space overlooked

 

 

THE MISSION

‘For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all cities in the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’

James Joyce

The aim of the ‘Non Building’ exhibition is to spatially excavate our city through a series of research and design projects. The exhibition was first encouraged by Dublin Civic Trust to explore a cohesive way of inhabiting the capital: developing a modern living environment while sensitively seeking to preserve and regenerate the city’s finite building stock.

In our current climate the necessity to review that which we already possess has never been so important. With so much constructed so recently, we are not in need of quantity, but of quality in our built space. We need the right buildings in the right places, at little cost, and without compromising the essential character of the city.

Our intention is to look very carefully at Dublin’s finite building stock, and propose to do the most with the least number of moves.

The NB exhibition is a joint venture of recent UCD architecture graduates and the Dublin Civic Trust.

 

 

PEOPLE IN THE CITY

‘Planners, designers and legistators need to be more informed about the city, yet less fearful and more investigative in ways of working with it, making it into a tool, a ground for experiment in new architecture’

Niall McCullough: Dublin an Urban History

The Celtic Tiger was sustained by a belief that a city could operate when spread across a province, that it made sense for a citizen’s office and bedroom to be separated by one hundred kilometres of road. This was in contrast to a fundamental axiom of planning - that people should be gathered in clusters: for social, sustainable, economic, and infrastructural reasons. In the breathing space left by the passing of the Tiger, Dublin City Council is thus urging a recolonisation of the city - as evinced by such projects as the Dublin House workshop of 2009. We are beginning to realise that a city needs people at its heart.

The inner city was not always an inner city, and its character not always that which it is today. The Georgian terraces have played many roles: as expansive domiciles of the upper class, as shells filled with rooms filled with families of the poorest sort, and as many things in between. Yet no matter its place on the social ladder, the historic core to the north has long remained steadfastly residential.

So people live in the city, and yet the city is not a place in which many people seek to live. The problem, in many ways, is not a lack of housing but a lack of domesticity. We seek to propose an intervention that can make the city a home.

 

 

CAN YOU EVER THINK OF THE GPO AS YOUR LOCAL POST OFFICE?

On any given day, one might go for a swim, have dinner with friends, engage in competitive curling, purchase a 1:76 model of a 2-8-0 steam locomotive, or attend a Coptic Orthodox service. Some things we do are frequent and universal, and should be accessible with ease; other activities are uncommon and particular, and need not be available immediately.

The benefit of the city is that many, many diverse facilities can be provided. The largest stadia, the most esoteric shops and the greatest selection of restaurants are all right there, in one place. Conversely, however, the simpler things are squeezed out: the local community players performing Hamlet, neighbourhood barbeques, a swarm of children playing three-and-in. The urban fabric is stretched so thin across so many people that no-one truly owns it.

We believe that this sense of locality is the missing ingredient that can make the inner city a place to feel at home. Civic buildings are scattered throughout the centre and individual units of accommodation abound, but the middle scale, the local scale is largely unaddressed. By providing for this, we hope that a district can be transformed into a neighbourhood.

 

 

THE MERITS OF INTROVERSION

‘Architecture is not necessarily defined by what form you can give a building; however, it is almost always dependent on its environment and the sensual qualities desired by and designed for the inhabitants.’

The conventional view of the historic Dublin terrace is that it is a streetscape. Indeed, it was probably originally envisaged in those terms, with care and attention placed in the proportions of the road and proportions of the front windows. In a smaller town and with slower traffic, it was perhaps possible to feel an ownership of the street, and neighbours could sitting at their front doors sharing gossip. The Georgian stoop encouraged interaction. Today, these external spaces are a short walk from the teeming masses circulating through the city centre, and their openness means they do not truly feel like they belong to the buildings that face them.

The front façade of many of these old buildings remains unchanged; in some cases, all that remains of an original structure is that single wall. The rear, however, has often been extended and adapted, intervened in or hollowed out. The built fabric to the rear is far more malleable and organic than the pristine frontages.

Perhaps, just as the city has changed, the way we think about how we live in the city should too. Taking the evolution of the hidden core of these structures as our cue, we propose to invert their focus, re-imagining the street as a block. Shared spaces, open spaces and public spaces can all be excavated into the heart, which will offer a communal place to those in the built fabric that surrounds them, and in turn receive shelter from the public street beyond.

