risinghome paper 1

An M.Arch Research and Design Studio Paper 1 - June 18th 2016 School of Architecture, Planning + Environmental Policy University College Dublin

Acknowledgements

Students (S2 2016)

Exhibition Team

Visitors (S2 2016)

Julia Angli Mingot (Spain) Temyka Belgrove (Australia) Adrian Bes Benede (Spain) Madeleine R. Bongard (Norway) Aoife Burke (Ireland) Irene Crespo Perez (Spain) Yannick Courtin (France) Francois Delubac (France) Celine Donzello (France) Wibke Erth (Germany) Laura Gray (Ireland) Naoise Greene (Ireland) Tecla Guzzardi (Italy) Gaelle Herault (France) Chungwei Jing (China) Jenny Keating (Ireland) Sarah Kemp (Scotland) Shiyi Liang (China) Rachel Loughrey (Ireland) Pia Melichar (Germany) Maedhbh O`Rourke (Ireland) Devon Rees (Australia) Hamid Rehan (Ireland) Emilie Roellan (France) Moritz Schmale (Germany) Trine Mathea Skjeltorp (Norway) Ronnie Tallon (Ireland)

Irene Crespo Perez Laura Gray Tecla Guzzardi Sarah Kemp Maedhbh O’Rourke

James Pike (OMP) Michelle Norris (UCD ) Lorcan Sirr (DIT) Prof Ronan Lyons (TCD) Mel Reynolds (Architect) Kieran Rose (Dublin City Council) Ali Grehan (Dublin City Council) Michael Pike, (UCD) Rory Hearne (TASC) Claire McManus (Architect) Orla Hegarty (UCD) Hugh Campbell (UCD) Greg Keefe (QUB) Andrew Griffin (Urban Agency) Daithi Downey (Dublin City Council) Merrit Bucholz (SAUL)

Staff (S2 2016) Gerry Cahill Fiona Hughes Mary Laheen Laurence Lord Orla Murphy Emmett Scanlon (Co-Ordinator)

Staff and Students from School of Architecture, Harbin Instititute of Technology, Harbin, China Staff and Students from ENSAB (School of Architecture of Brittany) +MOUI (University Rennes 2), France

Title: RisingHome 1 Authors: Scanlon, Emmett; Murphy, Orla; Lord, Laurence Published by: UCD School of Architecture,Planning & Environmental Science ISBN: 978-1-910963-03-6

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risinghome Emmett Scanlon & Orla Murphy

In November 2014 the Government of Ireland announced its intention to support the production of 90,000 housing units by the year 2020 to address a national housing crisis.

Although the term ‘unit’ is liberally used within policy documents, 90,000 units are in fact, 90,000 households, or 243,000 people - men, women, children, old and young needing a place to live. Almost two years later, this need has already increased and continues to do so. When considering the position of the architect in this scenario, with just 2,478 registered architects in Ireland, each architect would be required to design homes for a total of 98 people over the next four years, or almost 25 people a year.

This is a challenge - and begs the question what is the meaningful role for design and what role for architecture in the housing crisis? The number of homes required suggests mass housing, mass-produced. The urgency of homes required demands speed.Volume and speed will not necessarily facilitate a consideration of the potential of all housing to make better quality, innovative places in which to live and grown old, places to make friends and to have families, places to build up and participate in community and collective life. Architecture potentially can deal with these issues, which far from being the ‘soft’ issues of the built environment, are issues that have been shown to deliver better quality of life, have mental health outcomes and foster individual and collective well-being.

In this context, we argue that the architecture profession is at a turning point. The profession can simply wait for the phone to ring, enter competitions and produce housing

to the brief of a commissioner or it could articulate more clearly what architecture can offer to this crisis. Irish architects clearly have immense skill and talent and can design great, high quality places to live - there is significant evidence. However, the profession has not been involved in mass housing in Ireland to date, with the majority of Irish housing actually built by developers with little architectural input. The profession, in general, has tended to focus on the individual houses or house-extension, (on which much of our emerging and developing talent has been focused for the last fifteen years).There are notable exceptions in the realm of social housing but generally, even today, it feels there is an incapacity for full involvement with the housing crisis. The risinghome studio at UCD Architecture was established to participate in attempts to find solutions to this crisis and to work with colleagues in our School, University and beyond many of whom are already fully engaged with this issue.

