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This case study maps the route from Pearse Street train station to St Stephen’s Green. This is a well-walked city journey with ample architectural and historical features; passing Leinster House, the National Library, and Trinity College Dublin. It features bustling cafés which spill onto the street and a plethora of office buildings. Embarking from a main commuter station, it is a route travelled equally by locals and tourists.
The choice of this route was personal in origin. I left my office on Molesworth Street one evening, hoping to board the Dart at Pearse Station within ten minutes. En route, I grabbed a pear. Ripe and juicy, it was a quick snack to placate a familiar after-work hunger. What started as a carefree nibble would soon motivate my reevaluation of Dublin’s inner-city street infrastructure. Along my 700m route in the heart of this European capital city, I did not pass a single bin on my footpath in which to dispose of the pear remnants. Vexed by my sticky hands and a fruit core that had abandoned all its structural integrity, I could only expel the smushed remnants once I had crossed Westland Row and reached Pearse St Station.
As indicated on the map below, the only two public bins to be found on either side of my route, this main city artery, were outside the National Gallery on Clare Street and St Andrew Church on Westland Row (both of which are on the easterly side of the street). Typically, city infrastructure is almost invisible to me, only noticed when it obstructs a footpath or disrupts a vista. However, when critically assessed, the traffic lights, electricity boxes, bus stops, waste bins, street lamps, make up a substantial jumble of street-junk. The lack of aesthetic consideration and coordinated layout for these components belies the strategic vision of the Dublin City Development Plan to create: “a connected, legible and liveable city with a distinctive sense of place, based on active streets, quality public spaces and adequate community and civic infrastructure… ensuring quality architecture, urban design and green spaces to provide quality of life and good health and wellbeing for all” [1].
This map was made to record the contemporary urban condition by honestly depicting all the city infrastructure and footpath interruptions, with particular focus on public refuse and pedestrian crossings. It also notes the street lamps, bus stops, bollards, and bicycle parking along this route.
Approximately 900m lie between Pearse Station and the gate to St Stephen’s Green from Kildare St. Along this route there are twelve pedestrian crossings managed by traffic lights. To travel this journey, the minimum number of road-crossings is four and the (most reasonably direct) maximum number of crossings is seven.
Following the route from Pearse St Station to St. Stephen’s Green, the westerly path is 925m. It immediately crosses Westland Row from the station, and travels along the path hugging Trinity College Dublin. From Nassau Street, and onto Kildare Street it crosses Setanta Place, Molesworth St, and Schoolhouse Lane before reaching St Stephen’s Green. A point at which the urban infrastructure feels congested is the pedestrian island at the south of Kildare Street (marked location A). Here you will find a street barrier, sign posts, traffic lights, bicycle parking, electricity boxes and a reflective traffic bollard. Along this route there are no public bins.
The length of the route walked along the easterly path is 920m long. Turning left onto the path on Westland Row leaving Pearse Street station, it travels along the street before using the traffic island to cross onto Lincoln Place. Continuing along the bollard-lined curve to Clare Street, the third pedestrian crossing of this route brings you to Nassau Street. After rounding the corner to Kildare Street, it is a straight 260m to the Shelbourne Hotel, where you find yourself crossing to the westerly path to reach the Green. A point along this side of the street at which the urban infrastructure feels crowded is at the south corner of the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street (marked location B). Beside a grid of established trees around a statue of William Conyngham Plunket, there are two postboxes straddling an electricity box, several bus stops, signposts, and bollards. Leaving the station on Westland Row, along this route you pass three bins. The first two are clustered at the station, and the third can be found at the National Gallery. This confirms that from St Andrew’s Church to the Shelbourne Hotel, there is only a single public rubbish bin.
By recording the erratic distribution of street infrastructure, this map also highlights that simply providing physical infrastructure is not sufficient when aiming to protect and enliven urban character. While the DCC Development Plan states “The preservation of the built heritage and archaeology of the city that makes a positive contribution to the character, appearance, and quality of local streetscapes and the sustainable development of the city” [2], this is not reflected in the layered mess of electricity boxes, sign posts, and bollards. It is important to acknowledge the architectural richness and quality of the street in this case study, and that this issue of street-junk is just as evident throughout the city, on streets such as Camden Street, Church Street, and Frederick Street.