 

 

FINDING THE BLOCK WITHIN

‘The real success of the building is that it is able to create interesting, evocative spaces without relying on any definitive form...The exterior form of the house that is generated by this varied arrangement is incomprehensible from within. Instead, the form appears unbound and soft, as if an internal force is pressing the walls and roof out against the buildings around it. Like a baroque chapel in Rome buried deep within the city’s close pattern of narrow streets, the expansive interior is a place of escape and dreams.” Caruso St John brick house

The block typology is not a new one: rings of apartments enclosing a shared space have been found across Europe and beyond for hundreds of years. Nor indeed is it new to Ireland - many recent developments have worked with the perimeter block as a model, with varying degrees of success. However, the Irish inner city model has almost always followed the pattern of demolish, clear and build anew.

Yet the spatial structure of the historic Dublin blocks is not much different from their new counterparts - high at the edge, low at the centre. With very little building, and even less demolition, we believe it is possible to reconfigure a more sensitive, more genuine way of occupying the city that nonetheless owes to the pragmatic reality of how urbanity works. Such a modern typology can be activated without disturbing the physical structure of the spaces around.

 

 

ONE FOR ALL, AND ALL FOR ONE

‘Globalisation actually promotes concerns about identity, how to achieve particularity, how to establish distinctiveness. Unfortunately as real difference wanes, everywhere seeks new individuality of the same type and appearance, bring, over time, the opposite of diversity-Darwinian biology exactly stated’

There are very many historic blocks in Dublin, each one possessing its own unique character. This individuality creates a fierce certainty of place. Our proposal could engage at a masterplanning level, taking on as many blocks as possible, yet we feel that this will not truly do justice to their heterogeneity. Broad strokes will miss the beautiful subtlety that time has worn into the capstones and windowsills of the city.

We instead intend to investigate one particular block in depth and detail, a block that is typical and yet particular. By working through a proposal, ideas and realities will be unearthed that can apply to buildings and blocks throughout the city: perhaps an urban strategy here, perhaps a brick/glazing junction there.

Of course, to reach the scale of the specific, we must first examine and categorise the generic, then choose the most relevant condition. In parallel with our studies to the one, we will always keep one eye to the many, and on completion of a proposal for a particular, we will draw from it a series of rules, guidelines and suggestions for similar interventions throughout the city.

 

 

LOCAL ANCESTRY

‘They provide an under-appreciated layering of the town’s morphology, an architecture considered from the inside out and outside in, masked spaces against fine facades…A large hidden volume dominated the innards of a city block, an interior architecture without elevations which is an essential component of the city’s planned memory ’

Niall McCullough: Dublin an Urban History

The Catholic churches of Georgian Dublin are removed from the prominent locations of their Anglican brothers. These churches occupy a place somewhere between domestic and public architecture: a community meeting place, yet embedded deep within an urban block with little or no external elevation. Housed in courtyards, they were often only accessed through lanes and alleyways. The organic geometry of the block determined the shape and orientation of the church, generating a series of interesting and unique designs. By exploring the evolution of these buildings as they ingrained themselves in the urban fabric – eventually developing into schools and meeting halls – we mean to seek inspiration for interventions into the modern city.

Key examples of such churches include the oval-plan Clarendon Street Chapel, the Whitefriar Street Chapel, the Meath Street Chapel, and Adam and Eve’s on Merchants’ Quay.

 

 

PART 2

 

 

WHY DUBLIN ISNT HABITABLE (BRIEF) THE CITIES BOUNDARIES Briefs that people need in order of the extent to which they are shared  Private‐the individual dwelling place habitants Communal‐needs to be near and shared (i.e. accessible from home without having to enter public space) Local‐encloses a hinterland greater than the block itself (inner city) Civic‐the formal (city centre) We believe there is a lack at a communal and local level  The middle scale For people to live in the inner city they require a series of scale of functions. The house unit provides the personal needs of the individual and althougher a visual narrative with the outside world is gained through windows, a scale inbetween the civic and individual is required. These functions are not money generating however to a healthier lifestyle and communityness this scale can be seen as a possible regeneration tool for neighbourhoods. This scale are shared experiences of the community. Daily tasks taken together weather in work, home etc.  Our web connects all the needs and scales of the individual in their particular neighbourhood.  If we combine communal and local it densifes the area leaving more space for housing‐ Low rise‐high density  Making these spaces without destroying that which is there New apartment blocks are habitable but where they are inherited buildings were not dealing with them in a sustainable way. If the existing building stock is not contributing to a contemporary urban society they will fall into disrepair. 

