Dublin’s North Georgian Core is one of the city’s most important built assets, comprising a pioneering network of 18th and early 19th-century streets and squares developed by successive generations of the Gardiner family and by other pocket-sized family estates. Although vast tracts were demolished during the 20th century, including fine terraces on Summerhill and Grenville Street, Gloucester Diamond, Rutland Street and beyond, much survives in the area extending from the North Circular Road in the east to Dominick Street and Parnell Square in the west. And unlike the South Georgian Core, it is still densely lived in, populated by thousands of residents in a bricked landscape that is topographically more stimulating and culturally more diverse than its southside cousin.

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Despite these qualities, Dublin’s greatest ‘known unknown’, our best kept public secret, is that the North Georgian Core is floundering in a deleterious cycle of substandard uses and ever-accelerating unauthorised development in a property investment model – to call it for what it is – that is fundamentally at odds with the protection, custodianship and even the future survival of the area’s architectural heritage. Worse still, it is consolidating social injustice and chronic poverty in an area that has the least capacity to address it. Under this pernicious regime, the type of high-quality urban homes in historic buildings promoted by multiple central and local government ‘adaptive reuse’ strategies, plus RIAI best practice models, have not the slightest prospect of being delivered.  

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This is because there has been a massive shift in investment patterns in the area, not just in the face of the current housing crisis, but also in the aftermath of the last economic recession. Where previously own-door, old-school, budget bedsits populated some Georgian houses in so-called ‘pre-‘63’ formats, now, as a result of the ‘bedsit ban’ introduced under new legislation in 2009, many are set out as under-the-radar ‘units’ packed with beds and bunkbeds in a housing standards limbo-land that constitutes neither apartment nor hostel accommodation, but mere rooms into which a kitchen and bathroom have been squeezed, with accompanying top-dollar rents. In other cases, such as houses on Gardiner Street and Gardiner Place, where families, students and children until recently lived in reasonable quality 1990s-type Georgian house conversions, the properties have been sold over their heads to investors specialising in providing homeless and emergency accommodation to the State through enormously lucrative contracts [1].

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In countless other instances, where Georgian houses were in redundant commercial use: solicitors offices, local newspapers, community group facilities, tourist hostels, religious buildings – all providing multiple opportunities for high-quality, sensitively divided apartment homes as espoused by the Dublin City Development Plan – they have instead transitioned to unauthorised high-density accommodation of the poorest quality without so much as a planning notice being erected, often identifiable by blinds kept firmly closed apparently under landlord decree. One case in point is a house on Gardiner Place, where a fine late-Georgian property was used for many years as offices for Community Action Network (CAN). Following its recent sale, the house is now filled over four storeys with no less than 34 advertised bed berths, without any planning permission for change of use, or the resulting fire and disabled access requirements [2].  

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The areas affected may surprise readers: they’re not backwater side streets. They include flagship Georgian squares, such as Parnell Square, where unauthorised mutilation of its mid-18th century houses continues to spread; principal city arteries like North Frederick Street, set out by the Wide Streets Commissioners; and architecturally significant streetscapes like Belvedere Place and Gardiner Street. Even rare early-Georgian houses next to the Department of Education on Marlborough Street have recently been subdivided and, in one shocking case, entirely gutted from top to toe. There is a rulebook for the majority, but in the North Georgian Core there is one rule only: don’t ask and keep the head down. Even certain estate agents are in on the act, typically advertising Georgian houses in commercial use as a series of ‘rooms’, and posting only exterior photographs in their listings to limit the evidential record from prior to their inevitable unauthorised conversion.

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To be clear, the time referenced is not the 1970s. Instead, this has been the steady pattern of the most recent decade, happening in our own time, in an era of laws, regulations and policy guidance relating to housing standards and protected structures, and it is presently accelerating at an alarming rate. The phenomenon is not a function of the relaxation of planning laws in relation to emergency refugee accommodation, of which the North Georgian Core also hosts a significant concentration, but rather an out-of-control development model in which the State itself is a prime actor at central and local government levels [3]. This is exercised through funding for homeless and emergency accommodation services, approved housing bodies, private sector companies, housing assistance payments and related strands. All providing vital supports in an era of massive pressure in Ireland’s housing sector, but manifestly unaccompanied by regulatory checks and balances.

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So complex is this network, particularly its hazy intersection with private-sector providers, that no one public agency has a picture of the scale of what is happening on Dublin’s northside. And as housing is such a hot political issue, Dublin City Council’s planning enforcement section is both reluctant and inherently compromised to deal with matters housing-related, even in cases where protected structures are suffering material damaged, as the council itself is a statutory housing and de facto homeless authority. Not a single conservation enforcement officer, never mind a team, is employed by that section for a city with over 9,000 protected structures.

