology of black boxes finds another well-known (mis)use in the field of aviation. Again, the persistent metaphor is associated with the containment of something, in this case, the rarefied information about events that transpired in the final minutes of an ill-fated aircraft. In both, a black box metaphor appears at a moment of uncertainty between causes and effects.

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The design of theatre auditoriums can help to conceptualise some of the consequences of living with black boxes at a human scale and in a spatial sense. In his influential book Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, cultural theorist Jonathan Crary points to the adaptations that Richard Wagner made to the design of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth as a turning point in the dramatist’s ability to dominate audience attention [3]. This purpose-built festival hall, opened in 1876, saw Wagner make now-famous infrastructural interventions that would, he hoped, encourage his audiences to engage with the fictional worlds presented onstage in a more absorbed, even hypnotic way. Removing the sideways facing booths from the seating, visually shielding his orchestra from the audience and dimming the lights in the auditorium are perhaps the best cited examples of the type of adaptations he demanded.

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Crary, however, emphasises the significance of a less well-known innovation, an optical effect that would go on to be known as Wagner’s ‘mystic abyss’, in achieving a desired totalising engrossment of his audience in the presented scene [4]. This effect – the ‘mystic abyss’ – refers to the intentional insertion of unknowable distance between the stage space and auditorium achieved by separating the two with a series of receding, perspective-distorting proscenium arches. This intervention disrupted all continuous sight lines between stage space and the auditorium, thus perceptively and epistemologically severing the visual bonds between real space and fiction. In so doing, the mystic abyss demanded that audience members undergo a more fully-realised abandonment within the scene presented. They were encouraged to ‘pick a side’ between fiction and reality in a perceptive sense.

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Contemporary black box theatres, arguably and ironically, represent a move away from these hallucinatory priorities. While on the one hand, some elements carry an inheritance from Wagner and early modern scenographers (their blank flexibility, typically low house-lighting and matt-black surfaces that visually privilege the fictional space on stage) on the other hand, their frequent ‘in the round’ layout means that their audiences tend to be more self-aware and often have the impression of sharing the event space with the performers. Again, the metaphorical name black box does not refer to their colour or shape, but rather to a more generalised aesthetic of containment of a space of fiction in a self-consistent interiority (box), supported by a humility of the playing space that bends to meet the various fictions that inhabit it (black). Unlike Wagner’s passive, hypnotised audiences, stripped of autonomy – if we are to follow Crary on this – these groups inhabit the same forum as the performers [5]. In this case, the ‘suspension of disbelief’ tends to be requested rather than insisted upon as the border of the theatrical universe is situated close to the entrance to the auditorium rather than between proscenium arches.

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In a theatrical black box – unlike an AI-powered chatbot or a flight responder – the human element is ‘on the inside’, sharing a space and collaborating somewhat in the event that is live theatre. It might be hard to convey the full essence of what happens within a temporary theatrical universe to someone who never saw the show, but each event is always a joint venture.

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The question of explainability in AI is not a settled issue in computer science, with some developers believing that too much potential is lost in the process of making an algorithm fully explainable to humans. In the context of these decisions being made away from the public forum, it is important for the rest of us to consider what costs must be paid in terms of accountability and autonomy in exchange for the enchantment and wonder earned across a mystic abyss.

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Recent changes at all stakeholder levels in commercial construction have driven a charge in refurbishing and extending existing building stock rather than building new [1]. Within the development industry, we must see the opportunities in retaining, upgrading, and extending to help create the offices of the future. The office has evolved over the past number of decades – client expectations for ‘floor-to-ceiling height’ has increased to allow brighter interiors and more openness on a typical office floor plate (e.g. the British Council for Offices (BCO) recommends a 2.8m minimum) [2]; servicing requirements have grown both in floor and ceiling voids (150mm and 550mm respectively); while design for fire safety, universal accessibility, and staff welfare facilities have prompted changes to the layout of a typical office core. Lift sizes have expanded, cycling facilities are paramount, while fire escape and combustibility are key concerns.

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The expectations of office facades have also increased. Modern workplace facades must work harder to serve the dual purpose of communicating identity and integrating architecturally, while reducing the building’s carbon and financial cost going forward. Modularity, and off-site Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) have become a crucial part of early design consideration. An inability to meet sustainability targets has resulted in the demolition of some office buildings, and warranted justification for building new and better, albeit at an expensive up-front carbon cost. Through design thinking, architects must share our commercial design knowledge to help clients evaluate real estate opportunities where refurbishment can optimise strategic outcomes.

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Take for example a recently completed project in Dublin by my own practice RKD: Baggot Plaza for client Kennedy Wilson. Originally an 8500m² 1970s office across three buildings in a prime Dublin 4 location, intensive study determined that the existing building structure was capable of being stripped back and extended on several sides, then fitted out to the level expected of the fit-out tenant market. Re-using and extending the primary structure gave the development a one-year head start on competing new build developments. The design solution doubled the square meterage to 17,000m² while retaining the existing building shell. A new facade was added, and double-height spaces were introduced to increase daylight internally. The project was completed in eighteen months, a significant programme reduction on a new build, while improving the BER from F to B1, and achieving LEED Gold in the process.

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With this in mind, the recently implemented Dublin City Development Plan 2022-2028 [3] now requests the justification for demolition of buildings as part of the planning process. This justification refers to both the retention of our built heritage, and the carbon implications of demolishing and rebuilding. This move toward retention mirrors what commercial clients are seeking – a building that is truly sustainable given the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) demands of tenants in the current office market.

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Architects should work with clients to establish realistic and achievable sustainability targets at an early design stage and explore the benefits of retaining as much of the carbon-intensive structure in an existing building as possible. This might mean maintaining the structural grid and extending both laterally and vertically, looking at a new facade, or adding a new core that meets many of the modern building regulation requirements. Most often, many of these decisions help improve the performance of a building and keep the dreaded ‘stranded asset’ at bay. The benefits of retention can also yield more than sustainability targets. Good architectural practice should include a commercial design methodology which explores the potential for incorporating existing buildings as part of new development. This has both cultural and heritage benefits, more readily integrating new developments into existing urban contexts.

