Optimist ready for battles ahead

The new president of the RIAI, Tony Reddy, talks to Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, about the architect's lot in Ireland.

If Tony Reddy had his way, the Government would produce an Urban White Paper on the planned growth of our cities and towns, set up an Urban Policy Board and publish an annual "State of the Towns and Cities" report to see how it's all going.

But the 51-year-old Dubliner, who has just taken over as president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), is facing other battles - notably with the Competition Authority, which believes that the institute, like other professional bodies, operates restrictive practices that are not in the public interest.

Most perverse is the authority's misdirected criticism of architectural competitions. As Tony Reddy points out: "There is no other profession where people produce the entire concept of their work at the outset in open competition - and we pride ourselves on that."

As for the Competition Authority's notion that architectural competitions should be open to non-architects, he says this would undermine confidence among clients that the system will produce a qualified professional winner capable of seeing a project through.

The RIAI's new president is also hot on the issue of registration. "Irish architects can work abroad throughout the European Union, in the US, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. But anyone can come to Ireland, put a plate up on his door and call himself an architect."

Reddy believes there is something bizarre about having an EU directive that defines the educational standards required for Irish architects to work everywhere in the EU "except their own country". And that's why he will be pressing for long-promised legislation to register the title "architect".

He does not see this as merely a matter of professional pride. "We know from the Stardust tribunal that there is a real danger to the public from unqualified people designing buildings. Eighty per cent of all complaints to the RIAI also relate to work being done by people who are unqualified."

One of the things he will be pressing the institute's council to draw up and adopt during his two-year term of office is a "clients' charter", to demonstrate that the RIAI's agenda embraces the interests of consumers and of society at large, rather than merely protecting its own members.

The RIAI now has almost 2,500 members. Their profile has changed as a result of the boom, with a higher proportion of recent graduates, architects from abroad - over 100 - and members working in the regions. These changes are likely to be reflected in the way the institute is structured.

Tony Reddy knows how it works, having served as vice-president, treasurer and head of the public affairs division.He is a director of Anthony Reddy Associates, a large Dublin-based practice with offices in Belfast and Kilkenny, and also a director of Aukett + Reddy, which has offices throughout the EU.

Though he agrees that Jack Fitzsimons, author of Bungalow Bliss has probably influenced design in Ireland more than any architect over the past 30 years,Reddy points to the growing public awareness that architecture is part of our culture, and says that "wasn ’t there 15 years ago ".

Next month,the RIAI is collaborating with the Institution of Engineers of Ireland (IEI)and the Irish Planning Institute (IPI)to organise a course which aims to break down the barriers between the three most important built environment professions and thereby achieve better results.

"We live in an age of public concern for the built environment, yet we are only beginning to grapple with what is essential about town making," Reddy says. "Few planning codes facilitate the creation of the network of public spaces which characterise the towns and communities we admire." He suggests that if planning permission were sought today for a new street similar in scale and layout to, say Iona Road in Glasnevin, or the High Street in Kilkenny, both of which clearly work, it would be refused for numerous reasons to do with plot ratio, site coverage, open space and car-parking.

Rigid rules about road widths and turning circles gave us our place-less suburbs. And now, he believes, we could have a new type of "digital sprawl ", with laptop commercials claiming that we will all lead dispersed and isolated lives in rural areas, connected only by broadband data and satellite networks.

In Reddy’s view, the priority must be to extend and consolidate existing cities and towns and "intensify "suburban areas by building on useless strips of open space. He even sees this coming about through a more inclusive, democratic process because the community at large can see what it’s getting.

"Despite the fact that architects, engineers and planners are all involved in shaping our towns and cities, few receive training in how complex urban spaces work," he says. "If doctors trained as specialists first, patients would have great difficulty getting advice from any member of the medical profession."

That 's one of the main reasons why he advocates having a public policy on urbanism. "We have very quickly, in the lifetime of most people reading The Irish Times, become an urban society, admittedly one characterised by suburban
sprawl,and we need to develop a clear vision of where we 're going."

His own practice, which he runs with Brian O ’Neill and Ronan Smith,  designed whole street blocks in Dublin – the west side of Patrick Street, the west end of Temple Bar and Custom House Square in the Docklands – and, though generally successful, he admits that they made some mistakes.

The practice is currently involved in a number of major projects, including the Westgate mixed use scheme for Eircom near Heuston Station, a more controversial urban renewal project for Treasury Holdings opposite Kilmainham Gaol and a shopping centre at McDonagh Station, Kilkenny.

Meanwhile, the RIAI is working with the IEI and the IPI on a joint response to the Government ’s decentralisation plan, highlighting its "huge inconsistency "with the National Spatial Strategy – a document which Reddy believes was already flawed in identifying too many "gateways "and "hubs ".

He believes the case against the Government ’s plan to relocate 10,000 civil servants from Dublin to 53 centres throughout the State is so strong that it ’s bound to lead to a re-think by ministers. "We ’re getting together with the other built environment professionals to say we think it ’s wrong."

But how does he deal with ministers behaving like kids with their fingers in the cookie jar? "We must continue fighting the good fight," he says. "Don’t forget that in the mid-1980s, at the time of the Dublin Crisis Conference, things were so bleak that none of what has happened since seemed possible."

Though he accepts that there’s still a lot of rubbish being built even today, Tony Reddy – ever the optimist – insists that things are getting better. He even sees hope of curbing the Bungalow Blitz because tighter EU standards for groundwater quality will make it more difficult to build in the countryside