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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].
One Good Idea is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2024
1. E. Leslie, ‘A northsider's lament’, The Irish Times, 13 December 1965, p. 10.
2. E. Hanna, Modern Dublin: Urban Change and the Irish Past, 1957-1973, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 115-118.
3. O. Kelly, ‘Dangerous, dirty Dublin lane remains open seven months after closure ordered’, The Irish Times, 19 August 2024, https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2024/08/19/dangerous-dirty-dublin-lane-remains-open-seven-months-after-closure-ordered/, (accessed 26 August 2024).
4. Sean Harrington Architects, Reimagining Dublin One Laneways, Dublin, Dublin City Council, 2018.
5. L. Neylon, ‘Dublin City Council considers opening up city centre laneways for people to play cricket’, Dublin Inquirer, 26 June 2024, https://dublininquirer.com/2024/06/26/dublin-city-council-considers-opening-up-city-centre-laneways-for-people-to-play-cricket/, (accessed 26 August 2024).
6. I. de Solá-Morales Rubió, ‘Terrain Vague’, in C. C. Davidson (ed.), Anyplace, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1995, p. 118-123.
7. Dublin City Council, ‘Vacant Sites’, Dublin City Council, 2024, https://www.dublincity.ie/residential/planning/active-land-management/vacant-sites, (accessed 17 August 2024).
8. D. Mc Donagh, ‘Landowners Owe Councils €50 million as 90% of Vacant Sites Levies go Unpaid’, Irish Mirror, 23 May 2024, https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/landowners-owe-councils-50-million-32871977, (accessed 17 August 2024).
9. Government of Ireland, ‘S.I. No. 75/2022 - Planning and Development Act (Exempted Development) Regulations 2022’, Irish Statute Book, 2022, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2022/si/75/made/en/print, (accessed 26 August 2024).
10. N. Bosetti and T. Colthorpe, Meanwhile, in London, Making Use of London’s Empty Spaces, London, Centre for London, 2018, p. 8-9.
11. D. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, London, Melville House Publishing, 2016, p. 141.
Already functioning as a successful reuse of an old industrial infrastructure without any intentional architectural intervention, the Royal and the Grand Canals are likely our largest, and certainly longest, public spaces in the city. From the moment the sun emerges in spring, to late autumn, they bustle with activity, hosting commutes, walks, runs, and late-night gatherings. These truly vital spaces were gifted to the city by the cyclical nature of industrial change. Decommissioned, they have persisted throughout the success and decline of Dublin, fostering public social space which is increasingly rare within the stoic red-brick city centre. Our canals offer roots from which civic and cultural spaces may grow.
A reflection from John Banville’s Dublin memoir, Time Pieces, illustrates the canals’ enduring appeal:
“… by the canal at Lower Mount Street Bridge and watched a heron hunting there beside the lock . .. I told her I loved her, but she closed her eyes and smiled, with her lips pressed shut.”[1]
Dubliners display a love for their city on these banks every summer, and yet it goes on unrequited. Public spaces adjacent to the Grand Canal such as Portobello Square and Wilton Park are being eroded by speculative demand, despite their evident popularity in a city thirsty for space. Portobello Square is a rare open public square directly abutting the canal, so intensely popular at times that the authorities see no other crowd control option but to physically impede the public from occupying it. In 2021, Portobello Square was boarded up and temporarily privatised in return for an investment in its redevelopment.[2] This was a convenient alignment of interests, as the space had also been fenced off the previous year to prevent anti-social activity.
The Grand Canal’s banks often do not inspire hope in the here and now, instead becoming a discomforting reflection of our town and country. The most recent fencing off of the canal to prevent its occupation by unhoused asylum seekers [3] proved unpopular, not solely for its inhumanity, but also its cost. Hope, however, lies within this provocation; the moment of inflection should be seized to offer a new scale of social and cultural infrastructure to the city. The canals are crying out for rejuvenation through a top-down shift in thinking, to irrigate the city with public cultural spaces, foster more pace for unexpected encounters and more feed for the friction and forum that cities are ultimately about. Another greenway won’t activate the canals’ multitudinous potential to invigorate their dense urban surroundings.
Plans released by Waterways Ireland at the beginning of this year set out to enhance public seating, increase accessibility, and combine two existing narrow pathways to form one wider path.[4] Unfortunately, these proposals fall short of the ambition these urban spaces so desperately need. Combining pathways may optimise the space as a liminal venue of commute, yet may equally alienate those who use the bank as a space for slower, un-programmed occupation. Addressing the challenge of these banks’ inability to support year-round activity within their current footprint seems quite the daunting task.