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There is more to the Dublin City Development Plan 2022-2028 which impacts on our decision to build afresh. New office buildings over 10,000m² now must provide 5% of office net internal area as ‘Community Use’. This requirement is new to the Dublin office market and has added cost uncertainty to an already expensive construction process. Car parking allowance has also been reduced to zero in certain areas such as Zone 1, an inner-city zone served by more public transport. As this can still be seen as a risk in attracting certain tenants, an alternative approach might be to retain the building and a proportion of the existing car parking while omitting the 5% requirement for additional community space, thus incentivising adaptive reuse.

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In summary, we must see the inherent potential of refurbishment, conversion, and extension in creating commercial developments that minimise embodied carbon and maximise the character of existing buildings. While admittedly not all buildings are appropriate for refurbishment to current standards and expectations, good commercial design practice and policy incentives should be focused on providing the knowledge and tools to help prioritise reuse in realising their strategic ambitions.

At a time when housing has become such a pressing social, economic, and political issue, it is important to ask the questions: how do we actually want to live together? And how do the places we live in get produced? Examining international examples of innovative, self-determined housing reveals the fundamental connection between modes of production and habitation.

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How can our domestic environments reflect emergent patterns of daily life to create resilient social spatial configurations? Can multi-residential environments offer more than an atomised accumulation of individual units and traverse the polarity of the house vs the apartment; a polarity evident in housing typologies in Ireland and ingrained in the national psyche? Challenging the established model requires alternatives to reductive developer-led/market-driven housing provision which distorts our relationship to the places we inhabit by turning them into high-risk commodities.

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The Translating Housing research project briefly described in this article sought to explore these questions by analysing a series of Berlin-based case studies of diverse and innovative approaches to housing typologies, financing, and development models, in particular various forms of co-housing.

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These Baugruppen (building groups) and particular forms of Baugenossenschaften (building co-operatives) have involved groups of people coming together to secure sites or empty buildings, design their future homes collectively, and in some case participate in aspects of the building process. These forms of self-organised housing are customised to residents’ needs regarding size, layout, interior fit-out, etc. By eliminating the risk – and associated profit margins – of building investors/developers, the buildings that emerge from these processes are generally of a higher quality and more cost-effective than traditional alternatives.

Baugruppen projects effectively divide the finished building into individual apartments within a larger framework as collectively agreed by all residents. Baugenossenschaften provide affordable housing in the middle ground between ownership and rented accommodation, such that cooperative members are simultaneously both landlords and tenants, and the building is effectively independent of the free market’s speculative circle [1].

The negotiation inherent to such projects allows the tensions and potentials sparked by individual and shared needs and aspirations to be explored. Amenities that would not be financially feasible for individual households – shared roof terraces, collective kitchens, guest apartments, common gardens, shared workspaces, etc. – are made possible by collective investment. These resources support the social resilience and flexibility of collective housing models, and were particularly valuable during COVID-19 lockdowns [2].

The diversity of dwelling types typical of these medium- to high-density residential typologies is often coupled with a reciprocal flexibility, allowing rooms or spaces to be transferred, or dwelling units to being swapped as residents up-scale, down-scale, or adjust their live-work configurations. The Ritterstrasse 50 project, by architects Ifau and Jesko Fezer and Heide and von Beckerath, for client GbR Ritterstrasse 50, is a good example of how this designed flexibility works. Simplicity in the building’s volume, structural strategy, and services design allows for highly personalised internal spatial configurations, with no two apartment layouts being the same.  

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Ritterstrasse 50 also illustrates the significance of shared spaces and facilities. Its generous common areas include a 159m² two-storey common area in the lobby, a roof terrace with summer kitchen, a laundry room, a shared wrap-around balcony, and a garden.

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Our Translating Housing research developed a methodology to illustrate the location and relationship of such spaces to the building’s organisation. These drawings are cross-referenced to specially developed graphic representations of the density, construction and site costs, programmatic mixture, shared and private amenity provision, and the organisational and funding models of each project. This methodology foregrounds the interconnection between design intent and underlying financial and organisational models, as it is only through an understanding of these interrelationships that the case studies can inform our thinking in other contexts.

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Berlin’s development authority plays an important role in facilitating these self-generating projects: by strategically using its own land assets, and by accommodating smaller networks, not just large housing providers. These strategies could be instructive for Ireland, as has been outlined by SOA (Self-Organised Architecture) [3] who suggest that such state facilitation could take the form of sale or allocation by lease of public land for community-led housing initiatives based on such European models [4].

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For example, at Ritterstrasse, a ‘concept-driven’ sales process was used, meaning the site was sold not for the highest offered price, but for the best value for the city in terms of social, architectural, urban, and environmental criteria. Ritterstrasse 50 was selected because it proposed giving back part of the site as green space to the surrounding housing. Its emphasis on collective spaces and participatory planning processes was seen as an example of best practice for urban housing; a practice of people making the city and in so doing taking responsibility for it.

Our city’s name is in itself a reference to the body of water that it was founded upon - Dubh Linn. These rivers helped to shape the cities that grew around them. For much of history, the development of these cities has been intrinsically linked to their relationship with water. Acting as a main artery, the coursing rivers acted as sources of nutrition, hydration, sanitation, paths for trade, and most intriguing for us, as public spaces. 

Looking at a plan of Dublin, we can see how the city grew from the river. James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, as Viceroy of Ireland during the seventeenth century, helped to define the city's relationship with the Liffey by developing the quays, the longest of which still holds his namesake; Ormond Quay. Inspired by his travels through France and the opulent grandeur of Paris, he declared that buildings should now face the river – as they do on the Seine – whereas before they turned their backs on it. However, despite this early urban intervention, it is these quays – these public spaces – that this author believes to be hardly working. 

The Liffey is the spine that holds the capital city. Along this artery, the quays have always acted as a natural route from east to west. However, making your way along the quays, whether walking, cycling, or driving, you feel as though you’re always fighting for space; for your right to the road. The car takes priority along the quays, dominating the space, and even acting as another barrier and hazard to pedestrians and cyclists. When walking on the quays, at the river's edge, you feel trapped; you’re given a narrow path and are surrounded both by the natural barrier of the water and the man-made danger of traffic, oftentimes impeded by bus stops, public bins or the – although beautiful – mature trees planted on the footpath; another thing fighting for its own space. The few cafes and eateries that are along the quays – businesses that by nature are outward facing – have little or no room to present themselves, further adding to the transitory nature of the street. 

