Recent developments in urban design discourse in Ireland include an Urban Design Symposium at UCD in 2023 [1], during which proposals to pursue an accreditation for urban designers within the RIAI were discussed. While the Symposium’s published proceedings highlight Irish architecture’s broad professional commitments, any meaningful engagement with environmental or climate adaptation issues were glaringly absent.

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While it is too easy to point fingers and add to the rhetoric and calls for further expansion to the architect’s professional activities, the issue as I see it is rather that the profession of landscape architecture within Ireland remains critically underdeveloped. Elsewhere landscape architects are leading on large-scale urban adaptation projects and clearly articulating their role in the compounding climate and biodiversity crises. The urgent need for such professionals has led some of the western world’s most prized schools of architecture – the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL; ETH Zurich; Pratt Institute – to inaugurate new professional programmes in landscape architecture in the past six years. To highlight the excitement and optimism that exists amongst its practitioners, Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets recently said that he was drawn to the field because “there’s still so many things to be invented" [2]. Landscape architecture, in other words, is finally having its moment.

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In this regard I wish to discuss the disciplinary formations and practices of landscape architecture which are relevant to the development of urban design in Ireland. I frame landscape architecture here in its most ambitious form as it intersects with processes of urbanisation and as it emerges as a field uniquely equipped to take on a diverse range of issues at the intersection of living systems, public space, and social injustices. I also argue that the landscape architect has as much of a claim today to lead on urban design projects as the architect, and that ongoing considerations to accredit architects as urban designers by the RIAI may end up excluding landscape architects from their work to adapt the city to the environmental and social challenges of the twenty-first century.

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Greater cultural awareness of the climate and ecological crises alongside an emerging consciousness of spatial injustices has positioned landscape architects as primary agents in the design of the built environment. This has perhaps been best articulated by Charles Waldheim in his 2016 publication Landscape as Urbanism, where he argues that traditional urban planning and design strategies – allied with the field of architecture – are incapable of reconciling with the pace and scale of urban change caused by both deindustrialization and market-driven urbanisation. As industry recedes from urban centres it is typically met with an inflow of global capital to capture opportunities for the making of buildings as financial machines. When the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced the sale of Brooklyn’s abandoned waterfront piers in the 1980s, plans to occupy the 1.3-mile waterfront with fourteen-storey apartment buildings quickly emerged, but community groups challenged such developments and mobilised political and financial support for the project that would become Brooklyn Bridge Park. Over twenty years, the planning and design of the 85-acre park was led by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), and since 2021 has provided contact with the waterfront, access to an array of outdoor programming from sports fields to moments of solitude, offered open space to diverse communities, and acts as a bulwark to worsening storm surges. Brooklyn Bridge Park is a masterful choreography of expansive and intimate public space, curated views, play opportunities, and a thickening weave of volumetric plant and landscape material that is everywhere missing from cities.

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While urban design and development typically limits the biophysical world to remaining parcels of open space, at Brooklyn Bridge Park this pattern is overturned. MVVA worked with economic planners to calculate the annual maintenance costs for the landscape – providing the logic for the volume of building development along its edges that would directly finance the park through property taxes. The subversion of architecture to landscape architecture in this case of urban development is instructive in longstanding debates over which design disciplines have the authority to guide decisions on the formation of the city. Yet the moment we find ourselves in – global heating, ecosystem devastation, landscape contamination, coastal vulnerability, stormwater pollutants, spatialised social inequities – requires a new kind of design intelligence led by the logic of landscape. While disciplinary formation in the design and planning professions mean that landscape architecture enjoys little public awareness or professional authority in Ireland, across the world landscape architects are leading on infrastructural urban design projects that are absorbing the shocks of these crises at the intersection of urban and living systems.

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An unspoken premise within urban design discourse is often that the work of landscape architects is responsible for unmooring architectural quality from urban space. To be sure, there are endless examples of poorly executed work by landscape architects, just as there are from architects. Yet for prominent architect and urban designer Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, the emergence of landscape architecture in recent decades from within parks and gardens – at least where he is looking – into streets and the rest of the urban fabric has resulted in his call for a total abandonment of landscape in the city: “If we want to respect and preserve nature, we must not confuse it or mix it up with the city … The city must withdraw into its own space, develop distinct boundaries and concentrate on itself, becoming dense, solid and as hard as stone" [3]. Lampugnani’s admiration for the historic Italianate urban fabric and the writings of Aldo Rossi have caused conceptual upset and led to the reasoning that denser and harder cities mean more space for nature in the hinterlands. But cities are not closed systems. 

