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"Architecture has no meaning unless in relation to nature".
— Alvaro Siza [1]
We used to build in quite sensible ways.
Before industrialisation in Western Europe, we mainly built relatively simple structures of load-bearing walls using materials sourced in the locality. These materials – stone, brick, earth, timber, lime, plant fibre – required very little energy to produce. The walls were generally formed of one or two materials and the craft skills required were passed from one generation to the next. These vernacular buildings responded to local climatic conditions, making careful use of volume, the sizes and positions of apertures, cross ventilation, the thermal mass of the wall materials, thermal buffers to the most hostile orientations, and rooms of differing temperatures, to moderate the climate and achieve a relatively comfortable indoor environment without requiring significant additional heating or cooling. The buildings worked with nature and made the most of the natural conditions.
The industrialisation of construction over the last two centuries has created a change, from buildings as assemblies of materials based on craft practices to buildings as sums of subsystems, elements, and specialised layers of proprietary products. This change from materials to products greatly increased the embodied energy of building, as the standardisation of products requires significantly more complex manufacturing. Bricks, once produced locally from terracotta and fired at low temperatures, now require homogenised clay, must be fired at very high temperatures to meet industrial standards, and are transported large distances from centralised production facilities. Wood is now subjected to shredding, gluing, and shaping under pressure to homogenise its properties in the required formats [2]. We have also developed an ever-increasing number of industrial materials – steel, aluminium, PVC, concrete – that need vast quantities of energy to produce.
In parallel with these changes in construction, we have created a situation where buildings are increasingly isolated from the natural environment, relying on technology to achieve comfort, instead of working with the local climate and conditions, as buildings did historically. In this era of the hermetically sealed building, the architecture discipline has surrendered responsibility for the design of the internal environments to engineers and other specialists. Key architectural issues affecting the well-being of inhabitants, such as air-quality, temperature, and humidity, are delegated to specialists and handled by technology. These issues, which should be central topics of the architectural project, are treated as merely problems to be solved. The construction industry and design professionals have become obsessed with the idea that we can completely isolate the insides of our buildings from the natural environment, like habitable thermos flasks. Yet, as Kiel Moe describes in his book Insulating Modernism, Isolated and Non-isolated Thermodynamics in Architecture, this isolation is illusionary and denies the physical reality of the building and the way it acts in the world: "literal isolation is thermodynamically impossible to achieve in the context of buildings" [3].
Based on this flawed thinking we have developed policies and regulations aimed at ever greater levels of insulation and airtightness, pursuing the holy grail of zero-energy buildings. Passivhaus is perhaps the most extreme version of this, creating buildings so airtight that they rely on expensive and complex technologies to provide ventilation.
The goal of these policies is energy conservation above all else, drowning out any more balanced discussion about how carbon emissions can be reduced to combat climate change. A new industry of simulation and certification has been created to drive a massive technological upgrade of buildings, but the promised successes will never be realised in real life. We have rushed to encase all our housing in thick layers of polyurethane and other oil industry by-products without consideration of the destructive impact of this practice. We don’t consider that having the bulk of our energy generated via renewable sources will reduce the need to insulate [4]. We are caught in a mindset that believes that more and more industrialised production and technology will solve any cost, quality, or time problem in the construction industry while helping to resolve a climate crisis that is the direct result of industrialisation and technological growth.
In recent years an increasing number of architects have begun to realise that we are making buildings too complex to design, too expensive to build, and too difficult to operate. Worse still, we are slowly becoming aware that the indoor environments we are creating, the settings for an increasing proportion of our lives, are not healthy. We realise that buildings are not empty shells, that they are filled with air, in the physical sense, and that this air is the main source of nourishment for the human body.
Alarmed by these realisations, some architects are returning to first principles. They are beginning to study how vernacular architecture managed to create buildings that intrinsically required very little energy to heat in winter and that did not overheat in summer. A change of mindset is emerging, from the modernist isolation of the building and reliance on technology to a new sensibility about simpler, more robust forms of construction that engage in a dialogue with the natural environment.