Running west-east, the Liffey can be described as an avenue made of water. Framed on either side by its river-facing buildings, it still maintains its Georgian character. A style that is elegant but also austere in its outward restraint. These many facades are built right up to the property boundary line, making an already narrow footpath seem smaller. They are often void of any relief [1] which can make them seem to mesh together to create an impression of a singular wall, closing you in. There are, however, some points of respite to these issues; the meshed singular wall is broken up at times by certain inlets like at Liffey Street or on Wood Quay by the Civic Offices. The Liffey boardwalk, by McGarry Ní Éanaigh Architects and opened in 2000, was an ambitious and innovative project designed to address the chaos of the quays, but, unfortunately, it is generally avoided due to anti-social behaviour. 

In direct comparison to Dublin, Timișoara is another city that was founded on a river – this time, the Timiș River in Transylvania. A smaller city, comparable in population to Belfast, its relationship to its river through its waterfronts takes a different approach. The city in its modern form developed from a star-shaped fortified settlement which sat on a raised bank of the river amid marshlands. Over time, as the city grew beyond the capabilities of its walls, it began through hydrographical projects to drain the marshlands and create a new waterway in place of the river, the Bega Canal. 

When strolling along the waterside it’s easy to forget that the landscape you’re walking through is highly engineered; tree-filled parklands populate the sloping embankments either side of the canal. The water level sits lower than the city level, further creating a sense of separation from the busy city and cars that run along the roads above the embankments. Large wide steps leading down to the river invite you to sit by the water’s edge. There are restaurants and bars with terraces interspersed along the embankments. Considered civic structures with bike paths, benches, and well-designed lighting at night allow it to take on another life in the evening – there is even a nightclub built into the underside of a bridge. Boat tours lazily cruise up and down the water adding to the sense of relaxation. To say that this space is working hard seems almost ironic because the atmosphere is so natural and effortless, as though it’s not working at all. 

I don’t mean to suggest that the solution for Dublin’s quays is the Bega waterway – the two are almost the antithesis of each other. Through varying geography and historical development, the two offer very different atmospheres. However, I think that the city’s quays have enormous potential, and there is much that can be done to improve them. Generosity in pedestrianised areas for new developments can attract more businesses, leading to more footfall and in turn help to dissuade any antisocial activity. Further planting of broadleaves would complement the existing mature trees. A good public space is one that can accommodate a variety of activities and functions – the quays in Dublin are still playing catch up.

Most Dubliners can recall the sight of unusually-dressed adolescents gathering in Central Bank Plaza on Dame Street. These teenagers often sported a variety of long blue bangs, band shirts, piercings, and sometimes broke out in impromptu musical performances. We know subcultures such as punks, goths, rockers and skaters. Some will be familiar with emos, spicers or scenes. But do you know of the ‘bankies’? These Irish-based adolescents were named after the national institution they gathered outside. They encompassed many subcultures within one community, one’s tastes or identity did not matter for inclusion. It was a community where simply being different was celebrated and safe. You might have been a rocker, a goth, a rap music fan or pop music fan.

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Central Bank Plaza’s origins as a hangout space for the goth and punk scenes seem to have started in the 1980s [1]. This may have been partly due its proximity to numerous alternative shops and venues in the pre-gentrified Temple Bar, which was a hub of sorts for alternative music cultures. Large open spaces have typically been a rarity in Dublin city centre, as a space it was quite adaptable, being capable of holding protests, rallies or simply offering a respite in the city with benches and a south-facing aspect. The deep cantilever of the former Central Bank also provided a degree of shelter during rainfall. The location has been favoured in the past for many high-profile protests such as ‘Occupy Dame Street’. For a five-month period in 2012, pallets, tents and makeshift structures adorned the plaza in a protest against economic injustice and inequality.  

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Over time, the groups occupying Central Bank Plaza claimed the space, some even formed their identity around its location. In sharp aesthetic contrast to the anti-establishment style of punks, goths, and rockers, the Central Bank building, designed in 1980 by Sam Stephenson, was brutalist in style and authoritative in character. This begs the question, is the Central Bank Plaza an accidental success story for ad-hoc usage of an urban space? It was undoubtedly never designed for with these particular end-users in mind. I endeavoured to find out why it was popular through a series of interviews with former bankies.

One regular attendee, Jack Barrett, believed its popularity was an indication of the lack of good public spaces in the city suburbs:

’I guess it started for me, and probably for a good few people, because of where we grew up. I'm from Drimnagh, just outside the city centre. It's a very working-class area and even now, there are not a whole lot of amenities or things to do for kids from that 12-16 age range – if you're not into like football or normal things – so town was the best place for us to go to on weekends to have something to do’ [3].

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Jack added that back in the days when communication with peers was more sporadic, through online services like Bebo/MSN, it was easier to agree on a familiar and established location such as the Central Bank when organising a meet-up, with less chances for confusion or required clarification [4]. The Central Bank had instant name recognition and was an urban landmark for wayfinding. Thoughts of security were critical for young adolescents. In a central, busy area, the location had visibility and passive surveillance. As Bebhinn Cullen, a frequent attendee, noted:

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‘It was just a landmark that was close to everywhere and safe because we were out in the open and there was really nowhere else for us to go in town! Stephens Green was an option, but it had a closing time and was a bit dangerous too ... Everyone's bus stop was close. And we were never told to move on for loitering’ [5].

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Cullen added that being able to see business workers constantly passing by, including in the Central Bank itself, was a reminder of the passive security, expecting you would likely not be harmed in such a visible location [6]. The plaza was very well-served by public transport.

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Once occupied, the space could be animated and unpredictable. Bebhinn reminisces on how you could go to meet a friend and a few hours later you may be involved in recording a music video for a rap song [7]. Many of the attendees of the plaza would have been considered different by regular society, given their alternative choice of clothing and hairstyles. However, this ‘otherness’ extended past musical or stylistic subcultures into minority communities such as the LGBTQI+ community.

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Lynn McGrane, a self-proclaimed bankie who met her husband during their teen years at Central Bank Plaza, discussed how a vast portion of the group were members of the LGBTQI+ community. In fact, it would have been common to see large groups holding rainbow flags as cloaks on the plaza on pride days. McGrane notes:

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‘The thing that above all else we all had in common is that we just weren't considered normal. Because of how we've come on in the last few years, people often forget how far behind Ireland was in terms of social progression’ [8].

