When determining whether a space is working, in terms of accessibility, we often look towards details such as ramps and widened dimensions. However, for autistic people, atmosphere is perhaps an unexpected yet key element in whether a space is working hard or hardly working. Bright lights, uncomfortable textures, and certain sounds might deter autistic people from using a space so as to avoid becoming overstimulated and potentially having a meltdown.

The need for spatial alterations to facilitate the needs of autistic people is recognised in Ireland. Yet, the solution is often a momentary change of use in an existing building. For example, supermarkets (a typology notably found challenging by autistic people) often host quiet evenings, one night a week, when the usual bright fluorescent lights are dimmed and noise levels are controlled. Even Shannon Airport (the example I use for a building that is hardly working) has a sensory room which creates a space for autistic people to re-regulate themselves. However, these efforts are surface-level solutions for a deeper spatial issue. They highlight how unaccommodating these spaces are outside of limited quiet hours and singular rooms, and could be argued to be reminiscent of the spatial othering historically faced by autistic (and other disabled) people relegated to spaces parallel to the rest of society. [1]

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The Living Bridge on the University of Limerick campus, designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects,  is – perhaps unconsciously – an example of a public space that works hard for autistic accessibility. Spanning a particularly wild stretch of the Shannon River, where cormorants dry their wings on small islands and swans fish under trees that seem to almost float in the current, the bridge twists and curves from the main campus to the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. Upon stepping onto the bridge, two floor textures become apparent. On one side of an ebbing and flowing walkway, an aluminium surface gives walkers an extra spring in their step with a muted clunking sound underneath (which may appeal to sensory seekers). Meanwhile, a parallel path in a soft aggregated material seems to absorb force, muting the sound of walkers, joggers, and cyclists. Two alternative sensory experiences are available for bridge users to choose from or swap between.

The bridge is experienced almost as a series of rooms, with each stretch of ten metres or so offering a new view and a soft change of direction, resulting in a snake-like motion from one piece of land to the other. These bends provide a sense of privacy in what would otherwise be a long stretch of public land. This may be reassuring for autistic people due to their difficulties with social situations. The Living Bridge allows pedestrians to weave past each other almost on happenstance, thus avoiding anxiety about interacting with strangers.

In a similar vein, the concave wooden benches dotted along the perimeter of the bridge provide a sheltered resting space for the public to pause as they either relax or regather themselves with the help of the surrounding calming landscape. It has been noted that some autistic people may use their built surroundings to ‘ground’ themselves when overstimulated.[2] The slight nested nature of the benches with overarching glass sheets provides a momentary respite for someone overwhelmed by the bustling nature of a transitory space.

Lastly, the lighting on the bridge is coloured and soft. Positioned under the bridge, on the floor, and on the below-waist-level railing, the lights are in stark contrast to the bright white overhead lights often found in public space and are instead reminiscent of the colourful dark lighting often found in sensory rooms.

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As previously mentioned, Shannon Airport has a sensory room. However, the spaces outside of the sensory room create the harsh environment which warrants the need for a separate accessible room in the first place. Vast empty spaces feel like interior fields and provide few opportunities for tethering an overwhelmed body to the comfort of a hard and secure surface. Fluorescent overhead lighting is almost startling as it beams not only from above but reflects off the white polished floors below. Loud and regular announcements on the intercom are discombobulating. A sense of intense interiority is formed by the lack of windows, creating a claustrophobic space which does not signal any relief from what might be read by an autistic traveller as what is colloquially termed a “sensory hell”.

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In essence then, the atmosphere of a building can be seen as an essential element in determining whether a space is accessible or not (or rather, working hard or hardly working) to people with certain socio-sensory disabilities such as autism; perhaps best described by poet and art writer, Lisa Robertson: “...the entire body became an instrument played by weather and chance”.[3] Thus, in the case of autistic people, the small subtleties of the lighting, acoustics, textures – all the things which constitute atmosphere – can play the body like an instrument, leaving them overstimulated through no fault of their own.

“There was originally a bench here”, we were told. We had brought our own bench, fabricated in a garden in Inchicore, made from fragments of marble from a gravestone mason in Shankill and metal from a scrapyard in Rathmines. The previous bench was significant to at least this one bypasser, who stopped to talk to us, remembering how she would sit there with her son. 

For a few minutes our replacement reintroduced a place to stop, to rest and to look, and whatever else you might do with a bench, on the banks of the Grand Canal. And then with its aluminium legs removed and carried on bungee cords, marble bench top tipped onto the caster wheel tucked beneath the seat, it was rolled away, cold autumn sun once again hitting the old bench’s phantom outline in the tarmac. Invited by the Irish Architecture Foundation to build a bench as part of Dublin’s Open House Festival, reflecting on Dublin’s approach to public infrastructure through the vehicle of a humble seat, we transported our bench from place to place and talked to those we met along the way, about public space, and about Dublin.