One example of this new mindset is the work of the IBAVI in the Balearic Islands. This government housing agency has developed a whole series of really interesting social housing projects that rediscover vernacular materials and construction techniques such as the use of the local Mares stone, and a seagrass called Posidonia as insulation. In their projects, thick stone walls and vaults are deployed to stabilise the indoor environment without needing any applied technology.
These architects have been leading a rediscovery of how the fundamental spatial elements of architecture – walls, roofs, floors, ceilings, and apertures – can generate an environmental performance in which the building is not isolated from its surroundings, but instead takes advantage of the innate opportunities they offer to achieve comfort without the need for complex technologies. There is also a growing realisation that buildings inherently require a great accumulation of matter and energy to exist and persist, that they can never be zero-energy, and that a building’s success in ecological terms is characterised by its capacity to exchange and harvest energy from the natural environment. This emerging school of thought has the potential to establish a more coherent agenda for architecture and to reestablish its relevance and importance to contemporary society.
One Good Idea is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2024
1. A. Siza, Imagining the Evident, Lisbon: Monade Books, 2021, p. 25.
2. A.Cuchi, ‘A Necessary Experience’, in El Croquis 219 IBAVI 19952021, pp. 361-73.
3. K. Moe, Insulating Modernism, Isolated and Non-isolated Thermodynamics in Architecture, Basel: Birkhauser, 2014, p. 14.
4. D. Steiner, ‘Back to Architecture’, in D. Eberle and F. Aicher (eds.), The Temperature of Architecture, Basel: Birkhauser, 2016, pp. 38-43.
“Every city can choose to make different decisions and can choose to transform itself. The first step involves a candid conversation about where it is, and where it will end up if it doesn’t change course” [1].
– Brent Toderian, former chief planning officer of Vancouver
The city of Dublin is a continuous work in progress with no end to its development, no finish line at which to turn back and reflect upon a job well done, or otherwise. Yet if, as architect and writer Peter Carl suggests, “the city grants the possibility of profound understanding of one’s collective place in reality” [2], then we must stop to consider how it is being developed. Dublin’s present headlong, blinkered development has allowed capitalism, rather than a cohesive and considered planning model, to deliver our built environment. This has resulted in unsatisfactory districts inhabited behind fences and high walls, hollowed by corporate interest and abandoned beyond business hours. The prioritisation of foreign direct investment continues to segment large swathes of the city into streets of inappropriate, single use, and careless capital-driven development creating monocultured city districts which continue to ignore the needs of the city’s primary stakeholders: its inhabitants.
This reckless acquiescence to the whims of capitalism has left, in particular, our expanding North and South Docklands and their environs devoid of civic values and social inclusion, with privatised central courtyards in place of public realm. An ideological bridge is needed between the material world of investment-driven construction and the socio-cultural world of active public participation and daily inhabitation. We must consider what mechanisms of planning control could enable our city and its people to develop in concert, and what a reconfiguration of civic ideals could look like.
In his 2015 essay Civic Depth [3], urban and architectural theorist Peter Carl explores an idealistic, rather than capital-driven, city model for a renewed civic-oriented public realm. Predating urbanist Carlos Moreno’s 15-minute city, and championing many of the same basic principles, Carl expresses the idea that, in order for a city to fulfil the needs of its residents and foster a sense of community or identity, its districts must be composed of a range of distinct civic and programmatic functions. From a spatial point of view, this mix of programme is necessary “in order to ensure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in a place for different reasons, but who are able to use many facilities in common”. In this instance, Carl uses the word civic not to refer to a use case necessarily, but to something which “orientates architecture towards the shared conditions of urbanity or common ground”. Civic depth suggests a participatory character in shaping not just the physical realm but one’s rights to it. Not to be simply interchanged with public space, civic ground is based on inclusive collective civic values and shared usage of space accommodating the multiplicity of potential needs within a community. Opposing the generally limited city planning view of “public” and “private” as the only two modalities, Carl lays a spectrum upon the modes which comprise the city and “the public situations that penetrate the whole of urban life”, from domestic to the most civic ceremonial and ritualistic spaces of law courts, religious settings etc. Carl’s theory follows from the well-established convergence of urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs, Leon Krier, Kevin Lynch, and Christopher Alexander, all of whom championed the need for resilient urban quarters to be formed of what Jacobs referred to as “combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomena” [4], inclusive of diverse peoples and purposes.