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Only thirty years ago, in the 1990s, same-sex sexual activity was illegal [9]. Those with shorter memories may be shocked that there was such a recent time when being a part of the LGBTQI+ community in Ireland was dangerous in public. That said, even today we still hear too often of malicious attacks on individuals for merely not disguising their sexuality in Dublin city [10].

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The bankies’ home in Central Bank started to come to an end when it was announced that the plaza was being sold to private developers in 2017 [11]. Initial speculation of the privatisation of the space caused unease within the community, for whom the place had personal and collective significance. The loss of public space to gentrification is not unusual, however in this case the development heralded the potential destruction of the bankies’ ‘natural habitat’. Developers, elected officials, and detached members of the public may have seen gentrification of this urban space as a way to remove the 'nuisance' of loitering teenagers. Drug and alcohol use was a regular hobby of some attendees [12]. This may have provided an argument for redevelopment as a means to apparently limit anti-social behaviour. Similar unease was created during the late 1990s, with defensive railings erected outside the steps of Central Bank, preventing access due to claims of anti-social behaviour [13].

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Where are the bankies now? Some sources claim that they have relocated to an area dubbed ‘emo green’ within Stephens Green. Ultimately, Central Bank Plaza unwittingly provided a space in our community for alternative outsiders and LGBTQI+ people for over three decades. Urban planners and designers can learn from this; safe spaces for vulnerable adolescents in our cities should be celebrated and preserved. Nothing could be considered more punk and anti-establishment than the bankies of Central Bank Plaza bravely celebrating their differences loud and proud, in the public view of those that would call them unsightly. As Lynn McGrane astutely described it:

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‘As f**ked up as we all were (are?), in one way or another, being around others who were willing to talk about it when everyone else wanted you to just be quiet and conform was just amazing’ [14].

The 2023 Climate Action Plan [1] sets out massively ambitious targets for reducing transport emissions by over 50% before the end of the decade. The plan cites a modelling approach that demonstrates these emission reductions are possible. This modelling exercise was given a target emissions reduction and the outputs of the model demonstrate which modes of transport we need to use more of, and less of, to reach this target. However, these models can in some instances fail to consider the most important part about transport planning — the citizen and the length of time it takes for behavioural change to happen.

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If one wonders why are we in this situation in the first place, and why is it that we have to cut our emissions in transport so dramatically in such a short period of time. The answer to this question is because we simply have to — the climate emergency is such that waiting around for other solutions to come along or ‘magic technologies’ that will do the heavy lifting for us is no longer a viable solution. The reason we have to do so much now is because we have done so little for so long in transport investment. In 2019, it was shown that 74% of all of the trips we take in our country are done so by private car [2], and outside of Dublin the usage of public transport is sparse at best [3]. The decades of investment in major road schemes have also locked our citizens into a car centric culture, making the car the most attractive option to many and resulting in any change to this status quo being very difficult to achieve. Ireland is also a relatively sparsely populated country, compared to our European neighbours [4], and this makes the provision of public transport and active modes much more challenging.

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In 2022, the OECD published a comprehensive analysis of the transportation sector in Ireland with a detailed review of the current strategies being pursued to reduce emissions [5]. The messages from the report were very clear — to have the type of systemic change that's required in our country involves a substantial reorganisation of the public realm in Ireland. The report also indicated that our current strategies of promoting the use and uptake of electric cars was regressive, and could potentially result in the car population in our country increasing. Research that was published by myself and my colleagues in 2022 demonstrated that the majority of electric cars in Ireland tend to be in the most affluent parts of our country. These are the areas where people drive the least [6].

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Minister Eamon Ryan has said on several occasions that the transportation emissions targets will be the most difficult to achieve. He is correct, and this is mainly because how and why we travel are primarily linked to where we work and to where we live. For the majority of us, these locations rarely change. Equally, the time to plan, evaluate, and deliver large-scale, and even small-scale, public transport and active travel takes far too long in this country.  Changes to the built environment for more sustainable transport modes tend to be a lightning rod for heated debate, and small changes to local areas end up on the front pages of national newspapers. The type of changes that are required to cut emissions before the end of the decade by the magnitude required could cause severe division — unless they are handled in a way that brings everyone along the journey.

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While I do think that we can achieve this 50% reduction in transport emissions, I do not think it can be achieved in the timelines outlined by the Climate Action Plan 2023. This is mainly because the delivery of large-scale transportation infrastructure takes a significant amount of time, and is very expensive.  Many of the large-scale public transport infrastructure projects like Metrolink or the light rail lines planned in Dublin and Cork require a large amount of planning and capital expenditure in a short period of time. Delivering the amount of infrastructure required in Dublin alone, in such a short space of time, would seem to me to be similar to a city planning to host a summer Olympic Games. Cities across the world that have achieved the sustainable transport goals that we plan for in Dublin, and our other cities, have been undertaking this change over decades. It takes a lot of political bravery to embark on these changes. It can take decades to plan and deliver large-scale public transport infrastructure, but equally, it can take that period of time for behavioural change to happen. We are often told about the cycling cultures in the Netherlands and in Denmark, but these cultures did not happen overnight and took decades to deliver.

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To loop back to my initial opening statement, I believe that just because the models say something is possible, does not necessarily mean that it is feasible, or even achievable. Decades of car-centric planning and dispersed settlement patterns are at odds with the ambitions outlined for change in our mobility system. The 2022 OECD report [5] on transport in Ireland stressed that local level and community engagement will be key to achieving our goals. Achieving our climate goals will need both dialogue and consensus at a local level, matched with a national ambition of scale and complexity equivalent to the construction of Ardnacrusha in the 1920s to be successful.

Hanging out with peers in the urban public realm is an important part of many teenagers’ everyday lives. But there is growing awareness that teenage girls can feel unsafe and are frequently subject to sexual harassment in public space [1]. Evidence shows that many outdoor spaces designed for teenagers do not meet the needs of girls [2]. Designers and researchers are seeking to address this by co-designing public space with teenage girls [3].