The M.Arch studio at UCD Architecture has sought to engage beyond the University for several years now, setting projects in real-life contexts with real-life clients and engaging with critical social, economic, physical or environmental issues across Ireland. As there is no greater pressing issue, for the next number of years the students and staff of the M.Arch Year 1 program will work under the risinghome banner, working to establish a research and design laboratory.

To begin, we looked at a prototypical housing solution for publicly owned land in Dublin city in discussions with Dublin City Council. As the risinghome studio program develops we will begin to examine the housing question from a variety of perspectives with a number of partners and collaborators. This has significant pedagogic intent - our students to this program, currently drawn from Ireland, Europe, America, Asia and Australia - want their design work to have relevance and impact. The ambition for the students participating in this program is that their intellectual and practical skills will be highly developed and honed by pursuing ideas that are of relevance and interest to those inside and outside the academy. The studio is set up to enable the students to share and exchange ideas and knowledge with others involved in this discussion.

The Front Room of the studio was set up by the students to welcome and host visitors and guests and to allow for a variety of voices from a broad range of areas of knowledge, expertise and experience contribute, assess and develop their design work. Some of these visitors contributions to this semester are noted throughout this paper. Over the next years, we hope to welcome many more of you to the studio, our door is open, make yourself at home.

Emmett Scanlon & Orla Murphy

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The Front Room

In the first two weeks students were invited to occupy, appropriate and change the Crit Room of the M.Arch Studio into what became known as The Front Room.

Students worked in teams to re-design the room; to design and produce a website for the risinghome program: to source, gather and disseminate key data in relation to housing and home. The Front Room became our living room for the semester, a venue for discussion and exhibition.

The room was painted, new shelving and seating were made, data was gathered and exhibited on the walls. A 40sqm typical apartment layout was inscribed onto the floor. The making of home - a collective process by students from around the world who had to find a way of working together - within a place of learning, engendered a pride of use in all who came and went. Coats were hung up; feet were wiped on entry; tables were kept clean, tea was shared. A certain ritual associated with how we behave when we are ‘at home’ infused the studio. We took care and noticed this.

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Question

In this first Semester of the risinghome program, the

Additionally the students were asked to consider the

exploiting their potential to the full. Students were asked

students were asked to consider innovative design solutions

following strands in the detailed formation of your own

also consider the changing demographic make up of house-

for 100 homes on a notional site zoned City Centre or Z5,

approach and programme, however each project will be

holds, and the need for collective supported housing.

on publicly owned land, that is, land owned by Dublin City

tested against how it addresses the main research question, in

Council. Using the same density, plot ratio and site coverage

an innovative and comprehensive way.

guidelines of this zoning. The dwelling mix is to be informed

Strand 3 - House construction and Scale: Prefabricated | Traditional complete construction |

by the Sustainable Urban Housing: Design Standards for

Strand 1 - Home Ownership:

Framework/ Supports model | Mixed provision.

New Apartments, which also specifies minimum ceiling

The students were asked to look at a predominantly rental

Students were required to look for a model to work for a

heights, dual aspect ratios, minimum dwelling sizes, etc.

model, but taking a long-term view of this. A cost-rental

large numbers of houses.

model of production, management and consumption of the Students were asked to choose between one of two modes of

home was to be examined.

Strand 4 - Models of Provision:

provision:

Public | Private | PPP | Mixed provision | Co-operative | CoStrand 2 - Dwelling Place:

housing | Mixed provision

Mode 1:

Micro | 2 person | 3 person | 4 person | 5+ person dwellings.

These modes of ownership, construction and provision were

On Site: fully constructed on site (with some off-site

Students were encouraged to consider an alternative to the

explored throughout the semester and the housing design

components)

apartment or housing model and perhaps consider that there

projects were used as a way to investigate solutions to the

Mode 2:

may be a type of home not yet considered in the Irish context

main research question of the semester.

Off Site: fully prefabricated/modular (with on-site assembly)

- which mixes the advantages of both typologies while

Sources: Social Housing Strategy 2020, The Department for the Environment Quarterly House Completions by Sector and County Council, The CSO Here’s who wants smaller apartments, Frank McDonald Dublin City Draft Development Plan 2017-2021, Dublin City Council

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Place 100 homes for Dublin

To focus the study, we chose a site in Dublin city.

Bridgefoot Street had previously accommodated local authority housing and is part of Dublin City Council’s land bank. In consultation with the Dublin City Council Housing Department it was selected for the project as being representative of many unused urban sites in public ownership.