In its endeavour to foster “a distinctive sense of place” in this area of the city, DCC has been successful. However, while the overriding impression is a civic character envisioned by the Georgians and Victorians, it is hard to ignore the layers of haphazard and visually disruptive infrastructure that have been added in recent times.
There is an understandable conflict between the provision of urban services and the maintenance of our architectural heritage. Yet, looking at previous generations of lamp posts, manhole covers, and paving, this wasn’t always the case. In The Ancient Pavement: An Illustrated Guide to Dublin’s Street Furniture, O’Connell explains that the nineteenth-century street lighting would have begun as traditional oil lamps, before being modernised to gas, and then, in the 1890s, electricity. While this resulted in the preservation of traditional infrastructure, the decision to adapt the existing lamps would have been an economic one: “During times when many other cities introduced more modern lighting schemes Dublin, through economic necessity, was often forced to adapt such new fittings to older lamp-posts” [3]. The more frugal decision at the time has unconsciously allowed the preservation of beautiful nineteenth-century lighting street infrastructure, including manhole covers, bollards, and railings: “Street objects were accidentally preserved from many eras to produce what is now one of the most unique city collections of street furniture in Europe”. Kildare Street still acts today as a palimpsest of Dublin ironmongery. The ornamentation of earlier interventions reflect a dedication to both place making and necessary modernisation.
Working in the relatively well-preserved Georgian core of south Dublin city is a privilege – today’s converted office buildings, galleries, and cafés are identifiable in the terraces of Smith’s 1846 map of Dublin, first published by the Illustrated London News. In addition to the red brick and sash windows, the architectural character of the small city blocks are defined by granite curbs that have been smoothened by thousands of footsteps, railing-lined light wells, and generously proportioned streets. This emphasises that fostering a sense of place does not solely depend on the buildings, but how they touch our public space.
This case study concludes that in order to achieve a vibrant urban realm, more thoughtful, place-specific, infrastructural design is needed. And some more bins for a pear.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2024.
1. ‘Strategic Context and Vision’, Dublin City Development Plan 2022-2028, Dublin City Council, 2022.
2. ‘Built Heritage and Archaeology’, Dublin City Development Plan 2022-2028, Dublin City Council, 2022.
3. D.O’Connell, Derry, The Ancient Pavement: An Illustrated Guide to Dublin’s Street Furniture, Dublin, National Trust for Ireland, 1975.
This year’s presidential election made visible a dynamic that is often overlooked in political analysis: how campaigns operate as a form of civic infrastructure, and to what extent design plays a role in their efficacy. Far from being peripheral or decorative, the visual strategies deployed by candidates’ structure how people encounter political life; they shape perceptions long before policy is discussed or manifestos are read. Political design occupies a unique position within democracies, somewhere at the intersection of communication, civic identity, and public trust.
In Ireland, this relationship between design and democratic expression has been strained by a decades-long pattern of executive neglect. Successive governments have systematically deprioritised design and aesthetic quality in public communication and built infrastructure. Senior ministers increasingly frame design as an optional consideration, an unnecessary add-on rather than a fundamental part of how the State articulates care, competence, and regard for its people. As Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers stated during a debate concerning escalating costs at the National Children’s Hospital (NCH), ‘there needs to be much better discipline in cost effectiveness… That means making choices around cost and efficiency over design standards and aesthetics in some instances’ [1].
This position, widely cited and contested, exemplifies a broader ideological shift which sees design treated as a dispensable luxury rather than an essential civic tool [2].This framing misunderstands the function of design within public life. Design, in this case, is not ornamental; it is a mode of communication through which the State makes itself legible. When design is neglected, the consequences extend far beyond the aesthetic and shape the conditions under which political meaning, public trust, and civic visibility are formed.
In the aftermath of Catherine Connolly's election as President, commentators highlighted the design and visual expression of each candidate as decisive factors [3]. Connolly’s campaign offered me a rare opportunity to explore what an authentically Irish political visual identity might look like when grounded in cultural memory rather than branding for the sake of visuals alone. While designing, I drew directly from Ireland’s vernacular signwriting tradition: the hand-painted shopfronts, gilded fascias, and serifed letterforms that once defined the visual texture of towns and villages. These were not simply aesthetic references. They embodied authorship, locality, and a sense of civic care.