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The bench has its own personality, made from bits of Dublin, yet looked quite at odds with everything around it. The seat consisted of three broken fragments of Carrara marble fastened to an armature of metal grating, laid on a pair of mismatched legs. The thing itself is quite different to what we sketched out when discussing what an object that embodies the character of Dublin might be. Yet somehow it must be a reflection of the city - it reveals another side, maybe an unexpected one, some hidden identity. Built through DIY methodologies, it was designed through the act of construction, in relation to the materials we found, the constraints of the city’s transport, and the skills we could learn from other friends here. The object manifests as an almost automatic response to that which was offered to us circumstantially, by the city; a reconstitution of ruined bits of urban waste, discarded things which nevertheless played some previous part in the grand narrative of Dublin. Breton described this as “the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths”, deciding that such spontaneously developed solutions are “always superior…rigorously fitting and yet somehow in excess of the need” [1].

This sense of excess is not something which could be ascribed to many public amenities in Dublin - the general discourse tends to be more one of lack, of exclusion. While excess is not an approach which should be generally applied to the city’s urban spaces in terms of material, there is definitely cause for more generosity of intention. In its excessive-ness the bench represents an attitude towards the shape and feel of our public spaces. It offers a portrait of a place which reveals itself rather than one which is preordained, a place which might offer many yet-unknown possibilities to the city’s inhabitants, which might embody its own value to our collective public life.

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The spaces around the Grand Canal in Portobello have already provided a case study for this accidental, or perhaps provoked, collective appropriation of public space. Earlier in the year, following the removal of an encampment of homeless people, many of whom were immigrants and asylum seekers, fencing was installed along the canal banks, displacing those living there, and excluding the public from a valued and diversely-used shared space. In response, a guerilla art installation was produced, led by Rank’n’File Collective, turning a physical marker of exclusion into a backdrop for works of protest, and expressions of disapproval from community members. 

“This fence is racist. This fence is anti-homeless. This fence is anti-community. This fence will be torn down” [2].

The fence became the framework for a public exhibition space, easy to hang works from, lined along a busy pedestrian path, an accidental design language for a public space of dissent, before being torn down by protesters and finally removed by Waterways Ireland and Dublin City Council. Lefebvre writes that “The street is disorder… This disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises” [3]. The design of public spaces is not a fixed production, but something which grows through occupation, formulating itself functionally and aesthetically through its unpredictable use and misuse.

This was not the first time this part of the city found itself at the centre of Dublin’s battle for non-commercial public space. Portobello Square has become emblematic of this tension, between the living city and the intense council oversight attempting to enforce both a public order and a fixed public aesthetic. 

The square was a popular social space and an important part of Dublin’s skate community, “a rare example of what can be on offer for anyone who wants a space to socialise in the city, without the need to pay for doing so” [4]. This was until its closure in 2021 to provide storage space for the construction of a new hotel, hoarding off a public amenity for the private use of a commercial entity, in return for the vague promise of future landscape redevelopment on the site. This came after a long period of protest and attempts by the square’s users to begin conversations around its development into a more sustainable public space through the provision of toilets and bins, actions which were returned with an increased Garda presence.

The harris fencing exhibition was an echo of a previous work by Reclaim Our Spaces, who pasted a participatory timeline on the sites surroundings in 2023, reflecting on the square’s value to the city and the implications of its redevelopment on local people. The fact that this redevelopment failed to reflect the character or use which the place previously embodied, in many ways actively suppressing those uses through the implementation of skate stopping furniture, shows the direct conflict of public infrastructure development with actual public sentiment. Between occupation, temporary closure, and potential formalisation, the square is in stasis.

The discourse around Dublin’s public spaces and infrastructures is a frequently negative one. As a symbolic object, the public bench represents many of Dubliners’ most deeply felt qualms with their city; homelessness, price inflations, diminishing cultural amenities, lack of non-commercial urban space. It embodies the idea of public infrastructure in general, as an object which invites anyone to stop and stay in a specific place, without cost or criteria. Public infrastructures are conduits for how we can interact with the city, as individuals and communities, and their presence implies a trust in the city’s inhabitants, simply to be and use their city as they see fit. As a designed, material object, a bench may proclaim the value we place on our shared urban fabric, on our city’s character. 

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Before arriving at the IAF’s exhibition space on Charlemont Walk, the bench travelled for one day around Dublin, hosting a series of discussions with local occupiers of public space and random passersby, who shared their time and views with us. What’s clear from these discussions is that, bench or not, people will find a place in the city to do what they want to. Yet a bench signifies a generosity, a shared amenity which somehow one expects as a right of the urban dweller, even for those who are less compelled or less able to carve out their place in the public realm through more unconventional means.