The impacts on the North Georgian Core are manifold: the most obvious being a consolidation of inequality in an area which is already one of the most marginalised and densely populated in the State. Secondly, the illegal damage being undertaken to protected structures, including the gutting and subdivision of historic interiors, the insertion of PVC windows and doors, marring facades and streetscapes, and a total lack of proper conservation-led investment in facades, roofs, and exterior envelopes. This represents an assault on Ireland’s finite cultural heritage which in many cases, incredibly, the State itself is indirectly facilitating.

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But most impactful is the displacement of any quality investment in the area, either in historic buildings or in new developments, where the tens if not hundreds of millions of euro flowing into the district annually should actually be targeted. Instead, bargain-basement accommodation – it cannot reasonably be called housing – has now become the governing market for the district. There is absolutely no prospect of change unless the State itself intervenes in this deleterious cycle.

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It is vital that the new government gets to grips with this issue. This must include the establishment of a dedicated conservation planning enforcement unit in Dublin City Council staffed by accredited building conservation personnel. The spatial framework for the Strategic Development Regeneration Area (SDRA) for Dublin 1, being prepared under the Dublin City Development Plan, must prioritise investment in existing historic private properties as a policy action, and not just default solely to regeneration of social housing and lands in public ownership [4]. This should include street-by-street design strategies informed by architectural conservation and public realm expertise.

In a Dublin solution to a Dublin problem, 80% grant funding should be offered for large-scale conservation works to Georgian exteriors to draw long-term reluctant property interests in from the cold. And central government must better coordinate the regional and national distribution of emergency housing for our most vulnerable citizens so that Dublin, which currently hosts 80% of the State’s homeless accommodation, a staggering 82% of which is hosted in the city centre, is placed on a more sustainable footing [5].

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Statistics and climate action have a difficult relationship. Sometimes the statistics presented are not easily relatable, appearing abstract and therefore impersonal. Other times they can be presented at such a large scale, they seem to overwhelm our ability to act on the climate emergency. On this occasion, statistics were a starting point for Demolition Take Down, a research project initiated by two architects.

Let’s begin with the headline number of nine million tonnes of construction and demolition (C&D) waste produced in Ireland in 2021 as calculated by the Environmental Protection Agency [1]. This amounts to a staggering 48% of all waste produced in Ireland that same year [2]. In 2022, the Central Statistics Office estimated that the construction industry accounted for roughly 6% of the employed population in Ireland [3]. These three statistics are not absolutes, they fluctuate year on year [4]. It is the disproportionate relationship between the size of the waste production relative to the size of the producer that is the principal concern. This sparked a year-long project to understand why a small percentage of people had helped to produce such a large percentage of our nation’s waste. The gains from a potential change in attitudes and behaviour within this 6% club seemed a hopeful outcome to aim for.

This project was conducted in three parts. Part one gathered information primarily from a series of in-depth interviews with professionals operating in the construction industry on the back of an industry sentiment survey. Part two focused on an inter-disciplinary learning environment between students of architecture and of property economics. Part three was about dissemination and raising public awareness about the issue through a large-scale installation and supporting events, hosted by IMMA during September 2024.

In the beginning, care was taken to remain neutral in order to act as a go-between for various stakeholders in the industry. We appreciated a nuanced approach was required. The project departed from solely analysing statistical facts towards collating anecdotal evidence. It therefore painted a clearer picture of tensions between the economic mindsets of vested interests and the aspirational gumption of activists and academics.

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One area that this writer was focused on was the decision-making prior to buildings being demolished. The temptation to point towards the circular economy as the solution to C&D waste was resisted. While it is acknowledged that circularity is to be encouraged, it tends to make the unsustainable sustainable if relied upon. A lack of resources, imagination, skills, and knowledge is affecting top-down and bottom-up decisions, leading to the total removal of buildings from the built environment they each helped to shape. An engineer in a local authority put it rather gloomily “The only way C&D waste will reduce in this country is if there is another economic recession! It is unlikely that C&D waste will be reduced for the right reasons” [5]. This is not a future to wish for.

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The theme for this series of articles, "Future Reference", is apt because, in some instances, the total removal of a building or neighbourhood can make our future points of reference more uncertain. If you keep taking pieces of neighbourhood away incrementally, there is a chance that some people will later grieve for what is gone. They might walk through their neighbourhood where a building was demolished, replaced, or left as an empty site primed for future investment. Even if they can’t pinpoint what used to be there, they might feel a sense of loss. Some argue a reliance on demolition as the political tool of regeneration is leading us towards a nowhere place. In solving present problems, and searching for a better future, do we really need to erase the past?

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Public attitudes are the life and death of a building. Let us pause for a moment to consider problematic human behaviours like pursuing the path of least resistance through urban sprawl or the deliberate decline of parts of our cities and towns. Perhaps this momentary pause might take us from a top-down view – that in order to regenerate we must obliterate the past – towards a bottom-up approach: that sometimes the answer may be selective demolition, or even none at all. Whether empowering citizens to have more agency over their local development plans through delegated power would result in less waste is debatable; it would require an Irish construction industry that has the skill set and knowledge required to adapt existing buildings for new uses in a viable manner.

