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‘Studio’ is a broad term for a place of creative work in several fields, including film, television, radio, architecture, photography, fine art, music, and dance [1]. At a time of growth in creative industries in Ireland, this article focuses on the studio as a building type, especially in film and television, where studios tend to be large. Understanding these places can improve professional practice and policy around media industries, which have distinctive architectural and urban planning needs. It may also help public understanding of an urgent issue in Irish media – the infrastructure of RTÉ, which requires significant public expenditure and good will to fulfill its mandate sustainably while keeping pace with technological change.
Recent public debate has reminded us of the geography of publicly-funded radio and television in Ireland: the large scale of RTÉ’s studios in Donnybrook, its smaller facilities in Cork and Limerick, and the studios of TG4 in Spiddal, Co. Galway [2]. Only those in Donnybrook and Spiddal are purpose-built, having been designed to a high standard by the acclaimed Dublin-based firm of Scott Tallon Walker. Closely related is Ireland’s network of privately owned studios, originating in 1958 with Ardmore Studios in Bray, Co. Wicklow, and recently expanded by the nearby Ashford Studios and by Troy Studios in Limerick. Dominated by commercial feature film and television drama production, often for overseas clients but supported by publicly-funded tax incentives, the private sector has recently seen a growth spurt in which at least three more large facilities are in planning: Greystones Media Campus, Dublin Fields Studios in Clondalkin, and Hammerlake Studios, Mullingar [3].
Each of these is vying to be Ireland’s largest studios with an exuberant self-promotion reminiscent of the explosive growth of the Hollywood studio system in the 1920s. Meanwhile, RTÉ’s studios in Donnybrook – built in the 1960s, just a few years after Ardmore – are downsizing or threatened with closure. The discrepancy highlights the relative neglect of public service media in recent years but also an opportunity to recalibrate with joined-up thinking and greater ambition. Notwithstanding complaints about its cost, RTÉ’s underdeveloped estate shows that it has never been funded enough. In other recent publications, I have related this problem to European and American contexts, but here I want to compare it specifically to Los Angeles. That city has an urban area ten times the size of Dublin, and a population eight times as large, in which four clusters of film and television studios (Hollywood, Studio City, Culver City, and Burbank) directly employ about 100,000 people and produce over a quarter of all US film and television output [4]. There are significant differences of scale, economics, and ideology but we can still draw lessons from Los Angeles because it has shaped many international standards in studio design and construction, many studio buildings are still in use that were constructed a century ago, and the economic and cultural contribution of studios is a source of pride.
In the 1920s, when the GPO was first occupied by 2RN, the predecessor of Radio Éireann, William Fox was building the massive studio complex called Century City; Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks were financing the new studios of United Artists on Melrose Avenue; and Jack and Harry Warner were expanding their headquarters on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood to new and bigger studios in Burbank. This expansion was driven by growing international markets for Hollywood films but also by technological change. In the 1910s, the first studios had been open-air timber frame stages protected from the California sun by retractable muslin shades [5]. These were soon replaced by glasshouses with iron or steel frames, which were more permanent but still prioritized natural light. Both early types were made for silent cinema and housed actors, crew, and sets for multiple productions side by side without concerns for noise. In the late 1920s, the coming of sound brought dramatic change, requiring heavier concrete structures whose opaque and insulated walls excluded both light and sound. That type still dominates today.
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While commissions from the Hollywood film industry helped drive the architectural innovations of Richard Neutra, Paul R. Williams, Claude Beelman, and Albert C. Martin, Los Angeles studios developed world-leading standards that governed their buildings’ layout, dimensions, materials, lighting, climate control, acoustics, communications, and electrical power. Many of those standards were developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, which remains influential today in the US and worldwide [6]. Indeed, the design and construction of studios set many trends in architecture: studios built for ‘talking pictures’ in the late 1920s pioneered the use of tilt-up concrete walls; excessive heat generated by studio lights in the 1930s and ‘40s helped to popularise air conditioning; and the ramping up of television production in the 1950s and ‘60s accelerated the use of epoxy resin floors in commercial buildings, and the mainstreaming of open-plan offices, electronic systems, and digital networks.