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Make Space for Girls is a UK-based organisation campaigning for public spaces to be designed with teenage girls in mind. Currently, they say, spaces designed for teenagers – including skateparks, multi-use games areas (MUGAs) and even public parks – are dominated by boys [4]. Asked why they don’t hang out in parks, girls say there is nothing there for them [5]. Make Space for Girls has facilitated a number of co-design initiatives with teenage girls in order to better understand why they feel excluded. Through these initiatives, girls have developed interesting ideas including face-to-face seating designed for chatting, swings teenagers can hang out on, more toilets, and ‘walking loops’ or pathways which girls can wander along together and feel safe.

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These kinds of initiatives are not unique to the UK. Her City is a joint UN Habitat/Global Utmaning initiative which ‘supports urban development from a girl’s perspective’. To facilitate urban planners and designers, Her City has created a toolbox [6] which sets out a detailed process for working with teenage girls. This toolbox includes nine stages, from recruiting participants to designing ideas and ultimately, implementing change. In Weimar, Germany, for example, implementation of the Her City programme has raised awareness of gender-sensitive planning. Girls’ proposals for Weimar include the addition of signage across the city with information on female pioneers [7].

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There have also been moves towards co-designing public space with girls in Ireland. Sarah Flynn is the founder of A Level Playing Field, a not-for-profit interested in ‘what makes a girl-friendly city’. She has worked with teenage girls aged 12-16 to reimagine Charleville Mall in Dublin 1.

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The project unfolded across a series of workshops. Initially the group explored ideas around why public space should be designed better for girls. According to Flynn, one difficulty is that the challenges girls contend with are normalised: ‘growing up it’s just your reality, you don’t think, “I feel unsafe”’, she says, ‘it’s just a norm’. During the early phase of the project the girls thought about their everyday experiences in public space, identifying, sorting, and mapping spaces into categories such as: ‘where I feel happy’, ‘where I avoid’, and ‘where I see lots of other girls’. From there, they discussed why they avoided or liked certain areas. Several themes emerged, including safety, feelings of exclusion, and the need for more playful spaces. Flynn says, ‘people don’t realise teenagers want a playful space to hang out and so they end up having no space of their own. The girls want to meet friends outdoors but say they have nowhere to go’.

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Having identified specific problems, the girls developed sketch ideas for the improvement of public space. Working with Paola Fuentes de Leon, a planner based in Belfast, the group began visualising their proposals. ‘There were lots of sketches,’ says Flynn, ‘lots of written ideas and rough work. Then Paola took everything and created renders of the proposals using CAD and photoshop’.

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The girls’ proposals to improve Charleville Mall include increased lighting, seating for hanging out and chatting on, and playful interventions such as trampolines embedded in the paving. Renders of the girls’ ideas suggest an inviting, vibrant, and safe-looking space.

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It’s almost forty years since the seminal publication Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment argued that design processes should include women and under-represented groups [8]. Make Space for Girls and A Level Playing Field have shown the potential for co-design with teenage girls to create more inclusive public spaces. Susannah Walker and Imogen Clark, founders of Make Space for Girls, are unequivocal about the need for change: ‘Boys have dominated the landscape for too long and it’s time we made spaces that work for girls’ [9].

A city is a hard thing to capture. Dublin’s city blocks are defined by layers of orders ingrained upon the city over hundreds of years through cyclical processes of construction and destruction, forming a superimposition of past and present technologies, aesthetics, communities, and uses. The innate complexity of this matrix of social/material/economic/cultural/communal lives means the city’s nature, as a thing, always escapes our grasp, morphing into something else as soon as we feel we understand it. This process of change can feel as gradual and natural as a garden changing over seasons. But the idea that cities develop through a kind of natural chaos is misleading. It ignores the forces behind the chaos, allowing certain stakeholders and ideologies (manifested through building) to take over, implementing their version of the city.

This is why it’s important to consider not only what we build, but the processes by which it gets built; the way we structure the city and the ideals behind this structure. This article reflects on urban growth in Dublin through two blocks shaped by different development processes, considering the impacts of different paces and scales of development on the neighbourhoods these blocks form.

1. Charlemont Street: block-scale redevelopment

Building inevitably leads to an imposition of order; it restructures, attempts to harmonise, adds new frameworks and rhythms. Bounded by Charlemont Street, Harcourt Road, and Richmond Street is a block that characterises Dublin’s development over the last twenty years. This block has been almost completely demolished and rebuilt within the space of a few years, replacing mixed-scale building types with a highly rational, monolithic masterplan. This type of development stems from the surge in investment post-2008 Financial Crisis, which saw large investors shift from acquiring high-end buildings to buying whole areas of city to rebuild by their own design, by extension turning neighbourhoods into commodities. 

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This block was first built on in the late eighteenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth century was covered with a Georgian grain, cut through with irregular laneways. This grain was gradually filled in with smaller tenement houses, with the main streets characterised by small offices and retail units. The mid-twentieth century saw the block thinned out and overlaid with a modernist housing development built by Dublin Corporation, beginning with Michael Scott’s Ffrench-Mullan House flats in 1944, and an additional four blocks in 1969, the Tom Kelly Flats. 

The majority of those two centuries of development has been erased within the last ten years, beginning in 2014 with the demolition of the flats after their land was sold as part of a Public-Private Partnership scheme for their regeneration, between DCC and McGarrell Reilly Group, resulting in the construction of Charlemont Square. The land was sold by the government in order to modernise the flats, but only about 30% of the new complex’s 260 apartments are social housing, reduced from the initial agreement to provide over 50% social housing units. Thirty-seven of the flats’ original tenants remain [1]. The majority of the rest of the scheme is made up of private accommodation (with rents beginning at over €3000/month) and large offices with tenants including Amazon, in addition to retail spaces and community sports facilities.

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This development also saw the closure of the Bernard Shaw, a pub which acted as a cultural hub. Further sale of publicly-owned land occurred in 2019 when the block’s northwest corner was sold to Charledev DAC, after an initial vote which rejected the proposal to sell. Thirteen small retailers which lined the northern end of the block closed in 2019 after planning permission for the north end of the block was granted to Slievecourt DAC (who are linked to the same investment company as Charledev, Clancourt). All of these buildings were demolished in early 2023, after sitting empty for four years. As all of this development happened at once, the whole block has been essentially inaccessible and unoccupied since 2014, meaning any patterns of use which existed within it have been wiped out.