We are left to wonder - if so much happens in the absence of characterful, situated, or even basic infrastructure, what is possible if the public are supported in their inhabitation of our shared spaces?

The Irish Architecture Foundation commissioned rubble to make Benchmark on the occasion of Open House Dublin 2024. The commission is part of Rubble’s participation in GapLab, a programme of strategic mentoring and development for graduate architects to support and sustain risk and their critical practice in architecture.

You’ll eventually ruin a good thing if you’re always questioning it.

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Growing up in Longford you are conscious of the identity of this small town. A town which was stretched like a cloth in many ways and was never certain of what it wants to be. The Main Street, the Train Station, the Market Square and the Cathedral, each of the town's main focal points and civic centres all detached, becoming islands in their own right, separated by tarmac streams and rivers. 

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The rambling Park Road becomes Earl Street as it meets the station, then Ballymahon Street as it strides past the Market Square, and before you know it you are on Main Street with little give away that there has been any change at all; bar the street signs high on the corner buildings edges. As this long stretch of street intersects with the river Camlin it becomes Bridge Street, previously the gateway to the rest of the town, when Longford's centre was perched on the north embankment.

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A path taken by many crossing Ireland along the Slighe Assail, an ancient highway running East to West from the Drogheda area, upon which the urban centre of Longphort is believed to date from. Born around the fifteenth century with its inception as a Gaelic market settlement, Longford once trickled parallel to the north bank of the River Camlin. The original town ‘square’ or trapezoid was capped by a market house, flanked to the west by O’ Farrell’s castle and St John’s Church to the East. This square, unnamed, was once the epicentre of the ‘old town’, yet now it's little more than a chicaned byroad and car parking for the solicitors and dentists which occupy the grandest buildings sitting nearby. Contrary to its place of origin, along the clay banks of the river, Longford never intended to interact with the river so intensely – it was always about overcoming an obstacle, acting as a resting stop, halfway across Ireland. A town of streets, an arguably linear settlement with unrhythmic public space due to its origination as that of a road, uncertain what its hierarchical formation is.

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The development of the cavalry barracks in the early eighteenth century pushed public life south of the river, with industry and manufacturing happening along the south bank with businesses – such as a distillery, corn mill and tannery – making use of the fast flowing Camlin. But, as described in the Historic Towns Atlas of Longford, the greatest boost to the towns economic life  came with the Royal Canal in 1830; in part due to plans for the canal to pass only eight kilometres from the town and local traders successfully convincing the canal company to build a harbour in Longford town. With this significant investment of infrastructure, many large-scale buildings began to pop up around the town. A new market hall, a market square adjacent and, of course, storehouses and warehouses. This area to the south of the town had at this stage totally taken over the old town as the commercial centre, as larger institutional buildings and residences were built to the north. It is these two spaces that act as the focus to this discussion, as one playfully juxtaposes the other. 

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The town, in many ways, is a town of urban iconography. Upon the sports shirts and school crests sits the cathedral; at the end of the main street stretch sits the Barracks wall’s and gate’s; while the market building stands free in the largest open ‘square’. Everyone knows these icons, yet rarely interacts with them, only in a way akin to how you might interact with a ruin that you might spot as you pass by. This iconography is personified by St Mel’s Cathedral, which was described as ‘an act of faith in stone’, or as I like to think of it, a cathedral at the junction of four roads. The fabric as I said is stretched, it doesn’t have a coherent pattern, perhaps why the town has behemoths like St Mel’s, the Market Square and Connolly Barracks; landmarks with such purpose that it didn’t matter where they rooted as long as they are seen to be there.

This is where I begin to wonder if it is Longford's relationship to modernity that caused the urban downfall of both the ‘old’ town square in the north and the new market square to the south. The market square could be looked at as a piece of pre-modernist planning, with the aim of creating a societal appreciation for the town's fabric through the creation of a larger, more accessible space focused on access; facilitated by barge, cart, and automobiles. It is through the use of the public infrastructure network surrounding the market square that the space thrives. Yet, it is these factors that have created its ‘island’ issue. 

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When I return to Longford and I walk between the Market Square and Church Street, I now realise that neither of these spaces are really working hard for the town; it is the icons that occupy them that are working hard for themselves while it is everything that connects them that is hardly working. A town born on the side of the road lost its identity somewhere along the way, and now in its hopeful adolescence, I hope these spaces can be seen, reimagined as possible palazzos, surrounded by institutions that beam the richness of the town's history. If we stop looking at these squares from the seats of our cars and occupy the street, we might really begin to understand what needs to change to allow the town to hardly work for its appreciation again.