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Landscape urbanism is being internationally embraced in the discourse of urban design to organise the urban fabric around biophysical systems. Yet discursive formations of urban design in Ireland, at least as suggested by the recent Research, Discipline, and Practice: UCD Urban Design Symposium 2023 seem to consider landscape only in its pictorial dimension. For example, in the symposium’s published proceedings the only engagement with a landscape framework is by Finola O’Kane. Here it is engaged as a “landscape perspective” (or viewshed) comparison of Irish town squares using late nineteenth century photography with more recent equivalents. O’Kane’s lesson is that both incidental developments that have taken place in town squares – such as at Moville, Co. Donegal – and deliberate design attempts – such as at Eyre Square in Galway – are both responsible for “the loss of significance in urban space" [4]. The historical photographs certainly attest to the existence of a kind of character which Irish architects are perennially preoccupied with. Yet these historical examples show either acres of sealed ground or lawn with trees as framing mechanisms. In other words, these spaces are highly impoverished biophysically, and while this may seem to be less of a concern in very small rural towns where opportunities may be more widely available to slow down and remediate surface water pollutants and capture airborne particulates through green infrastructure – these areas are increasingly inundated with water from more frequent storm surges and fewer opportunities to slow and absorb water upstream. These examples may be even less appropriate as visions for our urban future in Ireland’s larger towns and expanding cities.

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The project of the city in the twenty-first century will need to reformulate urban conceptions of character and aesthetics to grapple with compounding environmental and social pressures. Core to this project will require engaging plant and landscape material as figures in the urban fabric as they encounter and mobilize landscapes’ logic. Such a reorientation however is likely to prove challenging as they have historically featured as backdrop, framing, or embellishment to architectural logic and form. Compounding this challenge is the identification in recent decades of the complex phenomenon of “plant blindness” in Western society - that is the failure to notice or account for plants in daily life [5]. Although there are many theories that aim to account for landscape architecture’s inferior position in the design and planning fields, perhaps its association with plants which evolved to “avoid recognition” is perhaps one of the more compelling versions. Yet the collaborative endeavour with plants, soils, and water, mark landscape architects as the primary design experts working at the intersection of the built environment and living systems and such professional commitments are a critical contribution to leading the development of the twenty-first century city.

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I am sometimes asked whether architects can also do landscape architecture. Can landscape architects also make buildings? Prominent American landscape architect James Rose did design both gardens and houses for his clients. And if trained architects seek to become landscape architects through practice, then more power to them. But as design professionals operate in increasingly complex global conditions, I think we need to clarify the core knowledge of our fields and the relative value of those contributions to the built and unbuilt environment. Current discussions to provide an urban design accreditation for architects calls for broader conversations about what constitutes expertise in urban design, and how such accreditation would affect other built environment professionals who have as much of a claim to this work as architects. While the proceedings to the UCD Urban Design Symposium showed balanced views on who should be involved in urban design projects, some fervently advocated for this role to be led by architects. From where I stand, urban design constitutes a broadly interdisciplinary domain – it is hubris to suggest that the range of challenges which emerge here could only be uniquely led by architects. If the end goal is to design environmentally resilient, socially just, and beautiful Irish towns and cities – rather than to, as Matthew Carmona argues in the Symposium’s proceedings, “grab the territory professionally and define its limits through accreditation” [6] – then interdisciplinary venues to advance this project should be pursued. As landscape architecture slowly emerges as a profession and area of intellectual enquiry in Ireland, architects should embrace its possibilities for Irish cities, work to include landscape architects in urban design’s discursive developments, and support its emergence in the academy.

In Donnybrook, an inner suburb of Dublin, the studio complex of Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), the Irish national broadcaster, is dominated by five buildings that exemplify late modern architecture in Ireland. The masterplan for their strictly rectilinear combinations of concrete, steel, and glass was laid out by the architect Ronnie Tallon in 1960, following which Scott Tallon Walker (STW) designed the various buildings in the subsequent twenty years. When first opened, they were celebrated for their cutting-edge aesthetics and engineering, combining functionality and beauty on an integrated campus that advertised Ireland’s modernity [1]. Today the buildings are under-appreciated, though they were added to the Register of Protected Structures (RPS) in 2019 [2].