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In this way, a neighbourhood which emerged over time by the hand of historic developers, city planners and local people, is replaced with a masterplan guided by development companies. Richard Sennet describes this process as "global capital imposing order” on the city [2]. This order has a logic of its own, one that isn’t founded in the reality of the city, but in a rationale of quantification and maximisation of value. Dublin’s architecture has been determined by capital since the speculative developments of Georgian builders, before even Haussman’s redevelopment of Paris, which marked the point when urban development became deeply tied to the economic market, with land values becoming linked to the safety, cleanliness, and beauty of the neighbourhood. 

Despite this long history of private development structuring urban space, there is a difference between ordering for beauty and harmony, and formulaic order for mass production. The gigantic scale of present-day developments results in neighbourhoods which tend towards homogeneity. The hyper-fast pace demanded by the market leaves little time for community involvement in design, and rigid masterplanning leaves no space for the unexpected alterations and appropriations which characterise dynamic urban spaces. Predictable and balanced forms are favoured in these mega-developments as when a city block becomes capital, it must be easily quantifiable and controlled. Charlemont Square is made up of five large buildings, which form eerily flat, pristine vistas within the block and along the main streets, the lack of any irregularities or defining features creating space which feels more liminal than public. The sole survivors are two protected structures, solitary and exposed in the rubble, now a strange and clumsy counterpoint to their glassy neighbours. These aesthetic changes are symptoms of a much deeper shift, as the block passes from many owners to few, and patterns of diverse forms and scales give way to large uniform structures. In this way, the block becomes more rigid and inflexible to change, as both the architecture and the use are highly ordered and predetermined.

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This is not to critique the design of the neighbourhood, which is one of many similar developments in Dublin’s city centre (see Townsend Street, Little Green Street, Blackpitts, Newmarket Street etc.), but to reflect on how the systems within which it is developed result in a place which does not embody the communities that use it or the city that it forms part of. Charlemont Square does offer a newly porous public terrain, with passageways and connections across the block. However, it remains to be seen if these spaces can support the dynamic and diverse uses an intense and well-used public realm demands. The voids left in capital-driven development often don’t speak of potential, but of wasted space, as this is a void that you cannot occupy. It is a public realm which the public cannot really interact with. An intensely used urban space stems from the combination of many different types of activities and people, resulting in an increased breadth of possibilities for use. Saskia Sassen describes the effect of mega-developments on neighbourhoods as ‘de-urbanisation’, as this range of potentials is squashed by the vast footprint, eroding much of what makes a city ‘urban’, even though density increases exponentially. This underscores the fact that “density is not enough to have a city”; it’s not just about building things, but about how we build them. No matter how good the design or expensive the technologies used, you cannot replicate the ‘urban’ condition if there is only one hand creating it.

2. Parnell Street: incremental growth

On the east leg of Parnell Street an order fixed years ago can still be read; a grain and a facade in place since the nineteenth century. The long, narrow rectangular plots, lined on the street edge by a steady ordered terrace, provide a strict rhythm which facilitates disordered growth within. An order here is a set of spatial rules for an area of city, which allow the disorder of individuals to co-exist, and elements to develop at different rates within the assemblage. The void space at the back has been filled in over time, resulting in granular forms, an accumulated mass of accreted pieces which rest and lean on each other. The technology behind these forms is basic, the materials cheap, accessible, and easily adaptable, lending the structures a transient quality. They are built to be changed or removed, evolving at the pace and scale of the individual.

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Within this framework, the layers of influence from many individuals, over many years of living and working, can be seen. Order is subverted by the agency of the inhabitants. Through this series of adaptions, a kind of backdoor vernacular emerges, an un-masterplanned territory of strange forms and unreconciled materials, junk, and paint and surveillance cameras and flowers and washing lines, within the confines of a burgage plot. There is space for undetermined form here; cumulative and permanently incomplete, a constantly beginning conversation between past and present. 

As the structures are built over time, communities and patterns of use can adjust as the physical environment changes. This kind of slow, cumulative process offers not quite an alternative to prevalent development processes, but an ethos, which opens the door to imagine a different way of developing. I don’t hold this up as a perfect piece of city, but to examine this soft, stitched version of a city, the likes of which can be observed all over Dublin. It represents a highly adaptive and flexible evolution of urban fabric, embodying both the character and past of the place, while still facilitating it to change. It offers a language which can negotiate between elements from different eras and technologies, giving an idea of how existing structures could be retained and reconciled with new ones, stitching together disparate scales and aesthetics. There is vast potential for re-use of existing structures through the addition of new layers and attachments which can create new connections and activate existing buildings in unexpected ways. 

There is a poignant instability to this block which somehow captures Dublin’s new currency of overhaul; its forms seem to accept that things fall apart, and can be stitched together again. 

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Not just architecture, but also the processes through which architecture is conceived and constructed, are a spatialisation of the political and social powers which guide the city’s formation. While redevelopment and masterplanning are not inherently negative, the way they are carried out may be; as they are always in support of and collaboration with certain forces and powers, whose values may not be aligned with the greater social and spatial good of the city. The aesthetic homogenisation visible in many contemporary large-scale developments in Dublin is a sign that the strongest agent in building the city is now the market. The city could be a place of play, a place with space for disorder which accepts the potential and necessity of the unknown and the unexpected. The city must be able to develop at large scales, but the way we develop should reflect a re-aligning of values, which seek not purely economic profit but also social profit and ecological sensitivity, through renewal, layering, and diversity of form, to build a city which we can recognise as our own. 

Planning systems tend to be better at preventing what they don’t want than enabling what they do want. The Planning and Development Bill is process-driven: it is to be hoped that its effects on the practice of architecture – on how we move between design stages – will be positive, but we shouldn’t look to it for design intent. Indeed, the component of the Bill that might most effect how we design is notable for its lack of detail. Urban Development Zones (UDZ) have the potential to change how and what we design. They define a mechanism by which the planned use of lands is specifically designated by local authorities with early public engagement to restrict what landowners can do with land within these zones, unless they accord with the designated intention. UDZs potentially move power back to public authorities to say what is developed; they could take Ireland toward much-envied Dutch or German models of development. Housing for All – the source of the UDZ concept and one of three docments that arguably most influence what we design [2] – limits its concerns to only one sector of the built environment: housing. For a broader demonstration of planning intent, we need to look to the National Planning Framework: Ireland 2040 (NPF) and the Climate Action Plan.  