All of these technologies were used in the construction of Los Angeles’ most famous purpose-built television studios at CBS Television City in Los Angeles. Opened in 1952, this was designed by William Pereira and Charles Luckman in the minimalist, rectilinear style known as ‘mid-century modern’ – the closest comparison in Los Angeles to the more Miesian but equally beautiful buildings of RTÉ. As such, just as MGM, RKO and other famous studios favoured neoclassical buildings in the 1910s and art deco structures in the 1930s, CBS Television City continued a tradition of film and television companies commissioning innovative architecture [7]. As media industries, constantly in the public eye and aligned with the visual arts, they valued design excellence and sought to promote it through studio buildings that embodied their ethos. Many of these have been bought and sold, changed hands, and modernised but there has been remarkable continuity too with most of the city’s original studios still in use today.
Feature film and television drama production is distributed more globally now than before and, ironically, Ireland’s recent success is one of the current sources of pressure on the industry in Los Angeles, along with the decline of theatrical exhibition and the rise of virtual production, AI, and streaming [8]. Signalling this, the original Warner Bros studios in the heart of Hollywood, which are well-preserved and still functioning, were recently joined by the high-rise postmodernist headquarters of Netflix, unceremoniously squeezed into a corner of the site in 2018. Meanwhile, Los Angeles also has a proud tradition in public service media, embodied in PBS SoCal, the Southern California affiliate of the national broadcaster, for whom Gensler recently refurbished studios between Disney and Warners in Burbank [9].
Like all of these, film and television studios in Ireland are also adapting to dramatic change. Some of the private studios currently in planning have been delayed by financial caution on the part of investors, still reacting to last year’s Hollywood strikes and calculating the effects of AI. And RTÉ is seeking to modernise in response to media convergence driven by Hollywood and big tech. In my next article in this series, I will further develop the argument that the best way to address the sectoral challenges of the day is to cluster indigenous Irish media and creative industries in a diversified and densified RTÉ campus in Donnybrook. This would also bring exciting opportunities in architecture.
Open Space is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2024.
1. See, for example, Brian Jacobson, In the Studio: Visual Creation and its Material Environments, University of California Press, 2020.
2. M. Shiel, "Public media in public space: the future of RTÉ Studios in Donnybrook", Type, 1 July 2024; "RTÉ was in the GPO before and it didn’t work", The Irish Times, 17 October 2024.
3. The television studios of Sky andVirgin in west Dublin focus on news, sport, and current affairs and are beyond the scope of this article but will feature in future publications.
4. Otis College Report on the Creative Economy, California’s Creative Economy, 6 June 2024
5. M. Shiel, HollywoodCinema and the Real Los Angeles,University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp. 128-210.
6. SMPTE, “Standards”. https://www.smpte.org/standards/overview. In Europe, many standards in film and television studio design – especially for public service media – are set by the European Broadcasting Union, of which RTÉ is a member. See, for example, its New Builders Report 2024. https://www.ebu.ch/research/membersonly/report/new-builders.
7. L. Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television, University of Chicago Press, 2009. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo5876276.html.
8. For a survey of Irish film/tv studios and the global production environment, see B. Grantham, “Studio Construction in Ireland: Boom, Bubble – or Both?”, in V. Mayer, N. Lavie, and M. Banks, Media Industries in Crisis, Routledge, 2024, pp. 102-109.
9. Gensler, “KCET Studios, Burbank,California”. https://www.gensler.com/projects/kcet-studios.
Most people call it crypto but for the purposes of this exercise we’ll use the term "blockchain".
At its core, a blockchain is simply a way of recording an event on a digital ledger instead of in a paper document. This could, for example, be a record of an agreement - the kind of agreement people have been making between one another for as long as agreements have existed. If you do X, I’ll do Y. In the past, we’d make the agreement official by signing some papers in a solicitor’s office. However, with a smart contract running on a blockchain we take a different approach: first, we set out all the conditions that have to be met before the contract can be entered into; then, instead of asking a solicitor to decide when these conditions have been met, we write the whole thing in computer code and let technology act as the referee. The terms of the agreement are implemented without fuss and in a way that’s difficult to undo. If I suddenly get cold feet about some commitment I may have made, I can’t wriggle free of my obligations by finding loopholes and stirring up trouble. That’s the first interesting thing about a typical smart contract: terms and conditions are fairly hard wired.