The canals would benefit from receiving intentional interventions beyond their immediate banks to amplify their use. Where possible, the tarmac roadways lining the canal banks should be reappropriated in service of the canal corridor, providing and connecting into adjacent cultural spaces. In King’s Cross in London, a sculpted mediation of the streetscape down to meet the water’s edge becomes seating for an outdoor cinema during summers[5], and in Paris, new businesses are opening in alcoves along the Seine, unlocked by the riverside’s pedestrianisation.
One thing has become abundantly clear, engagement in this issue should not be the sole task of Waterways Ireland. At minimum, council authorities should engage with W.I. to support their common ground. As it stands, similar to the redevelopment of Portobello Square, the current W.I. proposal for the Grand Canal’s banks involves a public private partnership, with IPUT Real Estate part-funding the works to the canal banks.[6] Unfortunately, investment of substantive urban change always seems to lie beyond the remit of the local authority, Dublin City Council.
When the building of the Grand Canal was commenced by the Board of Inland Navigation almost 270 years ago, it was government founded, funded and led.[7] Dublin City was building much of what we now see as its most definitive urban fabric, public and private, at a time when architectural neo-classicism proliferated with bold metropolitan might. The Rotunda, Grattan Bridge, Parnell Square, and Gandon’s Customs House, are just some of the iconic city elements built in this time. Perhaps in our government’s present moment of liquid economic abundance, we should aspire to a new era of bold urban thinking; a new scale in what we demand from our city; and, ultimately, in what we propose that our city becomes. The canals are a good place to start. Their waterway function now secondary, the city should lean in, commit to the development of this deeply urban space, and allow the future of the canals to define Dublin anew.
Dublin's canals, their original function now secondary, have untapped civic and cultural potential, proposes Peter O'Grady.
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Curated by Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli, the Portuguese pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibited photographs of Alvaro Siza meeting, in their homes, inhabitants of housing he had designed, many decades earlier, in various European cities. It included Schilderswijk in The Hague, designed between 1984 and 1993 for immigrants from Turkey, Morocco, Cape Verde, and Suriname. The design process of Schilderswijk included the construction of full-scale models to demonstrate Siza's plans to future inhabitants and to solicit their feedback. Resulting layouts include a sliding door that enables the apartments’ living spaces to be divided into public and private zones – the latter providing a realm into which Muslim women can retreat. Recognising, listening to, and designing for ‘the other’, at Schilderswijk Siza created housing that could be inhabited in multiple ways.
When, during construction, he was invited to present the project in the Berlage Institute, a conversation ensued that can be analysed through De Carlo’s triad of publics [2]. The presentation itself was addressed to an architectural public. A member of this first public, Herman Hertzberger, pointed to the second – the client. Siza’s housing in The Hague was commissioned by a city council engaged in the urban renewal of a district in which 46% of the population originated from outside Europe (rising to 93% by 2016) [3]. Hertzberger objected to Siza’s spatialisation, within Dutch social housing, of traditions at odds with that nation state’s ambivalence towards cultural, religious and gender differences. He evoked a homogeneous welfare state coming to an end; Siza had been approached by a local council deliberately seeking out an architecture open to immigrants’ requirements. At stake within the conversation was the architect’s responsibility to these immigrants, the project’s instantiation of De Carlo’s third and most elusive public: buildings’ users. Often unknowable to the client, it is a public with whom, in ways that range from the sincere to the performative, architects occasionally overtly engage in discussions about architecture. However, it is simultaneously a public with whom, through their design of ordinary environments, architects habitually engage, in an indeterminate, intimate manner.
During his 2016 visit to Schilderswijk, Siza met its original residents, but also newcomers; people he could have encountered during his participative workshops, but also people unborn when he was designing the scheme. What compelled Grande and Cremascoli to organise these encounters? What relationship was explored in the ensuing photographs? In what way is Siza connected to the current inhabitants of his buildings, and they to him? Recent analysts of the architectural design process have resorted to the spectral when describing how architects imagine the future inhabitation of their buildings. Paul Emmons suggests that, through the act of drawing, architects project an ‘imaginal body’ or ‘skeleton self’ into the spaces they propose [4]. For Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, architects’ assumptions that inhabitants will, in some measure, be formed through being in their spaces, necessarily reduces them to shadowy, ghostly figures; the inhabitants do not yet exist [5]. The Berlage conversation between Hertzberger and Siza indicated a shift in European architectural culture, away from the relative certainties of designing for the default subject of the modernist welfare state, towards the more onerous task of designing for a postmodern heterogeneous public. Celebrating the newly unknowable public emerging in the 1980s and 90s as differences in gender, class, culture, and race were increasingly acknowledged, Rosalyn Deutsche repurposed the idea of the ‘phantom public’ in her argument – validated in works such as Schilderswijk– that this unknowability was generative rather than problematic [6].