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Recent controversy has once again put a spotlight on the future of RTÉ, including its campus architecture. Twelve months on, the organisation may now be recovering, with a ‘New Direction’ strategic plan and several reports on its governance and finances providing a roadmap for reform [3]. The Irish government provided the national broadcaster with €56m of emergency funding in November 2023, but this is a small fraction of RTÉ’s needs. It has a long way to go to persuade a doubtful public and politicians of its sustainability, and future funding has been made contingent on organisational changes that may or may not work, including a 20% reduction in the broadcaster’s workforce, a redistribution of some activity to smaller studios in Limerick and Cork, and increased outsourcing of its productions to independent companies.

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Though downplaying it, the strategic report keeps open the possibility of a partial or total sale of RTÉ’s studios to improve the company’s finances and its corporate size and shape. It calls for “a streamlined RTÉ … operating on a smaller footprint within the Donnybrook site and with more modern facilities that require less maintenance … enable modern working and production practices and meet regulations, compliance requirements and sustainability targets”. It admits that “relocating RTÉ off the current Donnybrook site … does not appear to be economically viable” but it remains open to “exploring options for the vacated areas or land sale”. Politicians and independent media producers have often asked if we might ‘lift and shift’ RTÉ’s headquarters to a less prominent location, and in 2017 RTÉ sold 8.64 acres of its Donnybrook site for €107m as a temporary solution to its long-running cashflow crisis. Its latest plan notes that its remaining 24 acres are currently valued at only €100m due to challenging conditions in commercial real estate and the addition of RTÉ’s most important buildings to the RPS, but the possibility is left open that a higher price might be achieved in the future.

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Of course, in a capitalist economy, most properties are disposable, and our built environment rapidly changes. Nonetheless, further sale of RTÉ’s lands would be a bad idea. Its Donnybrook base is not only a group of world-class buildings but an internationally important centre of cultural production. Elsewhere, similar studios are accepted for their specialised engineering, their need for frequent capital investment, and their skilled workforce that cannot be easily replaced. Some major studios have been repurposed – for example, the recent conversion to apartments of the former BBC Television Centre in London’s Shepherd’s Bush. But the BBC has been under siege from private media conglomerates and frequently hostile governments for forty years. In other cities, especially in the EU, public service broadcasters have kept studios running, modernising in situ, sometimes with nearby additions. Hence, the longevity of the Maison de la Radio in Paris, the RBB Television Centre in Berlin, and the Via Teulada studios of RAI in Rome, all originating in the 1930s-60s and transformed for the digital age.

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Even in Los Angeles, the famous CBS Television City, designed by William Pereira, continues to grow in studio buildings first opened in 1952, while Sony, Fox, and Paramount operate studios that were founded in the 1910s and 1920s, with many of the original buildings still in use today. Los Angeles has less prominent public service media and more property speculation than most cities, but its studios remain central – economically, culturally, and geographically – while modernising, densifying, and diversifying. Unfortunately, RTÉ has been caught in an unproductive financial tug of war in which citizens and public representatives praise its work but question its value for money. Competing private sector media companies naturally call for the state broadcaster to be restructured. However, the international history of studios should encourage us to protect not only RTÉ’s buildings but its Donnybrook site as a whole – an invaluable concentration of talent, expertise, equipment, and services that is in prime metropolitan real estate for good reason.

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The economic geographer Allen J. Scott highlights the distinctive ‘clustering’ of media industries around dense networks of specialised facilities, skilled workers, and suppliers that are often unique in a given region or country. Scott’s influential analysis of Hollywood emphasises the long-term benefits of integrating media industries in large cities – as does the recent PwC report The Role of the BBC in Creative Clusters (2022) [4]. Relocating RTÉ would run counter to their findings, dispersing a cluster instead of consolidating it. In Ireland, we have relocated large public facilities – moving UCD to Belfield in the 1960s, moving TU Dublin to Grangegorman – but those moves centralised disparate units. Efforts to decentralise – for example, government departments – have proven much more controversial. The high value of RTÉ’s estate is sometimes cited to argue for its sale, but this misunderstands the industry. Media studios are not like other manufacturers for whom large amounts of mass-produced inventory account for much of their total value. RTÉ’s physical estate makes up a greater proportion of its worth because the commodities it produces are relatively small, unique, and transient: digital images and sound, not objects made of metal, plastic, or timber.