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The Climate Action Plan – across its 2019, 2021 and 2023 iterations – is clear in its intent. An urgent response to the climate crisis is required. Across various sectors it describes change needed and pathways to achieving this change. Spanning from the level of the building in its development of performance standards and its promotion of low-carbon construction, to the level of the settlement level in its creation of pathfinder decarbonising zones, the Climate Action Plan’s implications for design are huge – a root and branch reassessment of the energy we use, not just to heat, cool, and light our buildings, but in the production and transport of construction materials, construction processes, maintenance, repair, and disposal of buildings and infrastructure. Notwithstanding this, spatial planning, design, and architecture are only a small part of the Climate Action Plan’s concerns.  

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Planning in Ireland is based on the principle of subsidiarity – decisions should be made at the level closest to their effect. To understand the effects and intentions of planning toward design, we need to start at the top of the spatial planning hierarchy with the National Planning Framework ‘Ireland 2040’ and follow its vision down to the local level. The NPF describes intentions at the national level for how and where we design: a compact growth model of higher densities mostly within existing urban footprints; the growth of Dublin to be equalled by the combined growth of other cities; the combined growth of all Irish cities to be equalled by development directed towards key towns across the country. The Ministerial Guidelines that followed the NPF described in more detail what this compact growth model should look like in terms of densities related to transport connectivity, and what this might mean for forms of development. Having filtered down through the Regional Assemblies to work out the numbers, these national intentions find expression at the local level where their effects will be experienced as described by County or City Development Plan.

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The final document referenced here, Places for People: The National Policy on Architecture, makes important commitments to fostering a culture of architecture Ireland. It recognises how crucial design’s role will be in achieving the aims of the National Planning Framework and the Climate Action Plan in an equitable way across Irish society. Places for People reaffirms why architecture is important; Ireland 2040 tells us where and how it will be located.

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This returns us to Sorkin’s maxim. Architecture sometimes is participatory to varying levels, but it is not required to be. Design has no inherent analogue to planning’s subsidiarity. The statutory processes of planning are the mechanism by which concerns regarding the common good are brought to bear on the potentially individualised practice of architecture. Proposals are approved or rejected based on their compliance with local development plans which, for at least twenty years, have been placing increased emphasis on describing their intended built environment – not just development standards, but urban structure, quality design, healthy place making, and sustainable neighbourhoods. The effects of architecture, in other words, as described by Places for People.  

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If together this demonstrates that encoded within the suite of documents the NPF oversees are a set of intentions toward architecture and design, can anything be said of its effects? No, not yet. The NPF has yet to reach its first review; the first generation of development plans that follow it have only recently been agreed. Instead, it may be more beneficial at this stage to push farther into the question of intentions. Since architectural quality largely remains absent from development management functions of the Irish planning system, how can a degree of design control be provided, responsive to the needs of the common good, as exemplified by the principle of subsidiarity?

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The failures of past models of urbanism need hardly be rehearsed here. Suffice to say that should architects, urban designers, and planners ever feel the urge to act as boosters for good intentions (over their failure’s very real social effects), they ought to keep a copy of poet Caleb Femi’s collection Poor to hand. A reflection on a childhood spent on the notorious and now demolished North Peckham Estate – described by Jonathan Glancy as the Athens Charter built ‘too quickly, too cheaply, too brutally and without the necessary skills’ [5] – Femi’s ‘A Designer Talks of Home/A Resident Talks of Home’ [6] should make even the most ardent evangelic formalist pause.

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Can we perceive within the foregoing an intention to limit architecture’s ability to experiment at scale? Probably yes, and not unreasonably: credit effects, not intentions. But experiments at scale gave us Barcelona’s Eixample, wherein a new model for urban expansion has provided near limitless variation at the level of the building plot, the urban block, and now the superblock.

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What is the effect, if in our intentions toward architecture we are ‘too suspicious of formal experiment and overly sanguine about the dispensability of architecture as an artistic practice?’ [7]. We avoid Femi’s North Peckham estate, sure, but we also miss out on Cerda’s Eixample.

According to Robert Parks, cities are "man’s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire"[1]. This definition may also go some way to illuminating a city's continued draw. In 2006, 50% of the world’s population lived in a city, however 68% of the population are projected to live in cities by 2050. In no small way, we all succumb to their bright lights. We hope to remake them, and in return, we hope that they will remake us.

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If we are to remake, and be remade, we must ask ourselves what makes a city creative? Is it opulent bars and clubs posing as "literary salons" of the 20s, while charging a small fortune for some liquor and ice; is it through classification – labelling areas of a city as ‘creative’ for no reason other than its central location and abundance of overpriced shops and restaurants; or, is it something deeper, something harder won and, most dishearteningly, easily lost.

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In Henri Lefevbre’s Right to the City, the author argues for the role of play and creativity in the face of work; positioning the place of play as belonging squarely in a city’s streets and public spaces where disorder, spectacle, and interaction abide [3]. I would propose that we should begin to harness our streets and public spaces for the latent power that they hold, and would suggest that the way to do this is through play. By reclaiming play as a right for everyone, adults and children alike, we may begin to reclaim our cities.

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My inspiration for this article began in 2019 on a trip to Solingen in Germany. On this trip, I found myself walking through its Brückenpark. As well as appreciating this park for its natural beauty, I was drawn in by one particular and unique feature – a trail of ten riddles, designed and conceived for the park in 2006 by the artist Ulrike Böhme [4]. These riddles lie inscribed onto steel plates which are dotted and hidden around the park's expanse. They can be solved by stepping onto the metal plate and awaiting  answer – told to you by a mysterious and disembodied voice. The act of stepping not only elicits a knowing nod and satisfied smile from the visitor, but also newfound knowledge of the location itself. Each panel contains not just a riddle, but also a story of connection to the area. They stand as an ode to time gone by, inviting thought, presence and, more than a little, intellectual challenge to current inhabitants.

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This park, and the time I spent there with my friends and the playful challenges that it offered, have stayed with me for the four years that followed. Why this longstanding memory? The answer, I would contend, is play. Play that brings togetherness, slows, re-connects, and makes. Play that connects people to themselves, each other, and what is around them.  