By incorporating hand-drawn lettering, a deep green and cream palette, and a postage-stamp motif, the campaign sought to restore the tactile warmth and humanity often lost in contemporary political design. The stamp, a quiet symbol of communication and exchange, is a reminder that politics is, at its core, a conversation carried between people. This concept frames Irish craft traditions not as relics, but as living cultural practices capable of shaping contemporary civic discourse.
In doing so, Connolly’s campaign made design itself an act of cultural continuity, a way of honouring the past while proposing a more grounded and participatory future. By the time Connolly declared on election night, “This win is not for me, but for us,” the sentiment had already been woven through posters, leaflets, and social media, a visual testament to a campaign that made the collective visible long before the votes were counted [4].
Across the Atlantic, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City attracted attention first for his democratic socialist views. It was the striking coherence of his campaign design, however, that propelled him into broader public discourse. Not since Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster, for Barack Obama, had a political image circulated so widely. It gained the kind of immediate recognition associated with Jim Fitzpatrick’s image of Che Guevara.
The Mamdani campaign was intentionally rooted in the material and cultural vernacular of the city itself. The cobalt blue and yellow palette was drawn directly from everyday sights in New York: bodega awnings, taxi cabs, MetroCards, hot dog vendors, and the signage of small independent businesses [5]. In this way, the campaign aligned itself with working-class infrastructure that defines the city’s public life, situating Mamdani not as an outsider but as a candidate embedded in the city’s social, cultural and economic rhythms [6]. Central to this strategy was the premise that design could serve as a communicative bridge to the constituency Mamdani sought to represent. In doing so, the campaign framed visual culture as a mode of continuity and care, a reminder that political communication can affirm belonging as powerfully as it persuades.
Irish election materials, as well as the State's political design more generally, don't attempt to convey substantive meaning through visuals. Their long-standing reliance on formulaic portraiture, generic slogans, and minimal graphic refinement mirrors a broader campaign strategy in which candidates are packaged as approachable local figures using highly-conventionalised visual cues. This approach reduces design to a mechanism for name recall rather than a vehicle for articulating political values or fostering civic engagement. The environmental waste associated with poster production only heightens the sense of outdatedness and underscores how Irish campaign materials often lag behind the more considered, narrative-driven strategies emerging elsewhere. As such, this tradition of visual identity crystallises the limitations of Irish political branding: a dependence on repetition, familiarity, and low-risk aesthetics at the expense of meaningful visual communication.
A strong democracy depends on sustained, accessible dialogue between the State and its people. Visual identity is structurally embedded within this exchange. Visual languages that are familiar or culturally resonant reduce cognitive load and strengthen affective engagement, whereas generic or stylistically flattened forms tend to weaken meaning-making [7]. In this sense, campaign aesthetics function as a form of civic infrastructure, shaping perceptions of authority, intention, and legitimacy before a single word is spoken.
When design is framed as a luxury rather than an essential component of civic life, it erodes the shared visual language through which democratic communication occurs. Such an approach initiates a feedback loop. Minimal investment in design yields fewer meaningful symbolic or material expressions of public life. As these expressions diminish, the State becomes increasingly illegible to its people. Over time, the corporeal presence of the State, its visibility in the everyday, degrades. What was once a free-flowing dialogue becomes generic, flattened, and emotionally inert. Political branding therefore mirrors the State’s broader orientation toward public infrastructure. When design is treated as secondary, a dispensable aesthetic layer rather than a civic medium, its communicative and democratic potential collapses. When taken seriously, however, design becomes a point at which cultural belonging, political intent, and civic participation converge.
Ireland’s future civic health depends not on dispensing with design but on recognising it as a central component of public life. It is the medium through which the State becomes visible, legible, and trustworthy.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Highly visible and emotionally charged, electoral campaigns are often the first instance in which a state’s people encounter their elected representatives. In this article, Anna Cassidy, designer for Catherine Connolly's presidential campaign, examines how political design is indispensable to the democratic process.
