Cool-headed design meets council accommodation

With its varying roof heights and retreating facades 65-79 Upper Dominick Street provides a good example of where council housing should be headed, writes Emma Cullinan

We all know what council houses should look like: rows of identical dwellings with pitched roofs, or great slabs of flats, in bright brick, grey render, or even pebble-dash. Such blocks of accommodation are dropped onto sites randomly; some with gables onto the street, some fronting the road, in a layout that leaves odd pockets of ill-usable outdoor space.

In cities, council homes have traditionally faced right onto pavements with lower-floor bedrooms forced into darkness all year round, as opening the blinds or curtains would expose night-time cocoons to the street. It's been a tough road for such housing.

The Modernists had great visions about saving the world through social housing, with Le Corbusier espousing cities in the sky: his example was the Unité d'Habitation apartments in Marseilles, France.

Cheap takes on Corbusier's ideas were built to solve a post-war housing shortage and he was blamed for their failure. But lessons have been learned: one of which is that the endless repetition of poor forms is dull - hence the mix of schemes in the revamped Ballymun by a range of architects (known as an architectural zoo). And, as a great new scheme by Dublin City Architects in Upper Dominick Street shows, variety within the one project works well too.

This is a five-storey scheme that incorporates 46 apartments as well as a canteen, storage and changing area for Dublin's cleansing department (the guys who wield those huge street cleansing devices) and further storage for council paraphernalia.

This scheme has rhythm and verticality, breaking up what could have been just another huge, featureless block.

The duplex apartments facing onto Dominick Street are raised from the pavement and have a private walkway past them, behind a low wall and municipal grey railings - in current parlance such areas are known as "defensible spaces".

The lower part of the yellow brick building (a similar colour to traditional Dublin stock brick), housing the duplexes, is recessed and shaded in a complementary pale blue provided by innately coloured Monocouche plaster.

This type of off-pavement recessing is becoming more common now, and can be seen in schemes such as O'Donnell & Tuomey Architects housing in Balgally, Limerick.

The windows in the yellow-brick apartments above the blue duplexes are not the usual mean rectangles placed at an approximation of symmetry, instead there's a pleasing composition of horizontal and diagonal rectangles with a slit opening down the middle. The central housing section is bookended by two five-storey, brick blocks - one of which is the Cleansing Division accommodation.

In a lowering of scale this redbrick building falls to four storeys as it heads towards Bolton Street (where project architect Kieran Gallagher began his design career). The reduction in scale works on both a material and social level.

The glass-block clad, recessed stairwells provide access to around six apartments each, which enables groups of tenants to form a small community who can look after their section together. In the past security problems were exacerbated by having entrances that fed into whole housing schemes, and upper walkways that enabled anyone access to all of the homes.

This scheme has crammed a lot of accommodation into its 0.42-acre. To compensate for living above, below and betwixt neighbours, the balconies are generous. At a width of 140 cm and with many stretching along the length of an apartment, these can be used as practical outdoor spaces rather than just glorified window boxes. Homes on the ground floor all have patios.

The apartments are dual aspect: "It's healthier, because of the air flow, and we need to practise what we preach," says Kieran Gallagher, Deputy City architect.

Now that private schemes have to incorporate their share of council tenants, Dublin City's architects' department spends more time liaising with private developers. One thing they ask these developers to provide is a dual aspect. "Single aspect is a thing of the past," says Kieran.

Council housing is changing and while lessons have no doubt been learned from schemes worldwide, Dublin City Council is also drawing from its own successes. An internal courtyard in a scheme it did in nearby Jervis Street, is one of them, offering tranquillity in one of the busiest areas of the city. The council provided planters here and the residents have nurtured this by adding plants of their own.

Watching tenants taking on this type of responsibility and ownership delights those who provide social housing, as they usually compromise the design to guard against certain types of behaviour.

The windows in this scheme are of powder-coated aluminium, although the project architect would have preferred timber. It's more difficult to paint aluminium and, Kieran says, tenants love to get the paintbrush out: not something Dublin City Council is keen on.

The internal fit-outs are basic and, shockingly, include exposed pipes behind basins to allow for easy maintenance. Balconies have solid walls, to give privacy but also to hide any junk that residents may place out there. The stark reality of such designs is that it addresses lowest common denominator behaviour.

As with Jervis Street, the Dominick Street scheme has an internal courtyard. It's enclosed by the rear of the Dominick Street apartments and the fronts of apartments that back onto Henrietta Lane (raised above a storage area).

In the centre of the scheme, the central balconies step back to avoid overshadowing (a slight overhang allows for privacy). The balconies to either side are directly on top of each other because they all get direct sun, which swings around to this part of the building at around 11 a.m. and stays all day.

Such stacking atop circular columns in a sun-filled space brings to mind the De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, on the south coast of England, by Chermayaff and Mendelsohn. The seaside imagery is helped by the fact that this courtyard is so bright, and that the doors have portholes in them.

The far balconies were curved to capture the sun as it moves around during the day, an example of a technical application with an aesthetically pleasing result, reminiscent of the great Canadian 1930s Modernist architect Wells Coates.

Another illustration of this is the upward thrusting roofs above the stairwells. The main roof is in curved aluminium, but to continue this downwards would make it difficult to fit in the stairs, so the zinc periodically shoots upwards towards the courtyard. "It shows how something good can come from a technical consideration," says Kieran.

Those zinc roofs are special in a country where many designers seem to give up once they get to the top of the building. "The centre of Dublin from on high looks tragic. I like good roofscapes. Paris looks fantastic from above," says Kieran.

The Upper Dominick Street scheme, which will house some of the residents from Lower Dominick Street: an area that will be changing under Dublin's Development Plan, has a steady presence. This is a cool-headed design, yet it has combined the best of recent architecture with lessons about what makes good social housing.

This scheme has beautiful details, such as the roof, the curved blue balconies, and rhythmic juxtaposition of Monocouche and yellow brick. With its varying roof heights and retreating facades 65-79 Upper Dominick Street provides a good example of where council housing should be headed.