We can recognise numerous examples of play and its potential in a city’s fabric. It may exist in humorous incongruity, like a public living room found by a blustery pier [5], or it could be its wilful subversion of the mundane, whereby even the blandest objects become a game. In Marseilles, rubbish bins invite passers-by to "slam dunk" their drinks cans as they walk past [6]. Drawing attention to local examples of engagement with the creative benefits of play, it would be impossible not to mention the Irish not-for-profit organisation, A Playful City, whose focus lies in creating ore playful, healthy, and inclusive public spaces. Their work has included musical benches, or Beat Seats, in Hanover Quay in 2019, colourful zig-zag seating areas in Spencer dock, and ‘playful streets’ in Dublin’s inner city. The resounding feature of their methods is the level of community consultation. For play space, if inserted into an area and a community without consultation on the needs and desires of that community, is not play at all – it is a form of coercion, to be creative in a singular, expected way.

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Dublin City Council’s Everywhere, any day, you can play! is a document full of hope. It outlines Dublin’s intention to develop a citywide play infrastructure in order to ensure that streets, places, and things are interwoven into children and young people’s everyday lives. My challenge for the strategy is this – why is this just for children? The strategy defines play as "any behaviour, activity or process, initiated, controlled or structured by children themselves, that takes place whenever and wherever opportunities arise". If the intention is to develop a citywide infrastructure of play, I believe it should have the intention of ensuring that play, and its numerous creative and sociological benefits, is accessible to everyone.

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Technology has been harnessed to this end by London-based experience designers Pan Studios, who effectively co-opted its mediated engagement properties for more spontaneous ends. Their interactive 2013 initiative, Hello Lamp Post, invited a city’s walkers to engage in "conversation" with a city’s everyday objects and furniture, including lamp posts, post boxes, and parking metres. By texting a number with the objects’ unique codes, a user was "awoken"  prompting questions and observations for the speaker to reply to – with future activations built into each reply. Hello Lamp Post debuted in Bristol and has since been seen in Austin, Texas, and Tokyo [9].

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The answer, however, does not lie solely in technology. It lies in a willingness to think outside the box and to embrace the city as a space of potential for all. In the words of Jen Harvie, "everything means more than one thing – a nondescript doorway, invisible for some, is for others the gate to a magical garden, a place of work, worship or otherwise". For stronger communities, more creative cities, and happier citizens – let us play.

Every Irish town has a church, one at least, well-positioned locally; a place traditionally of communion and continually of memory, now part of a Western European trend of underuse and heading towards abandonment [1].

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A unique model of research-by-design for repurposing vacant churches has emerged in Flanders that is instructive for Ireland, given our mirrored societal shift from the dominance of Catholicism.

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Dialogue is emerging around the cultural value and significance of Irish churches, as their potential for reuse, and for better understanding ourselves as a society, is explored. In their exhibition at Housing Unlocked, David Lawless and Sophie Kelliher proposed adapting thirty-three Dublin churches for housing, churches that had been put forward by the Archdiocese for rezoning and rejected by Dublin City Council [2]. Since then, thirty-two further churches have been listed by the council for Residential Zoned Land Tax, though the Archdiocese has appealed this decision [3].

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Making Dust, by artist and researcher Fiona Hallinan, in collaboration with Ellen Rowley – currently at VISUAL Carlow – documents the arguably needless 2021 demolition of the Church of the Annunciation, a modernist landmark in Finglas, and the impact of that loss on a community. Giving attention to what was an important ‘space for communal experience and the rituals that mark the progress of life, whether cathartic or complicated in nature’, [4] the work raises questions about the protection of the places and behaviours that our communities value.

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Church vacancy doesn’t have to lead to the destruction of sites of collective experience, and with an eye too on the global climate emergency, demolition should be considered a last resort. Since the introduction of church policy plans in Flanders in 2011, whereby municipalities and church boards were invited to outline a long-term vision for the future use of every parish church, over one third of all parish churches, about six-hundred in total, have been listed for complete or partial repurposing [5].

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The Projectbureau Herbestemming Kerken (Project Office for Adaptive Reuse of Churches), or PHK, was established in 2016 to provide secular guidance for furthering church policy plans, by way of feasibility studies and assisting with funding applications. The feasibility studies, requested by local authorities for specific churches and carried out by multidisciplinary design teams, have numbered over sixty a year, and are collated online [6].

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Adapting underused or vacant churches in Ireland would be in line with government policy: since 2022, the Town Centre First approach emphasises the role of sustainable reuse and repurposing of existing building stock and assets in revitalising Irish towns. While the policy document recognises the detrimental effects of vacant and derelict properties on the ‘vitality and attractiveness’ of towns, the only mention of a church building is praise for McCullough Mulvin Architects’ adaptive reuse of St Mary’s in Kilkenny. This exemplary project transforms the thirteenth-century church into a museum and has been central to the ‘delivery of social, cultural benefit to a community’ [7].

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Though church reuse in Ireland faces the obvious obstacle of land ownership, and issues around secular occupation of sacred space, in Flanders this is overcome partly thanks to a Napoleonic structure – still in existence – where fabric committees (five laypeople appointed by the bishop) are responsible for the secular organisation of religious practice, including the maintenance of church buildings. As potential deficits in the budget of fabric committees are paid by local municipalities or the province, the responsibility for redundant churches is shared [8].

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Through the work of the PHK, redundancy makes way for the potential regeneration of towns and villages, and feasibility studies and open competitions allow for contributions from potential designers, no matter the size or age of their practice [9]. In an Irish context, the opportunity to contribute high-quality research-by-design would be available to young and/or small architecture practices – whose innovation and energy are often confined to domestic projects and their reconfigurations – as well as to more established firms with extensive experience and high turnover.

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While we have some fine precedent examples of adaptive reuse of churches in Ireland (Rush Library, another McCullough Mulvin project, is worth visiting), exploring the PHK’s research reveals surprising ideas, like the reimagining of the church of Don Bosco, St Niklas, by Open Kerk Studio as a sports hall, through the introduction of a raised floor that integrates the heating systems while protecting the original tiles [10]. While some design teams have focused on developing a methodology that can be applied to any church, and others have tested extreme conditions of site-specific intervention, interesting commonalities have emerged across a multitude of design proposals, such as a desire among designers and communities to retain some space for refuge, contemplation, and reflection, as was historically found in church buildings [11].

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One critique of the PHK is that it has yet to bring a design project to site, but it has created a body of research that illustrates the potential for underused churches in Irish towns to become significant sites of revitalisation and community.