The second interesting thing about blockchain contracts is the way details of the agreement are stored. Once the computer confirms that all the conditions have been met, the record isn’t just dumped onto one big central server which would be an obvious target for hackers. Instead, a copy of the entire record is kept on many different computers (nodes) spread out around the world. Each copy is kept in a series of linked “blocks” and each block contains a sort of digital fingerprint of all the verified information on which it is based. If someone tries to change even the tiniest detail in one block, the fingerprints won’t match and the change will be rejected. For extra security, large files (a good example for our purposes would be contract drawings) can be stored separately using a system like IPFS. The main block can be primed to keep an eye on these files to make sure that important material hasn’t been tampered with.
It didn’t take long for the earliest blockchain experimenters to see how this new technology could work as a form of money. Money, after all, is just another type of agreement. And so, around 2009, the terms "Bitcoin" and crypto entered the public imagination. Almost immediately, Bitcoin became synonymous with dodgy financial dealings and the internet was soon full of stories about international criminal gangs getting around banking regulations by paying each other in this new invisible currency.
But if we ignore all the hyperbole and look again at what an Ethereum-type blockchain involves – a system that has the same secure, tamper-proof data blocks as Bitcoin but also supports smart contracts – you can see how it might be used for things far beyond dodgy money. Anything that needs a secure, verifiable agreement could benefit from a blockchain approach, including many of the processes that underpin building and construction.
One of the more interesting examples so far of the use of blockchain in the broader construction/real estate space has been in property transactions and land registration. Anyone who’s ever bought a house, no matter where, will know that the process is slow, bureaucratic, paper-heavy and prone to error. Blockchain offers a secure, transparent alternative. In recent years Georgia (the country, not the US state), Dubai, Sweden and other jurisdictions have been testing out blockchain systems to record transfer of title. Media reports suggest the trials have been generally successful with transactions being completed sometimes in a matter of minutes.
In construction, the potential is just as easy to imagine. Take the example of a contractor completing the installation of a complicated foundation on a new project. Instead of waiting weeks for manual inspections to take place, on-site sensors confirm in real time that the work meets the agreed technical specification. That verification is automatically logged on a blockchain, which triggers immediate payment. Large companies like Skanska and Bechtel have been experimenting with these and similar approaches for quite some time, tracking materials from their source to their final installation as well as checking authenticity and compliance.
Another interesting area for potential blockchain crossover is the use of BIM. In a big public building project the architect, engineers and contractors might each start out working on the same 3D BIM model. But as the job progresses, each consultant makes one tweak here and another one there and soon various "official" versions of the same model have come into existence. When a dispute eventually erupts over whether a particular detail was formally approved, no one can be sure whose version of the detail is the “real” one.
With a blockchain-based approach, each approved version of the BIM model could be time-stamped and stored in a tamper-proof way so that a clear, verifiable record of what was agreed can be referred to. We could take this concept one step further and link the approved building model to a city’s digital twin – say, Dublin or Cork – with the building’s latest data slotted straight into the digital city model. This would mean that planners, utility providers and emergency services would have a reliable, up-to-date digital version of the building to work from. And, in fact, this is something that is already being explored in Dublin where the City Council’s partnership with DCU on creating a digital twin has received favourable coverage in the trade press.
While there has been progress in these and other areas, particularly in the private/commercial sphere, wide-scale adoption of blockchain technology in the worldwide construction industry faces a number of hurdles. For a start, regulations vary widely from region to region, making international coordination difficult. Added to that, the technology’s reputation still suffers from its early association with international criminal activity and, more recently, its environmental credentials have also been called into question. Similar to the technology involved in AI, conventional blockchain technology depends on large, power-hungry infrastructure which raises legitimate concerns about energy use and environmental impact, although it must be noted that more recent developments in the field have significantly reduced the amount of electricity to power an Ethereum-type chain.