This spectrum is the basis of civic depth: a lived, diverse, and shared city for and by its people. The city cannot exist as wholly public or private, our urban fabric must accommodate all shades of the two. It is the presence, co-existence, and intermingling of this civic depth which creates the intangible draw of cities. An overlapping common space promotes interaction between people who differ in their political convictions, their social, cultural, and economic backgrounds.
An example of civic depth successfully enacted is Parisian mayor Anne Hidalgo’s creation of some fifty “15-minute cities” throughout Paris’s arrondissements during her tenure as city mayor. Hidalgo has been working continuously with urbanist Carlos Moreno, whose hugely influential 2021 article Introducing the “15-Minute City”: Sustainability, Resilience and Place Identity in Future Post-Pandemic Cities describes the attributes of a 15-minute city [5]. A fundamental tenet of the 15-minute city is that most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure should be easily accessible by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or journey on public transport. This has been pursued in Paris through the implementation of policy at all levels. In a 2024 interview on the success of the Paris’s urban transformation, Moreno stated “I said to Hidalgo, the 15-minute city is not an urban traffic plan. The 15-minute city is a radical change of our life” [6]. From a transport perspective, through-traffic has been phased out of the city. Pedestrians and cyclists now have priority in the city centre, which has transformed once heavily trafficked areas such as those along the Seine and at Rue du Rivoli [7]. Commercially, a two-hundred-million-euro subsidiary has been established to manage retail areas, with rates set below those of the speculative real estate market. The subsidiary specifically rents to small independent shops, artisans, bakeries, and bookstores because these, Moreno states, create “a more vibrant neighbourhood” [8].
While the many changes implemented in the course of Paris’s metamorphosis have not been without difficulty or controversy, it is an example of civic depth successfully enacted: a model for Dublin in policy and ideology. It offers a route to resisting senseless monocultured development and establishing diverse, historically significant, and socially inclusive urban districts. We can choose to provide a critically caring social, economic, and cultural urban realm.
Dublin’s unchecked, capital-driven development has prioritised foreign investment over civic values, creating sterile, single-use districts disconnected from residents' needs. Inspired by models like Paris’s 15-minute city, urban theorists advocate for a balanced approach, fostering diverse, inclusive urban spaces. A reimagined planning model could reinstate community-focused design, shaping a vibrant, resilient Dublin.
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There are almost 30,000 preschool children living in Dublin City [1], but a brief stroll with a toddler in hand can be a perilous journey. You clutch that hand tightly for fear of traffic trundling past, sometimes having to step out onto the road to bypass cars parked on the footpath. These safety concerns are compounded by the trip hazards of poorly maintained footpaths, which can lead to cut little knees and lots of tears. Research shows that the views of young children and their caregivers are rarely considered in urban planning and design decisions [2]. Meanwhile caregivers living in Dublin City report that environmental hazards often leave them with little choice but to drive, even short distances, rather than walking [3].
However, short walks through and around their local neighbourhood are of significant developmental value to young children [4]. Each excursion is a potential world of wonder and amazement for a toddler, whether they’re watching the slow meandering of a snail across a footpath, or a truck driver unloading a delivery. Along the way there might be small chats with neighbours, one or two steep steps to climb, or maybe a puddle to splash in. These encounters and experiences support children’s social, physical, and cognitive development.
Urban95, a global programme funded by the Bernard Van Leer Foundation [5], is advocating for cities where preschoolers can thrive, by posing the question: “If you could experience your city from 95cm — the height of a three-year-old — what would you change”?
Urban95 works with LSE Cities (at the London School of Economics) to explore this question, offering the Urban95 Academy, an educational initiative where city leaders can learn to plan and design cities that address the needs of toddlers and their caregivers. Through the Urban95 Academy, a delegation from Dublin City Council, including Liz Coman, DCC’s Assistant Arts Officer and Cllr Cat O’Driscoll, Chairperson of the Arts, Culture, Leisure and Community SPC [6], has been exploring the possibility of a city designed with young children in mind.
