Establishing a sense of place in a suburban wilderness

A new residential scheme in west Dublin is completely different to the monotonous two-storey housing so typical of the area. Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, reports

The wilds of west Dublin is not the type of place where you would expect to find architectural statement. For this is a really bleak suburban landscape with endless swathes of squat two-storey houses, acres of useless open space, big wide roads with traffic to match and lots of walls, railings and palisades to mark the all-important boundaries.

"All of it looks like this - you can't remember where you've been because there are no landmarks, no sense of place anywhere," says Seán Harrington of Howley Harrington Architects. "Everything is two-storey - all mono-cultural, mono-class, mono-use - and there are hardly any shops, workplaces or facilities of any kind."

Much of the housing in Neillstown, Rowlagh, Quarryvale and north Clondalkin was built by the Dublin local authorities in the early 1980s. There is a terrible sameness about it all, though some of the residents have put an individual stamp on their houses by installing Georgian-style PVC windows, doors, decorative bargeboards and the like.

So when Howley Harrington was commissioned by South Dublin County Council to design a scheme in Balgaddy, they were determined to create a sense of place - for the people who would live there, of course, but also to arrest the eyes of passers-by "so they would remember where they've been because they saw something interesting".

More accurately, the completed scheme of 85 new homes conjures up that line from Monty Python - "and now for something completely different". It's as if a little bit of the Netherlands has come to Dublin, because the architectural language is clearly inspired by the best recent Dutch housing - Almere, outside Amsterdam, for example.

"I take that as a huge compliment," Seán Harrington says. "There are also elements of de Stijl in it and I have to say that Rietveld's Shroeder house is my favourite piece of architecture. The Dutch have had plenty of experience of living in cities. And because they know land is so scarce, every time they build a new building it's a precious thing."

There is nothing non-descript about Balgaddy A, as the scheme is called. A south-facing three-storey crescent, with four-storey buildings at each end, fronting onto a busy "distributor road" with smaller scale terraced houses on quieter streets to the rear, it's all about establishing a sense of place in the suburban wilderness.

There were to be two shops on the ground floor of each bookend, but the area still lacks the critical mass to make them viable. Seán Harrington regrets that they have been turned into garden-level apartments, now to be screened from traffic noise, and still hopes they may become shops when the opposite side of the road is developed.

Howley Harrington has designed the main section of that scheme, too, and it will also have a crescent on its road frontage. Another scheme of 68 units, by Murray O'Laoire, has already been completed nearby - not as successful as Balgaddy A in its form, layout or finish - while the final element has been designed by O'Mahony Pike.

A small public park is planned, while a church and school already exist, both looking somewhat like bungalows on steroids. To the south, beyond a 120kv power line, is the site on which Treasury Holdings hopes to build a new town centre for Lucan-Clondalkin. And to the west the housing estates just go on and on, all the way to Lucan.

A Turkish contractor, Gama Construction, built both Balgaddy A and Balgaddy B (the Murray O'Laoire scheme), mostly by bringing in its own crew from Turkey, although there were Irish bricklayers involved. The quality of the workmanship on Balgaddy A is outstanding - as is Gama's sophisticated site operations office.

In Balgaddy A - now bizarrely named Buirg an Rí Glen, for some reason - the south-facing crescent generates its own sun-trap, off the main road. The housing to the rear generally faces east and west, so all of the long back gardens get south light. It's also arranged so that you can't see right through it; the scheme reveals itself in stages. The architects had to work within the constraints of suburban standards, which require that houses facing each other must be at a minimum distance of 20 metres.

Yet there is a real sense of containment, emphasised by steeping forward the houses at each end of the curved side streets.

"Cul-de-sacs are great for cars, but bad for people," according to Seán Harrington. So what he and project architect Jim Roche set out to do was to encourage the idea of "travelling through to somewhere else" - not for cars travelling at speed, but of people, whether walking or on bicycles.

How this mixed scheme of social and affordable housing ends up relating to its neighbours to the north remains to be seen. These are the former grounds of Stewart's Hospital, now being developed for private housing designed by Anthony Reddy Associates. It should be an interesting interface.

The landscaping is hard. Instead of a front lawn, the houses have paved areas behind railings which could be used for off-street parking. Each house has a number welded onto its gate and a box-like aperture in the projecting wall next to the door to ensure passive surveillance of each close.

"There was no question of using grass," Seán Harrington says. "The areas are too small, so it would have been inappropriate. Also, the street should have an urban feel to it. We have planted numerous trees and little pockets of greenery, in available corner spaces."

Electricity and gas meters are screened from view, something that should be done everywhere, and the architects have also made a feature of the ESB substation at the rear; it's encased in an oval surround of perforated steel and brickwork that will be lit from within at night, like a light box.

Every door has its own colour to differentiate them. But what if residents replaced them with PVC doors? "That would kill me, but if they do we can't do anything about it," Harrington says. Uniform curtains are being provided from the budget for the big windows of the corner buildings, however.

That's because they're the scheme's flagships, as it were - the most prominent elements of what distinguish it from the dross all around. And though each bookend has only three floors, it was intentionally stacked up for effect, giving a great height to the livingrooms on the higher levels.

The Flemish bond brickwork at ground-floor level, finished with white sand and lime mortar instead of grey cement, gives a hand-made quality to the scheme. "It's like porridge - you feel as if you want to eat it," Seán Harrington says. "It's also absolutely beautiful, giving the sense of a deep wall."

The sense of place created by the crescent and its bookends will be completed when Howley Harrington's second-phase scheme is built. In the meantime, the architects are talking to Dublin Bus about making a design feature of the bus stop - an important thing for people living in the suburbs.

"The reaction has been great. On the day everybody moved in here, they came along in their cars, the kids were playing around, the curtains went up and the place came alive. It was fantastic. And we realised we had made a whole bunch of homes instead of just a piece of architecture."