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Several film and television studios now operate outside of Dublin – Ardmore Studios in Wicklow, Troy Studios in Limerick, Titanic Studios in Belfast – and new studio construction has been having a moment worldwide, driven by demand for new product from streaming media services, government incentives, and institutional investors looking for new opportunities at a time when other kinds of commercial real estate are in difficulty. But reports suggest the trend may be slowing; the most recent new studio planned for Ireland – Hackman Capital Partners’ Greystones Media Campus – has been delayed by the recent actors’ and writers’ strike in Hollywood [5]. So new studio construction does not always go smoothly. And all of these are private sector companies mostly making movies or television dramas, often for overseas clients, frequently subject to seasonal or economic fluctuations in activity and not heavily involved in broadcasting, news gathering, or live entertainment – so not directly comparable with a public service broadcaster like RTÉ.

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RTÉ did have an ambitious investment plan for Donnybrook, Project 2025, but it was shelved during the financial crisis circa 2010 [6]. It would have provided a large integrated multi-functional studio facility with state-of-the-art technology, greater floorspace and production capacity, and a better environmental rating. However, shockingly, it would have required demolition of most of STW’s original buildings which, it was claimed, could not be modernised or upgraded to the standards required by digital media – an unconvincing claim given comparable developments in other countries (eventually RTÉ did manage a relatively modest but effective upgrade of its Studio 3 building for television news in 2019). A substantial revision of the Project 2025 plan now could strike a better balance between innovation and preservation while serving the needs of RTÉ and the Irish public. Reduction or closure of the site should be ruled out, and the studio buildings should be renewed. Though still photogenic, they are not in good condition. RTÉ’s small but elegant modernist canteen was closed several times last year by rat infestations and its other buildings also need repair. This costs money but would give the country a flagship media facility of enduring value.

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To this end, RTÉ would do well to make its Donnybrook site more approachable, and this might aid the company’s PR. Studios are usually secure and secluded from the public – to protect their intellectual property, for the privacy of celebrities, and to encourage a sense of mystery and audience anticipation. Nevertheless, comparable studios run popular studio tours, on-site physical archives, and performance venues. Some of these were anticipated by Project 2025. Adding them now – as well as, say, a museum and educational centre – could enhance public understanding of RTÉ, improve media literacy, and protect RTÉ’s campus and buildings for successive generations to enjoy. Ancillary benefits might include independent media companies leasing some of RTÉ’s site but maintaining the media cluster, and improved pedestrian street life between Donnybrook village and UCD, which have densified over the years. Relevant international comparisons suggest we should double down on RTÉ’s Donnybrook site rather than reduce or vacate it.

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This would also serve environmental priorities. It is increasingly recognised that the ecological cost of growth is often high. To ‘lift and shift’ RTÉ to a new location, rather than update and expand its current facilities, would consume a lot of building materials and energy while disrupting supply routes and workers’ commutes, increasing RTÉ’s carbon footprint. This would contradict its sustainability goals, which include a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. Since Project 2025 was launched, the tide of international opinion has turned against demolition, as adaptive reuse initiatives such as House Europe and the New European Bauhaus demonstrate [7]. RTÉ’s sustainability goals could be better achieved by maximising its options in situ. Another way the state might do this would be to buy back the portion of RTÉ’s campus that was sold to a private company for residential development. The state often buys land for strategic infrastructure, and the land that was sold has been idle since 2017. That sale was first proposed in 2002 at the height of the Celtic Tiger property boom and it would arguably never have happened if RTÉ had been properly funded in the first place. Instead, its revenue shortfalls, which have now been constant for twenty years, were a function of neoliberal trends towards deregulation and privatisation that have since come in for scrutiny in Ireland and worldwide. We now have a chance to address these for the good of our media and built environment alike. Even Tánaiste Micheál Martin recently opined that RTÉ should not rush into further land sales because “very often selling land is something you will regret later” [8]. This is not to argue for a state monopoly – Ireland needs a thriving, diverse, creative, and entrepreneurial media sector. But it also needs vibrant public service media anchored in vibrant public places.

In the privileged and privately owned site of the Pumphouse in Dublin Port, architectural students spent a week thinking about alternative means of building public space through appropriation, without the limitations of traditional building and material supply chains.