This exploration has resulted in the Dublin Urban95 Pilot Project, an innovative art-based project seeking to raise awareness within DCC of how the city is experienced by young children and their caregivers. Four artists were supported to creatively engage directly with children and create work in response to that engagement. O’Driscoll describes the project as a unique opportunity to access the views of preschool children. “Young children are a voiceless group on urban planning and design, but so good at showing what they like,” she says.
For Coman, using creative practices to engage with children was key. “We knew we would get very rich data if we worked with artists to explore the city from the perspective of young children, and we are in a very unique situation to have a number of artists in Dublin whose whole practice involves working with young children,” she explains.
The project focussed on the theme of mobility. With that in mind, Lucy Hill, one of the participating artists, explored comfort objects children take with them on trips they make in the city [7]. Comfort objects shared with Hill include: a hand-knit teddy; a little blue torch decorated with embossed love hearts; cars and dollies; and of course, some much loved soothers. These precious items support what Hill describes as “a feeling of ease and belonging” for young children as they venture out into the city.
The three other artists involved in the project were Michelle Browne, Helen Barry, and Órla Kelly. Browne curated three geolocated audio essays developed by three writers, each of whom explored the adult experience of moving through the city with small children in tow.
Helen Barry created Sculptunes in the Park, a multisensory sound installation made both for and with children to support curiosity and play. Órla Kelly developed Mapping My City with a group of young children attending an urban preschool. The children mapped out their everyday walks, identifying hazards such as broken glass and dog waste on the paths. They also mapped a parallel imaginative experience which included encounters with a tiger, witches’ hats, and doors where zombies hide.
Together the various artworks shed valuable light on the everyday experience of young children in our urban environment. To enrich the qualitative data gathered through this project, the council issued a survey [8] on young children and mobility. The responses show a pattern of difficulties with cars blocking footpaths, dog waste, and poorly maintained footpaths. Using these data sets, O’Driscoll says the next step is to develop a toddler manifesto for Dublin, which is an “articulation of the needs of babies and toddlers” in the city. She says she is committed to advocating for this manifesto to be resourced and fully implemented.
The Urban95 programme describes the presence of children as “a measure of a city’s vibrancy and dynamism” [9]. This is supported by research from Arup which identifies the presence of children in the urban public realm as an indicator of how well a city is performing [10]. DCC’s work in exploring preschool children’s views and experiences through the Dublin Urban95 Pilot Project is a positive step toward ensuring the city meets their needs. In turn, an increased presence of young children in the urban public realm will foster a more vibrant, dynamic Dublin City.
A report of the Dublin Urban95 Pilot Project and its findings will be available on the DCC website in the coming months.
Navigating urban spaces with a toddler can be daunting, with trip hazards and traffic issues. Dublin City Council's new Urban95 Pilot Project engaged artists and children to ask how the city can open up to the needs of children and the people who care for them.
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“You can pass through streets almost every day of your life and hardly notice the changes that are taking place until one day, suddenly you realise that everything is different… It’s quite irrational but you do get the feeling of being dispossessed. In that warren of streets behind the quays you were safe from the world” [1].
Elizabeth Leslie’s words from her 1965 Irish Times article "A northsider’s lament" demonstrate a dejection and a disillusionment among city dwellers with the mass urbanisation projects of their day. Dublin of the sixties was indeed a city in flux: a potent mix of crumbling tenements and newfound free-trade prosperity had gifted Sean Lemass’s government with the opportunity to raze 1,200 Georgian terraced houses in just eighteen months between ‘63 and ‘64 and ship the residents to peripheral suburbs, leading to an estimated reduction of 10,000 in the number of people living between the canals [2]. The Georgian city’s ‘warren’ of mews lanes was disappearing as the country sought to rid itself of the remnants of its colonial past and rebuild under the influence of new capital.
Almost sixty years on from Leslie’s unanswered lament, not much has changed. Dublin’s built environment has grown ever more in service of the international market rather than its people, fostering a paradoxical city in which technocratic fantasies of steel and glass shroud realities of vacancy and vagrancy. The forgotten urban lanes embody this modern economic disparity. To many in power, the inner-city lanes are fetid spaces of dereliction, detritus, and drug use that offer no value within the urban system. This is reflected in Dublin City Council’s recent decision to close Harbour Court off Abbey Street [3], an unsatisfying "out of sight, out of mind" move that fails to address the underlying issue of disuse. Not only is this a crudely reductionist approach to a deeper systemic issue, but it comes in the wake of a 2018 laneway improvement strategy, Reimagining Dublin One Laneways, developed by Sean Harrington Architects for DCC [4], which has been woefully underutilised since its publication [5]. While the plan’s proposals to ameliorate blank facades and low footfall by improving surfacing and lighting remain relevant, it makes little reference to resolving the source of these blights: vacancy.