For the architectural public of a Biennale, some of the potency of the 2016 photographs rests, I think, in an intimation that they capture Siza encountering the everyday, corporeal manifestation of his phantom public. During an interview, Yüksel Karaçizmeli, a Turkish long-time resident of Siza’s Bonjour Tristesse housing in Berlin, asked Esra Akcan to thank the Portuguese architect for the design of her living room [7]. This would suggest that the Schilderswijk photographs might also record the inhabitants (similarly residents of authored architecture) meeting a person heretofore phantasmic in their lives. In my interpretation of them, the images of duffle-coated architect and tea-serving hosts (perhaps too cosily) register architecture as the site of a multi-layered human relationship between designer and inhabitant that persists across space, time and states of being.
Colomina and Wigley propose that design is a practice that seeks to negotiate ‘the indeterminacy of the human’ [8].With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is becoming imperative that architects articulate the critical role of human agency and indeterminacy in design, and develop methodologies that demonstrate to themselves, clients, and the general public the discipline’s capacity to sensitively create social realms. These methodologies will presumably harness the capacities of AI (to, for instance, enable the observation of ‘agent populations’ navigating simulated buildings) [9]. But, drawing lessons from architecture’s recent history, the use of AI should be tempered by a scepticism towards any certitude latent in such methods. Projects such as Schilderswijk suggest that robust architecture emerges from design processes involving consideration of and openness to the mysterious lives of others. I believe that such architecture is founded upon a resolution to work, with and through uncertainties, towards the establishment of a human relationship with De Carlo’s utopian phantom public – all those people who use architecture.
In this article, Brian Ward argues that the best architecture is made through design processes that consider the heterogenous and mysterious lives of all the people who use architecture.
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Our current system of designing and making buildings has reached an unprecedented level of standardisation. Global networks of supply have dismantled historic approaches to making buildings, which were based on material availability, climate, and cultural practices. Throughout the world, architecture is now made from the same kit of parts, which is heavily reliant on four basic products: steel, concrete, glass, and plastic. Each contributes to the hyper-industrial world we inhabit, and together they represent what has been referred to as the Quadrivium Industrial Complex [1].
As industrialisation brought about the ubiquity of standardised materials at unprecedented speed and scale, regulatory frameworks [2] were designed around them, supported by aggressive lobbying and marketing campaigns [3]. Advertised as low-maintenance and technologically advanced, to mid-twentieth century Ireland these materials were symbols of a bright future in which cold, damp buildings subject to fire risk were things of the past [4].
Today, both the process of specification and the materials from which we build have become so entrenched that it can be difficult for many to imagine an architecture situated outside of the standardised system. Testing, certification, mortgages, and insurance policies in Ireland and beyond are generally designed around these systems. Natural materials with proven efficacy over centuries of service are often dismissed by the building industry due to their inherent irregularity, which can make them resistant to automation, and difficult to produce at scale. They are too often considered risky and fringe – a costly, niche option.
Architect and writer Keller Easterling has described the “single evil – single solution” outlook on architecture as “a fallacy, the truth is far worse” [5]. To make meaningful change in the construction industry, we need to accept that there is no simple solution to the problem of architecture, and that all construction practices cause harm, even if the full impact of a material’s extraction is not immediately visible. However, we instead continue to conduct the practice of architecture, or of architectural fabrication, as an exercise in problem-solving, to a series of standards established for predictable outcomes – a one-size-fits-all approach.
We are at risk of losing sight of architecture as an important mode of cultural production and further consolidating the monopolies that exists within the construction and development sector. To deliver cost-effective architecture that is of a particular place requires a granular understanding of local biodiversity, ecosystems, cultural specificities, and situated knowledge systems.
Architectural discourse is gradually recognising the need for a new direction. With a growing consciousness of both the enormous scale of our environmental impact, and the almost prohibitive cost of development, as an industry we are beginning to question not what we will build, but how we will do so: focusing on architecture as more than function or aesthetic, but rather as networks of resources, people, and ecologies.
The Irish Concrete Federation is evidently threatened by this, having recently updated their age-old slogan to an almost insistent “Concrete Built IS Better Built”. And in the face of growing pressure for change, the construction industry is seeking a silver bullet to enable it to carry on as normal. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber [6] has declared mass timber to be just that, stating that if construction over the next couple of centuries substitutes business‑as‑usual materials such as steel and concrete for engineered timber, the atmosphere could return to pre‑industrial conditions. However, we at Superposition believe that this understanding of material resourcing is misguided. No material can be sustainable if it is applied at a scale that is unsustainable, and we cannot reach carbon neutral construction within the boundaries of the current system.