Situated in the historic Liberties in the south inner city the location presented a challenge for how to design and economically build new community housing - to provide not only high quality affordable rental homes but also neighbourhood support facilities for residents of all ages.

Image courtesy of Rachel Loughrey

The following are the responses of the MArch 1 students.

Image courtesy of Rachel Loughrey

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Apartments shouldn’t be seen as a compromise.

Ali Grehan

Julia Angli Mingot This project imagines housing provision as a combination of permanent structure provided at the outset, combined with a changing and bespoke kit of parts which can be changed by successive occupants. Owners thus have control over the detailed make up and organisation of their home and its relationship to private open and shared common spaces.

Temyka Belgrove Devon Rees The intention of this project is to propose a new way of thinking about housing and living within the city of Dublin by reinventing Dublin`s skyline. Instead of using greenfield sites and sprawling outwards from the city centre, we propose to utilize unused air space above underutilised buildings and sites. This would keep housing near existing and established facilities and create thriving pedestrian communities.

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Adrian Bes Benede This project provides 168 apartments and 4 2-story houses in 3 L-shaped blocks, orientated according to sunlight principles that organise several communal areas. The apartments have a winter garden either on the south, or on the west side in order to increase the thermal balance, and reduce the energy needed to heat up the apartment. The entire project is designed following the module of 2.7metres. This allows to build with a high standard of economy, speed and cost-efficiency due to the fact that all the facades are prefabricated to the same length.

Madeleine R. Bongard + Pia Melichar We propose a vibrant space with facilities accomplished by working with different kinds of apartments above urban farming and public ground floor facing the city. This will generate activity and give life to this central site in Dublin which has great unexplored potential.

The accommodation will be accessed via an outdoor deck, which is imagined as a social and semi-publicmeans of bringing the residents from the urban context into their own apartments. Along the deck, a sequence of spaces break out into a diverse range of different landings with different character for interaction and activity for friends and neighbours.There are three different types of apartments, all double aspect, and predominantly duplexes.

Constructed out of timber, using mainly prefabricated cross laminated timber elements with lightweight panels in order to achieve a short construction time.

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Aoife Burke Ireland is a changing society. Homes must be capable of adapting to our varying needs. Similar to how extensions are added to suburban homes can one apartment expand and contract to provide a life-long home for any type of household? As a person’s needs change their home can change with them; a bigger balcony, an extra bedroom, a home office or extra living space.

Having six dual aspect apartments per core allows a generous spill out space where each cluster can create a sense of community like the suburban street.

This spill out space also has a bedroom where visitors can stay; friends, parents, children, grandchildren or a carer.

Last census, it showed that just under 70% of people owned their own home in Ireland‌ from this 50% have a mortgage.

Lorcan Sirr

Irene Crespo Perez The idea of what Home is has a different meaning for everyone. Therefore the main idea of the project is the flexibility, trying to create different types of dwellings that might change depending on who is the inhabitant is.

Accordingly, only the services in the apartment are completely fixed.

The structure of the apartment is made of a timber frame, which permits the creation of free spaces, as living spaces and allow the rest of the dwelling to remain flexible. The vertical feeling created when the dwellings join together works with the vertical moveable panels inside the timber frame, creating the relationship between public and private space through the athmosphere created by the green space outside.

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Yannick Courtin The main idea of this project is to give priority to social life. In order to facilitate the interactions the idea was to multiply small common spaces.

Gardens, roofs and circulation areas are shared within a yellow brick environment. The circulation, as a social space, are intensified and propose an extension of the home feeling. The second priority is to incorporate surprise and diversity by alternating wide and narrow spaces.

Most apartments in Ireland have their own boiler, their own washing machine, their own individual facilities but an apartment block should have shared laundry facilities, space and water heating because they are built for long term renting.

The circulation becomes an enjoyable experience and the quality of light varies thanks to a network of double high volumes. Then, answer to the evolution of the family, which accommodates both joyful and difficult moments, is the third axis to offer a possibility to adapt the size of the apartment by designing autonomous rooms. The buildings are designed to be built on site withsome off-site elements. The repetitiveness and the use of concrete enables the project to be economical while providing a diversity of typologies.

Lorcan Sirr

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Architects have to think of the housing scheme, the housing group and then the individual dwelling.