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The Pumphouse sits in the Alexandra Basin within Dublin Port, a space offering residencies and opportunities for cultural and public events. A large, mostly empty, pseudo-public space left over from the remnants of a filled-in graving dock, the site consists of a historic industrial structure and an open paved area, under the shadow of vast infrastructural elements, cranes, silos, and passing ships. It was once a site of maintenance and repair for ships coming to and from Dublin Port. The pump houses, after which the nascent cultural space is now named, would drain and refill the water from graving docks to allow workers to access below the hulls of ships. The older pump house of the two, where our workshop took place, is now considered a site of historical interest, while the other remains a concrete remnant, inaccessible to the public, perhaps also quietly waiting to be granted historical significance.

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The week's workshop however, could be indiscriminate – with an arsenal of temporary paints, and a collection of borrowed, rented, and waste materials from sites around the city, we could occupy the site as we pleased, with the understanding that everything could be taken away shortly after, leaving no trace. These materials would be bound together with removable and demountable connecting elements – the connecting elements being the only new parts purchased for construction. The site was free to become a testing ground; for methods of community construction, public space interventions, parasitic and guerrilla architectures, and to facilitate the performance of construction without the implications and consequences of long-term interventions.

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Inside the older of the two pump houses, the back corner was set up to host lectures from international speakers and members of the workshop, on a borrowed monitor and speakers facing rows of leftover solid wood benches. Behind us lay a backdrop of materials gathered from recycling centres, construction schools, salvage yards, building sites. The workshop’s initial exercises allowed us to familiarise ourselves with these materials, first as individual shapes, then as relational objects, and finally as broken still lifes, stacked and arranged outside on a grid previously painted over the tarmac. These compositions formed the first temporary imposition on the space, necessarily functionless, forming spatial relationships between building, space, body, and material.

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The exercises shifted between scales, from 1:1 assemblages to analytical and experiential drawings which zoomed out to the scale of the site. The painted grid overlaid on the site accented its abstract nature as an empty and previously un-intervened upon space, a piece of land reclaimed from the sea, distant from the dense architectural narratives layered upon the nearby city centre. From the vantage point of an opening on the first floor of the pump house building, we discussed these surveys which were drawn on 1:25 representations of the painted grid. The grid, 25m squared, formed a referencing tool to quickly and easily survey important conditions on site, outlining the primary workspace, presenting opportunities to work in the margins, major and minor spaces, imposing a temporary order onto the site which we encouraged students to disregard, engage with, or undermine as they saw fit.

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Reflecting on the idea of building out loud, a term coined by the Belgian artist and designer Jozef Wouters, in which building and designing occur simultaneously in dialogue with one another, we engaged in a process of making, discussing, drawing, revising, dismantling, and making again; while also devising a brief and negotiating spatially between a series of undefined proposals. Given that many of the materials needed to be returned at the end of the week, and encouraging a general principle of demountability, a system of connecting disparate objects needed to be established. Through using a stock of ratchet straps, threaded rods, nuts and washers, clamps, rope, and bungee cords, a language of combining and dismantling objects was developed. As the proposals materialised, some began to form standalone objects, which could be moved and placed on site; erratics of disjointed scrap timber, blocks, and rubble. Framed by the grand and imposing space, these oddities were defined, given importance as monuments which became emblematic of the work built throughout the week. Other proposals were more deliberate in their functions: a bench, wall, roof, table, lantern, or seesaw.

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A closing event drove the direction of the design – considering how visitors might engage with the objects, where to gather, to dance, to sit and talk, where a DJ could stand. With the constraints of the amount and size of existing materials, the challenge became unifying disparate constructs into one proposal for occupying the Pumphouse. Methods of connecting were shared and re-used across different designs as each participant found their own ways of building with the materials gathered; techniques for threading rope, stacking blocks, or making clamps with threaded rods became a common language in many instances. This was important as the materials themselves were so varied – the challenge became how to unify them and build a public space containing our own individual ideas, to be used in conjunction with one another.

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As the week came to an end, the act of designing through making paused. A process which might otherwise continue to revise and resolve problems through testing and altering froze in time. As tools and equipment were taken away, the aberration of a proposal presented itself, the result of an experimental process engaging critically in ideas founded on public space in the city represented now as an assortment of objects, imprinted onto the large open space between the two pump house buildings. The immeasurable quality of the old graving dock is briefly given definition, engaging with these ideas of the city in this elsewhere space. As the final evening progresses, the interventions seem to settle in as they are leaned on and danced around, one structure being carried inside by the party’s attendees, enclosing late night conversations and cigarettes against a backdrop of an active port – simultaneously in the centre and the fringes of Dublin city.

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