How do you assess the relative potential of architecture in a country like Ireland which is in free-fall change and, if holding on to anything, is passionately in love with the sung, spoken and written word? Architecture - as opposed to building - is potentially a vehicle capable of layered expression. It uses a language sufficient to bear the weight of cultural and historical reference, able to represent something about a place or a society yet, is independently legible as pure sculpture. Set against the context of cities or landscape, it has the power of poetry. It can also change things for the better.
While there are some signs of change, it's not a language that most would say the Irish have taken to their heart - perhaps its very laconic messages are too understated, perhaps the very weight of bricks and mortar, with their undertone of serious social investment and monumentality still generates a suspicion in a society long unused to representing itself through solid physical form.
Placing contemporary architecture at the core of "national" expression can be done. Finland and Czechoslovakia, countries of similar vintage, with a similar history to Ireland, used contemporary architecture as a means of self-reinvention during the 1920s and 1930s. Spain after Franco consciously used good, modern architecture both to cement internal differences and present a new world image - the much revered (and copied) city of Barcelona is perhaps the most obvious example of its success.
What is interesting about the forthcoming intelligent and questioning series on RTE, Nation Building, about architecture and environment in 20th century Ireland, is that historical memory can be somewhat misleading. De Valera's Ireland had no fear of contemporary architectural language and had a use for it, producing a thin but respectable stream of works - schools, hospitals, offices which, while they were not buildings of heart-stopping greatness, were ambitious enough within the terms of stringent economy. Their modernity was a metaphor underlining independence (the newness of a new State) and the consequent hope for better administration and health, while successfully avoiding aspects of monumental fascism.
What about the present day, when confidence, building and the economy that supports it are waxing? Is there a particular role for contemporary public (or private) architecture to give form to the world we inhabit? Is such an idea too ambitious or outdated? At one level, it is true that everything is bigger, better, faster - the general level of public interest is higher and the worldwide renewal of belief in architecture as means of self-commemoration and expression has penetrated many quarters. There is a lot of good architecture around, measurably better in European terms than a decade ago, with many dedicated and well-educated practitioners who are getting an opportunity to build real buildings.
The very fact of its relative off-centre position within Ireland's cultural structure is certainly not a disadvantage to the growth of good architecture; it has little baggage to carry and few benchmarks to measure against. In some ways, it is growing up out of the corner of the eye. As contemporary work located here, its role is emphatically not to provide an ersatz Irishness derived from the history of architecture. Genius loci is endemic in building, in its function and in materials, in Ireland, through a spareness born of scarce resources and the special characteristics of light, context, landscape.
The best work uses modern materials, incorporates liberating ideas of space, but does it in a contextual and responsive way - even to the point where context might even be rejected for good reason. Where problems lie, perhaps, is at the interface between this work and the wider environment in Ireland, in inadequate levels of original analysis of current issues and the untapped potential for radical design initiatives to help resolve them.
At a day-to-day level, the consensus which emerged following the collapse of 1960s modernism - that everything should be respectful and "fit in" - has become a straitjacket, interpreted as a specific language of pitched roofs and little windows rather than a methodology. At the larger scale, there are many changes forced by economic success which render traditional views somewhat irrelevant.
A classic example is the near ritualistic debate about one-off houses built in open landscape. The reality is that many landscapes and small towns around Ireland have already been irreparably damaged, their context gradually suburbanised over the past 30 years and brought to a head in the past five by Government policy on urban renewal and seaside resort tax incentives. This is not something which might happen; it has happened and will be seen by posterity as an environmental disaster equivalent to the clearing of the forests which has killed off the integrity of a traditional beauty without replacing it by a better one.
However, it would be more appropriate to acknowledge it rather than debate whether or not it should happen, and apply thought to how architecture and landscape architecture could be harnessed to re-knit a new and more interesting environment.
Dublin is another example. No longer a beautiful city, it is certainly alive, but is suffering loss of memory, crudely rebuilt with buildings of poor quality, accepted by a planning process with little ambition - buildings which, in the main, are couched in "sympathetic" versions of the local vernacular, genetically modified architecture. Generally, expectations should have been higher with demands for better materials, mixed functions and more explicit support for contemporary responses which understood the grain and spirit of the city.
However, on the bright side, the city now has a fractured, discontinuous character which presents opportunities for intervention. Many of the most obvious sites have been filled, making the exploration of secondary "edges" and corners an economic possibility for the first time. These, if considered with imagination, could generate a new legibility in the city. The sudden appearance of a policy on high-rise buildings is interesting in this context - its present expression seems tinged with a triumphalist edge derived from economic success, and somehow provincial.
There is no need for the city to produce a cluster of skyscrapers like every other city in the western world and certainly no need to do it out of economic necessity - density can be achieved in many ways. It is an extraordinary thing to be handed a city at the end of the 20th century with a skyline offering some semblance of integrity. It would be perfectly possible as an alternative to design a series of narrow 12-storey towers - perhaps with a civic function - at important intervals throughout the city which could be used to reinforce its pattern instead of disrupting it.
There are other gaps. While the city grows, its context gets insufficient attention. Dublin Bay is its greatest asset and yet it remains dirty, its foreground filled with industrial material which is increasing yearly and which is insufficiently accountable to public will. While every other country in Europe moves to link leisure and water, Dublin shrinks behind a steel and sewage wall.
There is a pressing need for an integrated plan linking transport (including under- ground links along the coast), leisure and port use to provide a vision for the whole bay, with public initiatives such as linking the South Wall back to the city, restaurants, massive and considered planting and other infrastructural developments. This is not simply an engineering matter but a matter of vision and this is probably the most pressing issue of all.
Niall McCullough is an architect and a partner in McCullough Mulvin Architects
Nation Building starts on February 10th, RTE 1, 7.30 p.m.