In Ireland, there’s the added challenge of slow adoption in the public sector. The Government’s recently revised National Development Plan makes passing reference to AI, but none to blockchain. And while some of the important crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken have an established presence in Dublin, there isn’t a sense that blockchain technology has made an impression on the national psyche just yet. Without a clear strategy at government level, we risk falling behind countries already using the technology to speed up land transactions and improve on the construction workflow. How a more streamlined AI/blockchain approach could improve the delivery of, for example, much needed public housing is an interesting point to consider.
This doesn’t mean we should simply bemoan our misfortune and sit around waiting for the next tech opportunity to come our way. One of the more interesting things about the rise of AI, taken in its broadest sense, is its ability to tackle problems that feel too big or too unwieldy for heavy bureaucracies to sort out. So there’s no reason we couldn’t use AI to help us work through the practical and policy challenges of bringing blockchain into our construction and property systems. If we could get the two technologies working together – AI to design streamlined processes, blockchain to guarantee their integrity – the results could be extremely positive for everyone involved. And the countries that manage to combine AI and blockchain in this way will almost certainly enjoy some real advantages. There’s still an opporutnity for Ireland to put itself out in front – but time is running out.
Blockchain can offer a secure, transparent way to record agreements, and therefore holds potential across construction and property sectors, enabling real-time verification, automating payments, and improving data reliability. Yet its adoption in this context remains limited. In this article, Garry Miley discusses the possible impacts and limitations to the technology’s implementation.
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Open House Europe has chosen Future Heritage as its theme for this year.[i] This reframing of “heritage” urges us to consider not only what we have inherited from past generations, but what we would like to pass down to future generations. We are custodians of what we have inherited but we cannot preserve our cities to the point of stagnation. While building for the present, we must also negotiate a relationship to the past and to the future.
In considering the importance of the past and the future in the built environment, it is helpful to first consider the nature of the human relationship to time. This was explored by the philosopher Augustine of Hippo (354–430). In his reflections on the nature of time, Augustine speculates that where the past and the future actually exist is in the mind. The past and the future are present in the mind through memory and expectation, respectively. Augustine refers to this as the distention of the mind.[ii] In the human experience of time, then, the mind is always stretched towards the past through memory, and towards the future through expectation.
In this account, the past only exists through memory. However, memory also extends beyond our minds through the act of inscription. Inscription is described by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur as “external marks adopted as a basis and intermediary for the work of memory”.[iii] These “external marks” are what make up our written and visual histories and cultural narratives; crucially, they also make up our built environment. Our cities act as an intermediary for the work of memory. This is captured by Italo Calvino in his book Invisible Cities:
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the bannisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.[iv]
Layers of past inhabiting are inscribed in the buildings, streets, and squares of our cities. In our built heritage, we encounter the values and cultural narratives that previously guided the building of our cities. We reinterpret these through the lens of current sociocultural values in a perpetual renegotiation with the past. This is the work of memory.
The relationship to the past, cultivated through this work of memory, is an important aspect of the collective identity of any community. This is the case whether the place is one we have inhabited all our lives or is one that is inscribed with an unfamiliar past. For this reason, built heritage has a powerful role in the sense of identity of the inhabitants of the city. Its loss through war, natural disaster, decay, or development is often met with grief and even outrage.
In this regard, developing a city is a question of considering what memories we consider worth preserving and what future memories we would like to inscribe. The tricky balance of negotiating the relationship between the past and the future in a city can be seen in two late twentieth-century transport-infrastructure-led development projects: one in Amsterdam and one in Dublin.
In the 1970s, the city of Amsterdam’s development plan included the demolition of a large part of the central historic neighbourhood of Nieuwmarkt to make way for the city’s metro. The project proposed to replace the demolished buildings with New-York-style skyscrapers. At around the same time, the Irish transport authority planned to demolish much of the Temple Bar area in Dublin to develop a central bus station and underground rail tunnel. The historic neighbourhoods proposed for the sites of these projects were both in decline and in need of regeneration. The city authorities saw the opportunity this provided for introducing transport infrastructure for the future. A key difference in the circumstances of these projects was that Amsterdam’s had project funding readily available from government and commercial backers; Dublin’s did not.