 

 

Making Dublin habitable without destroying it. Dublin has a series of estates. Its original formation, the layout of which is een in todays streets had been to an extent unplanned. Cheap feasible intervention to transform unintentional block into a fully operational block. This is cheaper than building anew.  People don’t have to money to move but could reinvest in the homes. A way of improving the home and environment without moving. How to make an area habitable if it has already been built on and in some cases protected  ‘in general the presence of a ceiling defines the particular kind of enclosures known as interior space...when their is no ceiling, the sky acts as the upper boundary and the spaceis, in spite of lateral boundaries part of the exterior space. An enclosed space ehich is lit from above therefore offers a strange experience of being inside and outside at teh same time. 

Norbery‐ schulz  ‘Rather than a fixed pattern of frozen identies, a tradition reveals a constellation of pre-existing ideas and forms capable of unexpected new readings and alignments in the minds of later interpreters...’nothing old is ever re-born’ ,stated Allto. ‘But it never completely disappears either. And everything that has ever been emerges in a new form.’i  Finding a suburban quietness in the inner city A lot of effort to bring you kids to the park. If a space can be given that allows you to overlook them and for you to do whatever you want this would make a more habitable environement for families. Again the local and the communal. The surburb quality of being overlooked by the fact that you are Living in a cluster. 

 

 

If a space is forgotten its quiet and if its quiet its good for certain briefs A link between forgotten and quietness.  With a considerable amount of talk about the urban buildings and considering housing as an commodity it is quiet easy to forge the human landscape.   The population expanding to parts of Wicklow and meath  With inner city housing the trancient community must be considered. These are usually students and yong people renting apartments and donating very liitle to the community as they see it as pitstop rather than an endpoint. These people result in the high portion of occupants in the city. with ownership of a house comes respect both for the house and a vested interest in the community. Private development of houses and maintainence is assured. Landlords renting out houses sees them as comidities and invest miniumium for maximium gains.  And to ensure a stable and varied human lasdscape in the city ownership must be encouraged.   housing is too important to be left to the market  If people are making rational decisions for not living in the city you cant do anything about it. Middle class people ahve choice not living in the city if they don’t want to  it seems to me that past, present and future must be active in the mind’s interior as a continuum. If they are not, the artifacts we make will be without temporal depth or associative perspective ... Man after all has been accommodating himself physically in this world for thousands of years. His natural genius has neither increased nor decreased during that time. It is obvious that the full scope of this enormous environmental experience cannot be combined unless we telescope the past ... Architects nowadays are pathologically addicted to change, regarding it as something one either hinders, runs after, or at best keeps up with. This, I suggest, is why they

 

 

tend to sever the past from the future, with the result that the present is rendered emotionally inaccessible, without temporal dimension. I dislike a sentimental antiquarian attitude toward the past as much as I dislike a sentimental technocratic one toward the future. Both are founded on a static, clockwork notion of time (what antiquarians and technocrats have in common), so let’s start with the past for a change and discover the unchanging condition of man.

—Aldo Van Eyck

        

 

 

REIMAGINING BOUNDARIES (SITE) When developing in a city people consider the private sites. It is usually walled and completely protected. The Space overlooked exhibition lays claim to the sites which are overlooked. To a large extent these sites had in the past not been viewed as viable sites for development. Our exhibitions thesis looks at these and claims them for the exact reason for which they were disregarded, for the fact that they are overlooked. Giving a front to the back of houses . These sites are usually found at the back of houses in unused courtyards or in overlooked lanes  ‘Each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life...so the house is far less a refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out. Life bursts not only from doors, not only into front yards, where people on chairs do their work..just as the room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and alter, so only much more loudly, the street migrates into the living room...poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers.,

Walter Benjamin. Reflections 1978 Schocken books new York p166 Division of certain spaces as a negative thing in the inner city A successfully urban dwelling society is not necessary an affluent one. With affluency comes the need to segregate and protect. In Dublin and Ireland the most influential city development tool has been the boundary. From the early estates to the city today the nature of territory in the Irish landscape is defined by bounding. A marker placed in the ground separates functions, identities, ownerships ‘a need so deeply rooted it takes to such perverse extremes as to bound a foot and a half concrete apron at the front of a house with railings’

(Elizabeth Shotton-Building Materialsxx)

 

 