In autumn 2023, Aisling Ward and Sophie Reid, two architecture master’s students at UCD, conducted an exercise in vacancy mapping of the Dublin 1 area that showed a high concentration of dereliction in three local lanes: Charles Lane, Grenville Lane, and Rutland Place (figure 1). Judging by a 1985 photograph (main image) of the house on the corner of Grenville Lane, some of these buildings have been slipping into ruin for almost forty years. Without meaningful intervention, the lanes’ dysfunction will only deepen, leaving them vulnerable to becoming what urban theorists call “terrain vague”: unproductive, unsafe, and uninhabitable voids alienated from the city around them. However, as architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales declared in his 1995 essay, Terrain Vague, the void can represent absence, but also hope: “the space of the possible, of expectation” [6]. While these lanes clearly expose the symptoms of negligent ownership and property speculation under capitalism, they also offer fertile testing grounds for the potential reclamation of abandoned city space. Applying the logic of Solà-Morales, the lanes’ absence of utilisation is what now makes them spaces of opportunity, opportunity that may flourish with a change of use and a change of ownership.
Of the estimated eight vacant commercial properties sitting immediately on these three lanes, only one at Rutland Place is listed on the Vacant Site Register and therefore subject to the vacant site levy [7], a tax that has been widely ignored by property owners who owe up to €50 million across the country in unpaid levies [8]. In the context of the climate emergency and current housing exigencies, the council should – instead of maintaining a cycle of negligence based on the unwavering sanctity of private property ownership – take real action and start issuing Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO) to vacant properties that have eluded taxation over the course of at least two years, which is the minimum period a building must be vacant for to be exempt from planning permission for a change into residential use [9]. Purchased properties could then be redeveloped by the council or an Approved Housing Body (AHB) for social and affordable housing schemes that will return much needed density and human activity into the abandoned lanes, in turn improving the permeability and spatial diversity of the surrounding communities.
In the inevitably long period between purchase and redevelopment, the council could invoke a “meanwhile use” mechanism that gives temporary guardianship of properties to grassroots organisations like community groups or artists collectives. Meanwhile use is a loose designation for activities that occupy empty space, while waiting for another activity on site. These are usually cheaply produced events like markets, exhibitions, or installations that exist on an ephemeral basis. It is an alternative city-making solution that has enjoyed much success in similarly priced cities abroad like London, which boasts a thriving pop-up economy and many temporary-turned-permanent spaces such as the Young Vic theatre and Gabriel’s Wharf market in Southbank [10]. If a truly inclusive development process is devised to create a similar variety of programmes and uses, the impacts of footfall and activity would immediately breathe new life and identity into the lanes.
In the imagined future of unlocked laneways, the role of the architect as a collaborative agent is imperative. Many laneways are home to older buildings, suffering from structural insecurities and lack of servicing. In the case of meanwhile use, the architect(s) can envisage interpretive and playful site-specific building systems designed for easy assembly – and equally, disassembly – by the groups transforming these spaces into viable loci of non-market activity (figure 2). In the long-term vision of providing housing on the lanes, architects must equally play a pivotal role in navigating the challenges of adaptive reuse. However arduous these processes of transformation may be, it is clear that the lanes offer small slices of enormous possibility for the making of a radically different city – one whose “warren of streets behind the canals” no longer speaks of vacancy, but of vibrancy and culture. Perhaps hope for change can be offered to us, and posthumously to Elizabeth Leslie, by the late David Graeber, who succinctly claimed that: “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” [11].
Laneways are an intrinsic part of Dublin's fabric but a combination of vacancy and neglect has made them dysfunctional spaces. In this article, Paul Stewart considers how to unlock Dublin's warren of back streets.
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