James Pike

Francois Delubac Society is in flux and we are not able to predict the future. This idea of this project is to create modular prefabricated housing, in order to allow for future flexibility. The building is designed to offer the ability to change over time. The project deals with the transition between public spaces and private houses through its threshold spaces. The common open-deck access is designed as a street in the air, in order to create a social area where you can meet your neighbours. This sheltered space is used as a big outside room, a pulled away wintergarden. The variety of threshold spaces extends the sense of being ‘at home’ to the whole building.

Celine Donzello The main idea of the housing project is to explore social mix/house type/ and work with density, in order to answer to different needs and find the best qualities for living in the city of Dublin. The site is designed as four crossing terraces. Public landscaped gardens are placed at ground and roof level. The idea was to work on a sequence from the ground to the apartment.

Indeed, to encourage socialisation the circulation becomes a meeting point.

The housing design is explored through 2 typologies: the deep apartment and the slim apartment. Both of them are designed around the living area and with the idea to allow the maximum of light. The materials chosen are timber cladding on an in-situ concrete structure.

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Top Row L-R Julia Angli Mingot, Temyka Belgrove + Devon Rees, Adrian Bes Benede, Madeleine R. Bongard & Pia Melichar, Aoife Burke, Irene Crespo Perez Second Row L-R Yannick Courtin, Francois Delubac, Celine Donzello, Wibke Erth + Moritz Schmale, Laura Gray, Naoise Greene Third Row L-R Tecla Guzzardi + Emilie Roellan, Gaelle Herault, Chungwei Jing, Jenny Keating, Sarah Kemp, Shiyi Liang Bottom Row L-R Rachel Loughrey Maedhbh O`Rourke, Hamid Rehan Trine Mathea Skjeltorp, Ronnie Tallon

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Wibke Erth + Moritz Schmale When we consider housing, the most important thing for us is that people live in a community. The community needs to provide a space for different people and different groups of people with different needs. And the people need to have a healthy environment. Because of that it is important to have big green parts, enough sunlight and public places to meet each other.

Because of that we designed a somewhat dense neighbourhood with high quality apartments and opportunities for people to live in. Important for us are different qualities of the public, semi public and private spaces.

Naoise Greene This scheme aspires to solve part of the current housing crisis by serving as a potential model for social housing. Offering a diverse array of one, two and three bedroom accommodation in both single and duplex typologies, the purpose of this building is to create long lasting homes, for a variety of different people. Each of these typologies is pre-fabricated using a modular template for quick and inexpensive construction. These independent units are placed on an east-west axis, around a central exterior atrium, to permit light from the south to flood the circulation spaces, while allowing all of the apartments dual and in some cases triple aspect.

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We have gone too far with the model of relying on private rented housing for low income people.

Michelle Norris

Laura Gray Motivated by the new minimum size standards for apartments brought in by the government earlier this year, this project explores the idea of EFFICIENCY of space and whether clever design can provide comfortable, FLEXIBLE living in a small area. Working with a 40 square metre unit, the project can also ADAPT to the needs of its inhabitants as their lives evolve. Alternating modules of services and furniture walls contain all living necessities and create boundaries between the open floor plan of the apartments. Areas of these modules can be added or removed to create a diverse, adaptable environment.

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Tecla Guzzardi + Emilie Roellan The aim of the project is to respond to the important issue of the increasing number of homeless families in Dublin by providing them affordable living spaces. The idea is to build a mega-structure which works as a light frame and supports dwelling spaces, as well as useful spaces for the community and circulations. It is an organism, all the elements work together to create a shared environment within the structure. We can imagine that people will be able to dwell, eat, meet, work, exercise, study, inside this world. The scheme could be adaptable to every context. Over time, we can imagine that the structure will remain the same or be extended but that the elements that it contains will evolve to respond to different needs.

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Gaelle Herault This project is guided by the pebbledash house typology. This typology is an icon of everyday Irish architecture and theand a majority of Dubliners live in this type of house. That is why, I directed this research towards a hybrid typology combining the house and the apartment.

The challenge of this project is to build collective housing with the same qualities and advantages of a pe­bbledash (the sense of privacy, the outdoor space, double garden (front yard back yard), multiple levels). I kept also several elements of domesticity: letterboxes, laundry room, garden shed.

But the most important thing in this accomodation is the flexibility. The living room is adjustable with a sliding door. Peoples lives change over time, sometimes we need an extra room. In this project is possible to rent another space linked to your flat. Your flat is adjustable according to your needs.

Lintels for future openings are designed in at the beginning so new doors can be easily installed.

Chungwei Jing This project focuses on prefabricated homes. There is a huge framework on the site. The modular units can be installed into the framework structure.