The wall as the beginning of an Irish building typology, irrespective of its manifestation, is fundamental to the formation our culture. Shaping our landscapes by defining agricultural transformations and manifestating in a culture of ownership in urban centres, generated in the past ‘to defend a position of insecurity’ (Elizabeth Shotton-Building Materials xx) by absent landlords. I propose a study reinterpreting the division of space, while maintaining a degree of ‘continuity into a context of change’(Taka Architects; Mnemonic tectonics: Constructing space through memory and ritual). Dividing spaces and the purpose by which we do this effects movement and mentalities. How a building is divided is vital for our integration with others, and our experience of a space  The benefits of sharing space Poverty brings with it the need to share and communicate. The idea of the Georgian clothes line promotes a sharing of resourses. The inner space of blocks before the regeneration of the city was used for the menial tasks. The image of the clothes lines shaping the space below. This single space belonged and was used by each individual and took a task outta the house and made it a communial experience. This formed a threshold between the individual residences and enabled neighbourhood interaction. We need to look at how we live in the city and weather architecture can promoted a different way of living. The idea of living in clusters has the fundamental idea of sharing resources. With more dense space each person must live in a way that  The irish national perception The idea embodying a sharing space is a collective definig something else and living in a cluster. The collective emdeaver must be of benefit to the people aready established in the area and not to encourage a gentrification of middle class replacements. 

 

 

 However contempory society demands more than a clothes line. Our aim is to create the modern Georgian clothes line  What do you consider a plot? If architects are involved in the generation of possibility for developemtn in the city the choice of sites will become more innovative. Most architects act as agents employed for a peroiid of time. However involving an architect before the actual purchase and brief forming encourages an innovative way of city occupation. This could be a saving in terms of valuable city sites and costs. And is it possible to get projects of a modest scale and budget built int he city centre and the inner city. The red bounding line of planning Questioning what architects see as sites and opertunites for intergratiowith the existing. What do qualifies as sites for architects. Does it need a ground level/footprint or just a volume. The landing bathrooms of the Georgian house understood this and cantilever rooms off the external walls as house. Again the concept of boundary is limiting to the possibility of design. If clients chose sites the buildings are only a response to site and brief rather than an innovative approach to architecture in the city. the issues that have always been there will remain. The space overlooked exhibition is a series of project and proposals that     

 

 

  

Three degrees of ownership/feasibility of sites

1 UNUSED LOST FORGOTTEN SITES 1%

2 SITES WITH UNDERUSED POTENTIAL, YET ALREADY BELONG TO SOMEONE 40%

3 SITES THAT ARE OWNED AND THRIVING 59%

 

 

DISTILLING THE MAIN PRINCIPLE

A social and spatial way of dealing with the city  Step one  Make Dublin more habitable for families Step two Do it without destroying the fabric of the city Step three Families chose the suburbs over the city thus some of its qualities need to be brought to the city. Step four Suburbs are full of controlled green external spaces. Surveillance is paramount.  Step five The most overlooked spaces are the spaces we use least therefore they have the potential to becomes sanctuaries. Your secondary home.  Two major themes Making the city more habitable and building in the lost space in blocks 

The city is seen as something fixed and requires a considerable amount of money to alter it. Our exhibition proposes modest developes at an urban scale which maintaining the cities character 

 

 

Rethinking about what you have and challenge it. OUR PRJECTS AND SITES THE EXHIBITION  The parnell place site An overlooked space, has fallen through the gaps of ownership and is valuable as unsuitable due to the amount of people looking over it.  It is for this reason this site is of interest.  The composition of the block is mainly residential with shops on the ground level. Eaxh house looks out onto the street in different directions. The centre is an unused geen area unaccessible to any resident.   The threshold between the private residences and the top of dublins main street is overhelming.   Our project proposes a middle scale brief uniting residents in a shared space, a large santucium away from the street. But doing this survilence over the area can be maintained while you remain in you house. A resourse belonging between you and the other residences.   The best way to maintain a good quality of housing and community is to involve the people directly involved.     Need to provide bins storage Bike storage 

 

 

Bbq  

           

 

 

 The Molyneux Yard The GYM  

         

 

 

 The ross road 

 The poddle swimming pool Making the grounds of a few apartment blocks work together. The idea is to place a swimming pool in there grounds using the water from the poddle which runs along the wall in the centre. This whole thing can be made into a block like the the iveagh and a new iveagh baths. This site has been overlooked because of the challenges of building over the poddle however this could be incorporated into the design. All the apartment blocks here could be tied together into one open space and a swimming pool like the original iveagh baths.  

 

 

 This site is really good. The red sheds can be removed. A disused factory. Right in the centre of the block. Really like this one.      