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Ultimately it will be our shared cultural and social values that will allow us to reduce carbon emissions and retain embodied carbon within our existing buildings. The challenge will be how to unlock the power of culture to get things moving in the direction of adaptive reuse. It is this writer’s hope that the Demolition Take Down project can build upon our research to date and find like-minded practitioners within the 6% club who are interested in rethinking the value system currently associated with our existing buildings.

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To encourage positive change, we intend to keep questioning and pushing back against current methods of practice and policy in Ireland. By working together, stitching new within old, we will ultimately make no "newer or greater contravention" [6] to the quality of our built environment.

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Arguably one of the most novel features of the New European Bauhaus (NEB) is its inclusion of ‘beauty’ as a core value. In tying the concept of beauty to sustainability and problem-solving, the NEB is appealing for a new sensitivity in the built environment. This will have a significant impact on how we think about architecture. Few lament the late Hawkins House in Dublin, however, the loss of its predecessor: the art-deco Theatre Royal, is mourned to the present day. Beauty matters, and retaining old buildings will require a re-evaluation of their beauty, while new-builds embodying the NEB concept of beauty might encounter fewer calls for their demolition and replacement.

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The climate crisis has been addressed by the European Commission with the launch of the European Green Deal in 2019, an ambitious legislative agenda to create the world’s first carbon-neutral continent by 2050. This was followed by the NEB in 2020, a cultural programme intended to engender connections between citizens and the goals of the Green Deal and enable the scaling up of effective local actions taking place across the EU.

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The NEB is structured around three core values: sustainability, inclusion, and beauty, arguing that combining a deep consideration of each of these values generates the maximum social and environmental benefit from any deployment of resources. The NEB promotes a revolution in mindsets, envisaging greater sensitivity to limiting resource use while achieving social justice, thereby ensuring a desirable, sustainable future for citizens.

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By centring the plan around beauty, the NEB recognises that part of communicating a more hopeful future is to offer a more beautiful alternative vision. The NEB does not advocate for any specific architectural aesthetic. While borrowing the name of the historical Bauhaus school, it does not endorse the modernist style associated with the movement. The name instead echoes the aims of the historical Bauhaus: to address the pressing crises of the times through design and innovative thinking. The NEB defines beauty as a rich emotional and sensual experience, brought about by the application of “sensitivity, intelligence, and competences” into the fashioning of satisfying experiences for people [1].

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The NEB offers guidance for those designing projects (including building projects/services/ products/community events etc.) on how to evoke the quality of beauty as understood by the initiative. It defines three levels of ambition, paraphrased here from the NEB Compass document [1]. First, projects should aspire to (re)activate the qualities of a site/context while promoting physical and mental well-being. Second, projects should seek to offer opportunities for connection between people, places, and the non-human world, fostering “a sense of belonging through meaningful collective experiences”. Finally, the highest ambition involves offering opportunities for new creative, social, and cultural currents to emerge/coalesce through the project. By considering each of these factors in relation to a project and tying them in with the values of sustainability and inclusion described elsewhere by the NEB, actors can optimise the benefits of their project and demonstrate the desirability of an NEB-aligned future.

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Since the advent of modernism, beauty has often been side-lined as an aspiration in architectural design, viewed with suspicion as a reactionary bourgeois value [2], or a relic of the clash of historical styles of the nineteenth century [3]. Modernists like Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer embraced functionalism, a rational approach to form and expression, denying the role of “art” in construction [4]. Functionalism found favour as an inexpensive and ideologically credible approach to building, which in less talented hands has resulted in an aesthetically impoverished built environment. The technical limitations of modernism for much of its history have resulted in a legacy of inefficient buildings, which has led to wholesale demolition in Dublin and elsewhere. The aesthetic and energy limitations of modern architecture have gained pertinence through the reconsideration of these buildings in terms of their embodied carbon and the consequent necessity to retain them.  

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The nature of architecture as a public art, with an involuntary relationship between the public and their exposure to architectural designs, has been argued to place an ethical duty on architects to strive for beauty in their work [5]. In a world where the demolition of buildings will become increasingly rare and perhaps exceptional, this ethical consideration becomes heightened. The lifespan of buildings and building envelopes will inevitably expand as carbon budgets shrink. The public acceptance of the retention of buildings can be influenced by the perceived presence of beauty. The NEB argues that public buy-in for a resource-restricted future will depend on selling it as a lifestyle improvement on the status quo. If buildings are to be retained indefinitely, they should embody the qualities the NEB seeks to imbue: a sensitive, intelligent reading of physical and social context, a compassionate appeal to our senses and emotional well-being, and the opportunity for connection and new social dynamics through thoughtful design. Whether the current crop of speculative developments achieves these goals is questionable; however, with the ever-increasing urgency of the climate crisis, building in the absence of these values may soon become unjustifiable.