Dwellings can be located flexibly within the framework. There are four different types of home: which are 1 bedroom, 2 bedroom and 3 bedroom, and they are for single, couple, family, respectively. The ground floor is raised on stilts over a common shared garden, and public facilities including a cafe, market and shops.

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Jenny Keating The aim of my project was to create a community run co-housing scheme.

By following the new regulation guidelines on apartment sizes, I designed a project that had the same overall floor area as that of a scheme following the old regulations with the same number of units. This allocates over 2500m2 to communal space that would previously not have been available or would have come at an extra cost. This extra communal space can be used in a multitude of ways, and gives extra room for guests to stay over, barbecues, terraces and other communal areas that have become central to the scheme.

We have this very stripped vision, which is enforced by property websites by the building industry.

Even by our own regulations. There is always this very clear distinction between houses and apartments.

Michael Pike

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Sarah Kemp I believe a home should have a good quality of natural light and adequate open space. My scheme involves south-facing prefabricated modular housing. There are 4 different unit types, each unit has at least 2 outdoor areas and is organised on a grid.

The apartments are stacked on top of each other and are designed to incorporate voids to give a greater height for the garden terraces below. On the ground floor there are 3 shops, a cafe, a community centre, bike storage and private apartments. Paths guide the residents through the grassy areas.

There is a public park to the south of the site. The private areas are secured through gates and dense planting.

The right to housing is a human right.

Kieran Rose Shiyi Liang This housing is designed around the idea of groups and sub-groups. The largest group considers the whole project and its relationship with the city, and within this are smaller community groups which relate to the idea of neighbourhood. Five different apartment types are created and each has a relationship with the shared space of the garden at ground floor and with the roof garden. The aim is to design diverse housing suitable for a mix of all ages.

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Rachel Loughrey The concept behind this design is to create long lasting, durable homes’ that are knitted into a rich community. The central idea behind the project is to create city homes in Dublin rather than standard urban housing. Housing has restrictions that determine and hinder the activity of the occupant whereas homes allow for freedom for an unrestrictive lifestyle. All of the homes are built to let, thus going against the Irish tradition that one must own a home to feel self worth.

When you try to fit minimum room sizes into a minimum apartment size they don’t fit. Apartments need to be 10% bigger than minimum to fit the minimum room sizes in them.

Mel Reynolds

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Maedhbh O`Rourke I approached the design brief from the angle of procurement, how we build housing in this country. Taking advantage of a form of public private partnership, a collective of end users could come together to approach their local authority to buy land. This would benefit both the collective and the local authority, with a lower land cost for the collective and an invested community for the local authority to place social housing in amongst.

People think of design as wallpaper, as drawings, as intentions, as vision.

Orla Hegarty

With this in mind I created small clusters of homes which circulate around a courtyard on the ground and a deck above for access. These clusters are flipped or rotated to allow for a central circulation for the public through the site and intermittent green spaces for everyone to enjoy.

Hamid Rehan My project is about modular apartments which are entirely factory built and then shipped to the site, stacked and rotated in an arrangement that allows for windows on all four walls of each module.

One module alone becomes a one bed or studio module, two modules joining becomes a two bed duplex apartment and three modules joining becomes a three bed triplex apartment. The walls of these modules are made using a panel system which can be customised in the factory before the module is shipped to the site, by changing window types or positions, as well as internal finishes, so that they better suit the different lifestyles of the people who would live in them.

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Trine Mathea Skjeltorp The purpose is to show how high density living or living in apartment blocks in Dublin can hold qualities otherwise associated with traditional Irish homes. It explores through drawings and models the use of common or shared spaces intended as a stand in for the traditional front/back yard and also how light is important for the quality of living: a traditional home will have natural light from more than one direction. Each floor is composed by three units with large balconies and one shared room between them connected to a balcony accessible for all three apartments.

The project puts a focus on the social areas we find outdoors: they are found on each floor: an indoor playground between the apartments and a large external shared balcony. This will serve as a stand in for both front yard and street.

Since the project is situated in central Dublin I wanted to keep the site accessible to the public without creating an atmosphere where residents did not feel at safe at home - I accomplished this by having the private and semiprivate spaces above ground level, allowing me to keep the site quite open and also to have private and safe spaces for the residents.

Ronnie Tallon Dublin is a city comprised of Georgian houses that are no longer homes.

Georgian Society had many faults but one thing they did do correctly was design vibrant living cities. Georgian architecture understood the important dynamic between the public, semi-public and private spaces. While also understanding the need to create links between these three domains.