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

 This site is really good. The red sheds can be removed. A disused factory. Right in the centre of the block  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

NOTES NOT YET INCLUDED IN THE ESSAY                                                             i Kfp630     Rte arts show  The flats mosaic‐maybe pictures could be arranged to form that advertising or showing the exhibition  Where does public space end and private space begin 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                           We don’t do collective space quiet well in Ireland. The suburb model has been adopted.   The collective management of the place and consultation  The market force has driven housing.  Involvement of people living there taking part in it and the collective management of it. Not something left over after planning  Great believer in management Management   How the collective space is dealt with Architects are involved very little in design.   For housing to work it has to be minded. With your house and with your environment Long term has a real impact  maNix flynn  an increamental thing taken the memories of some existing fabric and find ways of reknitting the tapastries of what was there  and understanding of scale is very important  cant lose that sense of space and memory and that has to be brought to the rejunvination of an area 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                           housing is not a   housing is too important to be left to the market  housing is something that can rejunvinate and area itself  housing choice is so important. Everybody is valuable for the local business and the social aspect  resourse‐ an abondanded resourse‐housing  the idea of abanded landscape becoming important again  the inner city is the focus‐havent cracked the perfect neighbourhood  north inner city‐the arch of disadvantage‐ opportunity  what is a reality‐ the generational issues of poverty  40 percent of all homes  close to the inner city are one bedroom, 17000 people   Middle class families live outside the city. cant get a mix of housing if its not nice. That aspect of Dublin is striking  If people are making rational decisions for not living in the city you cant do anything about it. Middle class people ahve choice not living in the city if they don’t want to  

 

 

                                                                                                                                                          Mixed income and mixed community‐ the weakeness that architects have that theyre agents and not generators‐   Post boom interesting place to be in‐ a review  Apartment s were scene as transicent you do for a while and move on. Just not big enough  The centeality of architecture to the way we live  Cogent image‐ a 1000 words‐ drawn into the debate‐ just a graphic and then you being to debate it.  From the edge Gerry cahill  

Dublin Flats: an exhibition of photographs of social housing by Willem Heeffer

Taken by a young Dutch photographer, Willem Heeffer, the images present a fresh, analytical view of what are often regarded as unloved buildings. The

 

 

                                                                                                                                                          provision of social housing is always politically charged, and the architecture of social housing can be inseparable from that politics. The buildings cease to be seen as buildings and are only viewed through the prism of the perceived successes or, perhaps more often, failures of individual schemes.   t seems to me that past, present and future must be active in the mind’s interior as a continuum. If they are not, the artifacts we make will be without temporal depth or associative perspective ... Man after all has been accommodating himself physically in this world for thousands of years. His natural genius has neither increased nor decreased during that time. It is obvious that the full scope of this enormous environmental experience cannot be combined unless we telescope the past ... Architects nowadays are pathologically addicted to change, regarding it as something one either hinders, runs after, or at best keeps up with. This, I suggest, is why they tend to sever the past from the future, with the result that the present is rendered emotionally inaccessible, without temporal dimension. I dislike a sentimental antiquarian attitude toward the past as much as I dislike a sentimental technocratic one toward the future. Both are founded on a static, clockwork notion of time (what antiquarians and technocrats have in common), so let’s start with the past for a change and discover the unchanging condition of man.

—Aldo Van Eyck

  The most desired place to live in Dublin is in d4 a large suburb area with two storey housing. Inner city mdoes not have this appeal even though it has more amenities. If from a planning view closeness to amnesties is not ehich is desired then why is this area so desired.  

 

 

                                                                                                                                                          The sites that escaped the celtic tiger. The arc of opportunity as described in redrawing Dublin. they continue to have deletric sites.  Getting the middle class and a mix populationceltic tiger homes ate a fifth of all Dublin homes The inner city population has doubled during the celtic tiger poeroid  The best way to develope now is possibilibly the cheapest.   Dubliners inner city and dublins city centre are two different things entirely So inner city communities even want these other people . are we changing the city like the rest of the city and other cities. Maybe to look at that community as having a better standard of living that they could contribute more. A regeneration rather than a replacement populous.  What would it take for you to live in the city centre. Can decision makers answer this question The city centre. The dramatic transitional zone from the Dublin a tourist knows and the living part of the city. its another boundary and scale transition point.       Questioning what architects see as sites and opertunites for intergratiowith the existing. What do we qualiry as a site for architects.  Does it need a ground level/footprint  If architects are involved in the generation of possibility for developemtn in the city the choice of sites will become more innovative. Most architects act as agents employed for a 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                          peroiid of time. However involving an architect before the the actual purchase of the site is vital.   If clients chose sites the building is only a response to site and brief rather than an innovative approach to architecture in the city.  

  

 

 

                                                                                                                                                          

 The poddle swimming pool   http://vimeo.com/28454510