If Eoin O Cofaigh, president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) is right in estimating that the average design spend for many speculatively-built suburban estates works out at £400 per house - about the cost of a decent washing machine - is it any wonder that the resulting residential environments are so woeful?
And what chance is there that things will get much better when local authority planners - the gatekeepers of the building boom, as Philip Jones, president of the Irish Planning Institute (IPI), put it - are barely able to cope with an avalanche of schemes offering more of the same?
The RIAI and the IPI, at a joint conference in Dublin last Thursday entitled Stopping the Sprawl, were trying to drive home their message that new housing needs to be "design-led" and built at higher densities if we are to achieve the elusive goal of achieving "sustainable development".
Two and a half years after the Department of the Environment pledged to promote higher housing densities, now fleshed out by a set of guidelines, there is not much to show for it. Yet we are in the midst of the biggest building boom in Irish history, with over 42,000 new homes being turned out annually - a trend that's likely to continue.
Given the ESRI's estimate that 500,000 new homes are required between now and 2011, of which at least 200,000 are needed in the Greater Dublin Area, it is clearly an issue of overwhelming importance where these new homes are to be built, in what form and whether their future residents are going to have access to public transport.
But are we up to the enormous scale of this challenge? Dan Wallace, Minister of State, who was standing in for his colleague, Robert Molloy, took comfort from the fact that suburban sprawl was "not unique to Irish cities and towns", saying it was "a phenomenon experienced in other countries, too, to a greater or lesser extent".
Warming to the complacency of his theme, Mr Wallace said: "Thankfully, we don't have the problems on the scale to be found in other countries". What he does not seem to realise is that the scale of the challenge facing us is proportionately much larger, because we must meet the demand and change the culture at the same time.
Though last week's Stopping the Sprawl conference was a high-density event, with participants squashed into a dark, makeshift hall in the horrible barn of the RDS Simmonscourt "pavilion", there was only one TD present (Eamon Gilmore), two councillors, no county managers, no senior civil servants and no roads' engineers. As Philip Jones conceded, the planners and the architects have yet to convince this wider body of interests that higher residential densities "can be made to work effectively to create good quality environments that people will want to live in", because suburban sprawl would only continue "if we do not change our ways".
The cultural problem, as he noted, is that Irish people "expect to be able to have their own house, their own hall door, their own patch of garden in which to hang out the washing, play with the cat (if not actually swing it) and sit out if the sun comes out". Balconies and shared roof terraces were for "those yuppies up in Dublin".
Thus, it would be "out there in suburbia" that the battle would be won or lost. Local authority managers, engineers and other officials - "including, let it be said, some planners too" - must be convinced that higher quality residential developments "can come about in suburbia if we change the design philosophy".
AS Dr Patrick Clarke, technical director of Llewelyn-Davies in London, told the RIAI/IPI conference, an "obsession" with road layouts and off-street parking requirements - as well as low densities and design standards - had produced bleak suburban landscapes designed for cars.
His firm has been involved in a series of "Sustainable Residential Quality" studies. Central to their approach is the idea that new housing "should emerge from a creative design-led approach tailored to the specific circumstances of a site and the requirements of future residents" rather than from the application of rigid standards.
Even allowing for one parking space per dwelling, such an approach could increase site capacity by 50 per cent. But if the requirement for off-street parking is replaced by on-street parking, the number of dwellings could be doubled - and a significantly better residential environment can be created as well, according to Dr Clarke.
The lesson, he told the conference, was that developers "must be prepared to invest in tailor-made designs rather than rolling out a carpet of standard housing types". They also had to recognise the "positive, dynamic role" of new housing in urban regeneration, particularly in run-down inner city areas. The new philosophy of housing layout and design is encapsulated in Places, Streets and Movement, a policy document produced for Britain's Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions by David Taylor, of Alan Baxter and Associates, a London-based firm of cutting-edge consulting engineers.
Mr Taylor told the conference that some of the older roads engineers regard him as a heretic for suggesting that through pedestrian routes and streets should replace the cul-de-sac so characteristic of much suburban housing. The aim is to replace design standards which had produced "abysmal" environments.
He showed slides of new housing in Poundbury, near Dorchester, which may strike some as twee but it at least has the merit of placing houses in a traditional street setting. "Imagine that," commented Eddie Conroy, deputy county architect in South Dublin, "houses facing on to streets. What will they think of next?"
And yet the idea seems revolutionary because we have so lost our way over the past 30 years. This was tellingly illustrated by David O'Connor, the Fingal county architect, with a slide showing two-storey houses facing each other across a distributor road and slip roads with an aggregate width exceeding O'Connell Street.
Why do we make roads like that when we could be making streets like those in the Drumcondra area of Dublin, he asked. Nobody would regard it as undesirable, yet parts of the area were built at a density of up to 28 houses per acre - nearly four times the density of many suburban housing estates of much more recent vintage.
Better design meant more than "putting on brick fronts" to make new houses more attractive, he said, adding that Fingal is producing its own design guide for higher density housing. But with the county plan just adopted, he expected that the "floodgates" would open long before the guide appears - another case of rushing to catch up.
Michael O'Driscoll, of Manor Park Homes, said people were so desperate for housing that even corrugated sheds would sell - a "horrible thought", he quickly added. In his view, we need to be looking at the type of system-building which has been used extensively in Germany and Scandinavia to make houses more affordable.
In the light of grim experiences with Ballymun and the low-cost housing schemes of the early-1970s, both the Department of the Environment and the Construction Industry Federation take a sceptical view of pre-fabrication. But the new systems available are tried and tested and do help to reduce costs.
The question posed by David O'Connor about how we could continue building remote, low-density satellite suburbs before we have first consolidated the existing built-up area was taken up by Colm McCarthy, the plain-talking economist, who said consolidation made a lot more sense than continued suburban sprawl.
Though he accepted that there was opposition from existing residents to the loss of open spaces such as the former Phoenix Park racecourse and a variety of fields still being mowed within the M50 ring, Mr McCarthy warned that the alternative would be a "nightmare scenario" in terms of traffic and car dependency.
The prospects are grim. Fergal MacCabe, who helped to draw up the new Residential Density Guidelines, predicted that we would "go through a very bad period over the next couple of years as aspirations hit the wall of low design skills". Meanwhile, rural Ireland was being "wrecked on an unprecedented scale. It is absolutely out of control".