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“[W]asn't this all started by some terminally online moron in trinity? … Nobody gives a shite so long as the statue isn't actually being damaged” wrote [Deleted] on the reddit page r/Ireland in a thread to discuss Dublin City Council's proposals to stop the repeated groping of the Molly Malone statue on Suffolk Street — her breasts repeatedly touched by the sweaty hands of tourists, so much so that the dark patina has been worn away to reveal the earthy metallic dark orange of the bronze from which the mythical fishwife was cast. Thousands of images of Molly #mollymalone circulate on TikTok. A group of men dressed in Jack Chalton-era Irish football jerseys stand in line to rub their faces in her breasts. In the comments section one user posts, “reminder she’s 15 in this statue,” others disagree, claiming she was older, as if somehow the behaviour would be permissible if the statue represented Molly as 17 – the legal age for consenting sexual acts. Others use the platform to protest the behaviour.
If you ask Google’s AI Gemini about the practice, it tells you that “this practice is now discouraged by authorities for preservation reasons.” This is artificial stupidity, a view blind to a far more important problem, one that philosopher Sylvia Wynter described as an urban planning that assumes the male-coded subject as the norm, while others—women, Black, Indigenous, and colonised peoples – are excluded, marginalised, or rendered invisible [1]. For Wynter, urban space is ontologically male, in that its logics of design, governance, and belonging reproduce a gendered and racialised “Man” as the universal standard of being. Speaking to RTÉ Radio One, DCC Arts Officer Ray Yeates (a man) suggested that one solution could be to “just accept that this behaviour is something that occurs worldwide with statues” – human stupidity [2]. Perhaps Yeates might agree to a plaque being added, inscribed with a quote from Wynter: “Man …overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself”[3].
As images of the statue circulate online, they both promote and raise awareness of this deleterious practice. But this is the means and not the end of their circulation. These images turn Suffolk Street into a space for the production of a strange kind of economic exchange. With one sweaty hand on a breast, and the other on a smartphone, tourists become workers. Here, as in all of everyday life, a distinction can no longer be made between work and play. In our age of contemporary digital technology all of everyday life is a factory. To play is to work; the digital proletariat; to use a technological prosthesis is to be used by that prosthesis. These interfaces, designed for the many by and for the benefit of the few, manage life by means of ‘fun’. Spaces like Suffolk Street are, as Letizia Chiappini writes, where “[a]ffect, desire, pain, and love, are digitally mobilised for direct spatial impact” [4].
Henri Lefebvre called this abstract space – “[t]he predominance of the visual (or more precisely of the geometric-visual-spatial)” [5]. He described this kind of logic as a planetary mesh that has been thrown over all space [6]. Any space, anything, anywhere, no matter how banal is subject to this logic. 13,461 km away from the Molly Malone statue is an underpass in the Chinese city of Guilin. Each night crowds of outdoor live streamers gather to steam content on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), their faces glowing in the phosphorus white of selfie lamps. Geolocation means that if they are closer to more prosperous neighbourhoods then they make more money from the wealthy clients who live there. These leftover urban spaces that are seen as unattractive and once disregarded in a capitalist economy have become spaces where new economies and ways of working emerge. I have written elsewhere about the disproportionate role that Ireland plays in facilitating the infrastructures that produce these kinds of spaces [7]. This is a new kind of geopolitics, one facilitated by State fiscal policies, such as in Ireland, home of one of lowest standard corporate tax rates in the EU.
This is capitalism incarnate – capitalism become flesh. Everything has an exchange value. There is not a thing that cannot be transformed into a commodity to be circulated in an economy of flesh, thoughts, drives and desires. This is an economy governed by images, subject to what legal scholar Antoinette Rouvroy calls algorithmic governance – the governance of “the social world that is based on the algorithmic processing of big data sets rather than on politics, law, and social norms” [8]. The statue of Molly is a public surface subject to an extractive logic, via the lens she is engineered for constant circulation, interaction, and capture. The statue as code has her meaning flattened into content for the purpose of data extraction and ad revenue. This kind of collapsing together of work and leisure is a weapon of mass distraction. It removes us from everyday life, producing what philosopher Henri Lefebvre called a “transcendental contempt for the real” [9].
Lefebvre also called for a right to the city, by which he meant the right to the production of truly democratic space. Space that is not subject to capitalist abstraction. To what extent this is even possible in our precarious age of algorithmic governance is questionable - but nonetheless we must seek to understand, hope and act.
The groping of the Molly Malone in Dublin reveals a complex new urban condition – the algorithmic production of space. Social media, viral images, new modes of capitalist production, foreground the emergence of an entirely new logic of spatial production. What does this mean for the possibility of a right to the city?