In Amsterdam, many Nieuwmarkt buildings that had been cleared of their residents in preparation for demolition were occupied by artists and conservationists in an effort to preserve them. However, this local opposition to the demolition did not prevent it from going ahead. Instead, it culminated in some of the city’s worst ever riots, with violent clashes between those who had taken up residence in the district and the police and army sent to forcibly remove them.
Like Nieuwmarkt, Dublin’s Temple Bar area was in need of regeneration as a result of years of decline. However, in this case, funding delays led to the state transport authority letting out the properties it had acquired and earmarked for demolition. The cheap short-term rents attracted artists and small businesses. This brought new life to the area and revealed its potential as a cultural quarter. With intensifying local resistance to the plan and a new civic consciousness of the area’s potential, plans for the bus station were abandoned.
In Dublin, as in Amsterdam, there was a dissonance between the values of those altering the city and the values of those inhabiting the city. However, the delays to the Dublin project sowed the seeds of an alternative approach to the area’s development. Eventually, as part of Dublin’s tenure as European City of Culture in 1991, a competition for the rehabilitative Temple Bar Framework Plan was launched. This was won by Group 91[v] with their plan that proposed preserving much of the existing network of streets, with a handful of interventions including squares, streets, and a few key buildings.
Similarly, in Nieuwmarkt, even though a large number of buildings were demolished and the metro was built, plans for a motorway and tall office buildings were abandoned and Nieuwmarkt was ultimately rebuilt on its original street layout. This is notable as memory is not only inscribed in the materiality of the city, but also in its layout and design. In his book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard points out that “over and beyond our memories [our formative space] is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits”.[vi] Memory is inscribed in our cities, and the space of our cities is in turn inscribed in us through choreographing our habits of use.[vii]
Learning from past instances is valuable in deciding how to develop our future heritage and recognising what values are driving our decisions. It is evident from the above examples that changes to a city should be approached with care and follow the “principles of cooperation, equity, and democracy”[viii] that underpin much of Europe’s recent history. A good guiding principle to making interventions in the city that create inclusive socially responsible future heritage is perhaps the generosity of spirit invoked by Grafton Architects' concept of “freespace”.[ix] This includes generosity to current inhabitants through collaboration and the promotion of agency and belonging, and generosity to future inhabitants, particularly by taking measures to mitigate climate change and to make our cities inhabitable in the future.
Like the mind in Augustine’s account of time, the city is stretched towards both the past and the future. Our own values determine how we approach our relationship to the past and what we desire for current and future inhabitants. Where the future exists as expectation in the mind, it exists as possibility in the built environment. The past is present in the built heritage of a site and the future is present in the possibilities that the site presents. In deciding how to alter our urban spaces we are renegotiating our relationship to our past and drawing out the city we want future generations to inherit.
In this article, Dr Sally J. Faulder, referencing this year's Open House Europe theme of "Future Heritage", considers how we ascribe value to our inherited and inhabited built fabric, and to the built heritage we seek to pass on.
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OUTSIDE: IN, which ran from 29 May to 20 June, was a display of the work from the UCD School of Architecture Planning and Environmental Planning. This year, the summer exhibition wanted to invite the public into our studio spaces at Richview, continuing an important conversation between architectural education and the wider professional community, sparked by the Building Change project and highlighted at the RDS Architecture and Building Expo last October. The exhibition aimed to invite the outside into our world of Richview architecture and exhibit how the next generation of UCD architects are being prepared to shape the built environment.
The exhibition draws on the ideals of the new Building Change curriculum that has been introduced into the B.Arch over the past three years, and aims to comment on the environmental, social, and economic challenges and opportunities arising in current architectural discourse. OUTSIDE:IN sought to bridge the gap between academia, industry, practice, and policy. It represented a space where the values of architectural education intersect with the realities of contemporary practice.