There is great urgency here. If we estimate that a typical construction cycle spans seven years, then we have just four remaining cycles before 2050 in which to radically transform our construction practices. This is crucial to meet the ambitious targets established by the Paris Accords and to avoid severe environmental consequences. Although modular construction is often presented as the solution to seemingly global building crises, increased modularity will only result in increased homogeneity and reduced biodiversity. It is therefore deeply necessary for architects to engage with localities in a more specific and materially focused way.
While a shift to bio‑based materials is necessary, it is just as crucial to ask how these materials will be cultivated: where, on whose land, using what resources, and at what cost? While mass timber holds promise, there exists a cautionary tale around the pitfalls of monoculture plantation. In moving away from generalised solutions to the “problem of constructing architecture”, we must urgently work to establish a resilient and biodiverse construction industry, marked by concentrated pockets of knowledge that address conservation, sustainable cultivation practices, material usage, embodied knowledge, culture, and economy, and view each site’s distinct challenges as opportunities for innovative architectural solutions.
Superposition’s recent collaboration with Atelier LUMA, on the Unwanted/Overlooked Species Project [7], explored underutilised trees and plants native to the Camargue region of France, such as cypress and Aleppo pine, as well as invasive species such as the tree of heaven and cane de Provence. Our investigations focused on the highly resilient, heat-resistant Aleppo pine tree. Currently, due to the large number of branches and the conical shape of the trunk, over 80% of Aleppo pine trees harvested do not meet the current timber grading profile, and so fully virgin trees are burned for energy, or mulched.
In collaboration with the regional timber council, Fibois Sud Provence Côte d’Azur, and a local sawmill, we explored how Aleppo pine could become a viable source of construction timber. Taking reference from historic boat construction, which sought out, and often cultivated particular grain direction in trees to generate desired forms that were stronger and easier to work with, we designed a joinery system that embraced the complex and unique grain patterns of these timbers. The result is an adaptable framing system composed of just two elements – a node and a strut – in varying configurations and lengths.
Similarly, our project “An Experimental House” explores ideas for assembling and disassembling a structure with limited means within a particular context. The design is underpinned by digital design tools which allow for the rapid planning, transformation, and translation of the form. The first phase of the project was designed for easy assembly and disassembly within a gallery context. The second iteration of the structure elaborates and evolves the framework to explore ideas for grounding, sheltering, servicing, inhabiting, and maintaining, on the grounds of VISUAL Carlow.
Engaging with the material context within the region of a site, the project explores alternative uses for local, varied, and sustainable materials including native larch sections – a species compromised by climate change and the spread of disease – indigo, and beeswax from a local hive as a cladding material. These elements are held in place by the folded steel nodes which form the guiding logic for the arrangement of the structure. The structure utilises helical screw piles, and is designed to be disassembled, relocated, and inhabited upon completion of the exhibition.
Other recent projects from small and emerging Irish practices such as Fuinneamh Workshop Architects’ “Den Talamh” [8] and RAT Office’s “An Bothán Cladach” [9] seek to emphasise the use of natural, found, and irregular materials that embody the craft histories and material cultures of their sites and engage with both the challenges and opportunities of material scarcity and limited budgets. Further afield, students led by Kate Davies and Emmanuel Vercruysse at Hooke Park, the Architectural Association’s forest campus, have been exploring the construction of post-tensioned space frame structures and walkways which utilise found and pruned beechwood branches. The structures incorporate 3d scanning, CNC, and robotics in their design and making and propose an argument for the value of using near or on-site materials in spite of their inherently diverse characteristics. Together, these projects can be read as an increasing response to, and an attempt to practice outside of, the monolithic industrial architectural complex and its underlying thesis that humanity’s spatial demands can only be met through ubiquity and standardisation.
We see the future of sustainable design not as an exercise in the replacement of existing global networks with “green alternatives”, but rather in highly location-specific micro practices which respond intelligently to varying site constraints and climactic conditions and are flexible enough to integrate a wide range of materials while empowering local actors. This approach to architecture may not be scalable in the traditional sense, but rather utilises a particular framework or way of thinking which can be applied to a broad range of projects and regions. With contemporary technological advances, highly responsive and specific approaches to construction are not only essential, but entirely possible.
Our current system of designing and making buildings has reached an unprecedented level of standardisation. In this article, Donn Holohan and Elspeth Lee of Superposition argue against a one-size-fits-all approach in favour of a highly responsive, site-specific architecture that embraces local materials and evolving digital design tools.
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