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On visiting the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, one might be struck by a couple of things. First, on entering the building, the air in the hallway is stale, a result of the inoperative original air-conditioning system. Secondly, the planning of the basement service floor is surprisingly chaotic. These two observations suggested to me a narrative about modernism’s dependence on technology and about Mies’ attitude to that technology – and the situation of architecture in general in relation to technical measures.
Mies worked in more than one register when designing the villa. The top floor, with the entrance hall and bedrooms, is fairly straightforward: lucid and rational. The floor below, what I suppose in German could be called the Beletage, has a flowing and expressive plan comparable to his single-storey Barcelona pavilion. Like the Barcelona pavilion, it has a representative purpose: it contains spaces for entertaining, constructed with fine materials which convey the wealth of the inhabitants. The basement below is half-buried in the hillside and contains mostly service spaces. The layout of the basement feels strikingly unresolved in comparison to the other floors.
The plan of the basement is not often published. It contains, among other things, a boiler room, a laundry room, the room-like processing chambers of the air conditioning system, a photographic darkroom for Mr Tugendhat, and a “moth chamber” where fur coats were stored. These functions are arranged in a way that is partly determined by the layout of the floor above. For example, the dumb-waiter is at the end of a narrow corridor around which a contorted storage room is wrapped. It’s as if the occupants of the basement scurry around this warren of spaces to pick up the loose ends of the freely-planned floor above. There is no functionalist virtue on display here. Indeed, the tiled and napthalene-impregnated moth chamber, accessed through the darkroom, is at the end of a chain of five rooms. It gives a claustrophobic impression tainted by the idea of moths as vermin, and of a cruel method of industrial extermination. The technology of circa 1930 is reflected in the primitive air conditioning system: a piece of apparatus firmly fixed in history, but one in service of the apparently timeless perfection of the upper floors.
It seems that Mies did not consider the basement floor to be part of his architectural expression. He didn’t optimize it. The terse open-plan geometry of the main living spaces reflects not just freedom of movement for the inhabitants, but Mies’s freedom of design. It is simple in comparison to the complex technicalities of actually keeping the house running.
The closest thing the villa has to a centrepiece is the orange onyx wall, non-load-bearing and composed of five slabs. While one could interpret this as a pure display of luxury, it is also an object of contemplation (or at least a talking point). The Tugendhat family were cultured as well as wealthy, and I want to attribute to them some kind of elevated curiosity about this object. What can we recover, in the way of intellectual depth, from reflecting on the onyx slabs? A suitable source might be the French philosopher Roger Caillois, who, in his book The Writing of Stones [1], discerned in geological patterns “some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.” In relation to the Villa Tugendhat, where the setting sun causes the backlit onyx to glow translucently, Caillois’s words evoke an understanding beyond the codes of architectural modernity. Mies’s obsessive refinement of his constructional poetics certainly has something to do with striving for a universal syntax, and the connotations of cosmic grandeur must have been intended as well, but the awkward, “puny” insignificance of humanity, in contrast, doesn’t seem to find a direct expression in his design. A stone is an indifferent thing.
Caillois wrote “Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.” [2] Although Caillois did not have architecture in mind, these vivid words evoke, in contrast to the timelessness of the onyx wall, the more fragile reality of the Villa Tugendhat, a reality of uncertainty that undermines Mies’s confident form-making. At the most basic level, the presence of humans means the presence of water vapour and all manner of microbial impurities. These are perennial problems for the architect: problems of climate control and hygiene. The handling of the response to them (the concealed inventions and intricacies of the air conditioning equipment) is arguably a truer token of humanity than the stony perfection of polished onyx panels.
The flight of the Tugendhat family from Brno in 1938 in the face of the impending Nazi occupation is emblematic of the precariousness of civilization and of an industrial society gone astray. The grand formal spaces of the villa have an appropriately monumental character, as Mies intended, but the technical floor tells another story of historical contingency, unresolved difficulties, and of all the problems we try to sweep under the carpet.
Editor's Note: An exhibition on the architecture of the Villa Tugendhat will run in the Irish Architectural Archive from January to March 2026.
Throughout its evolution, architecture has been required to engage both with imperfect technologies and the contingencies of life. This is clearly evidenced in Mies Van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat. The villa has a public face of rare perfection, but other aspects make one wonder about the architect’s ethical stance in relation to functionalism and humanity.
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