Featuring the work of seventy-five Master of Architecture students, the work was curated around four forward-looking Design-Research Studios, each tackling real-world challenges through the lens of climate action:
• Housing & the City – rethinking urban living and community development.
• Material Embodiment & Resources – exploring sustainable materials, construction, and structure.
• Landscape Economy & Town – investigating settlement and production through social and economic perspectives.
• Past, Future & Reuse – advancing circularity and adaptive reuse in architecture.
As well as a celebration of the students work, the opening evening began with an insightful panel discussion with panellists Ana Betancour (Urban + Architecture Agency), Lucy Jones (Antipas Jones Architects), Sarah Jane Pisciotti (Sisk Group), Emmett Scanlon (Irish Architecture Foundation) and Conor Sreenan (State Architect, Office of Public Works). The panellists were carefully selected to reflect the diverse paths which are open to us as we leave the four walls of our institution. Although panellists share a common foundation in education and practice, each has pursued different and inspiring trajectories across the architectural realm.
The panel discussion allowed us to consider and reflect on our five years of education and growth, within and outside of the studios in Richview. The overall message was of encouragement, to have confidence, be brave, be unforgiving, unrealistic, and open-minded. The variation in the panellists showed the diverse and varied opportunities and interests that can stem from an architectural education. Our education is about the fundamental ability to evaluate things, understanding our own morals, social values, interests and to ask what can architecture be? Lucy Jones described architecture as a connective tissue that sits between art, policy, developers, education, the city, and people. The field mitigates between the pragmatism of society and the desire to evoke creativity and feeling within the urban environment. As Sarah Jane Piscotti said it is “a desire to know how others think and understand their perspective”. Having seen the process from within, we know there is so much more thought, passion, values, morals, and ideas in a project that can ever be represented on two grey boards. In Richview, we create a culture of curiosity and aim to understand others and we hope to bring this forward in whatever form it may manifest.
OUTSIDE:IN has allowed Richview to open its doors and studios to friends, family and the general public. Emmet Scanlon spoke about a need to de-silo architecture and its educational institutions, making it more accessible to people not within the field. There were certainly moments throughout our education where this sort of ‘wall’ was obvious to us. There was a continuous use of inaccessible language to communicate something that may have seemed relatively simple. At times it felt as if the words were being used to throw us off intentionally. But looking back these moments also taught us to question how and why we communicate our designs in a certain way and, in particular, who we are communicating it to. Despite the challenges and hurdles, our education pushed us to critically think, to find clarity among complex situations, and to constantly strive for inclusivity within our work. It’s a reminder that architecture is not just about what’s built, but about the people, language, and connections we are creating. As we move forward, we now have the opportunity to carry these lessons with us, to make the field more transparent and approachable and to always design with intention and accessibility at the centre.
The Building Change initiative aims to bring climate literacy and sustainability into practice through developing the undergraduate curriculum. A three-year project across all architectural schools in Ireland, it encourages students to engage with and consider the climate emergency, and their impact and responsibility as architects in relation to this. To celebrate the end of the three-year programme in UCD, the Building Change Student Curators held a competition titled, ‘Making Visible the invisible’. The aim of the competition was to submit a piece of work that communicates the often unseen factors that inform design. We cannot always see air, sound, force, energy, waste, biodiversity, environmental impacts etc., yet being able to understand and visualise these systems is a vital part of architectural practice. Similarly, Building Change was often an unseen system, changing and informing education in Richview over the past three years. To celebrate this and bring light to all the innovative and positive impacts the initiative had, a collaged mural was erected in the front foyer representing Building Change’s timeline within the school, plotted in relation to wider environmental changes on a global scale. The timeline is a visual representation indicating how our education is adapting and responding to the climate emergency.
OUTSIDE: IN opened Richview’s studio doors to the public, showcasing how UCD’s architecture students are responding to today’s environmental, social, and economic challenges. This article explores how the exhibition, grounded in the Building Change initiative, reflects a shift in architectural education connecting academia, industry, and community through design, dialogue, and climate action.
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