Similar to Georgian architecture I wanted to design a scheme with a seen and unseen vernacular in mind. That led me to thinking of the project in two scales the external scale of the city and the internal scale of the community and home. Externally the way the scheme developed is that I wanted to provide apartments that met the established scale of the city while at the same time providing a presence to the street. Internally I wanted a more intimate yet connected scale for the community. The internal square of the site is divided by mews houses into 4 smaller square courtyards. The four squares negotiate a 3.5 meter level change across the diagonal of the site. Two of the squares are brick-paved formal courtyards and the other two squares are heavily planted community gardens which open out onto the mews houses and circulation cores.

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The Importance of Situating Architecture in a Broader Context Lorcan Sirr

Emmett Scanlon and Orla Murphy of UCD’s School of Architecture, Planning & Environmental Policy recently asked me out to Richview to speak to their first year MArch. students who are busy running a project known as risinghome. Each week a different group of speakers talk to and interact with the students; I was with Michelle Norris, chair of the Housing Finance Agency (who lend money to Approved Housing Bodies for the supply of social housing), and James Pike of O’Mahony Pike architects.

Not being an architect, it can be challenging knowing how or where to pitch a talk on housing policy to a class of architectural students. Housing policy - both contemporary and historical - can be a complicated issue covering supposedly diverse (but actually inter-related) topics such as the role of the church, incest, social exclusion, mental health, labour mobility, vacancy rates, neo-liberalism, sub-prime lending and so on. We got there, however, and eventually ended up discussing how an architect can take on board societal and financial issues in their designs.

I suggested a challenge to design suitable accommodation for different households on an average wage (in Dublin around - €41,000pa, a bit less elsewhere). This would mean students designing homes for single people which would sell for around -€160,000; for a couple this figure rises to - €320,000. An alternative challenge would be to take 30% of an average salary as the sum that could be expected to be paid in rent each month: if this is c. - €1,000, then the

architects’ job was to design a home that would reasonably be let for this sum. It’s not easy working backwards like this.

In preparation for these weekly speakers, the students have created a space known as The Front Room and within this they have taped out a new bedsit-sized 40sqm unit. Even without the advantage of having real dividing walls and doors, it was evident how inappropriate this size space is for any form of living, especially not long-term (there are standard hotel bedrooms larger than this). Translating policy rules to on-the-ground dimensions (literally in this case) is a good way of bringing home the importance of clever design in creating liveable places, and of space in and of itself. It was also easy to point out how reducing size is the least efficient way of reducing building costs.

There are a couple of significant points about an exercise like this. The first is the very act of bringing together experts from diverse backgrounds to meet and discuss issues with architectural students, to give them an understanding of the role of social policy for example, or the importance of designing for affordability. In over a dozen years teaching I have never spoken to architectural students like this about housing issues and how their skills and mine are interrelated and interconnected.

Silo-thinking has been - and probably still is - a curse in many areas of Irish life. Built environment professions are as guilty as anybody else of this, and indeed, our adversarial

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system of construction doesn’t help matters. Events like The Front Room talks are therefore very valuable in helping to break down (mentally at least) barriers between parties involved in building our environment, before they become too embedded. I think that having various parties with skin in the housing game explaining where they are coming from and how their area relates to or affects the architectural element helps to contextualise issues for students. Highly skilled professions like architecture and engineering have a tendency to believe that it is perhaps they who are the most important element in the construction process; in this case, house-building. Engaging with other components, from policy to finance, highlights the fact that architects, like the developer or financier, are part of a continuum where no one person is more important than the other, but yet where nothing can happen without the other.

The Front Room and risinghome is a brilliant idea that will serve its architectural students well in situating them and their skills in a broader approach to housing, which can only be of benefit to all.”

Professor Lorcan Sirr is a housing lecturer in DIT and visiting professor of housing in URV Tarragona, Spain. This article originally appeared on Feburary 11th, on the Architecture Ireland website and is reproduced with kind permission of the author, Architecture Ireland and the RIAI.

This risinghome exhibition + newspaper is part of a new programme of housing research and design established in 2016 as part of the M.Arch programme at UCD Architecture. This ďŹ rst exhibition opened on May 27th and closes on June 18th 2016.

This iteration of the risinghome program, exhibition + newspaper has been supported by:

www.festival.ucd.ie www.risinghome.eu www.ucd.ie/apep

@UCD_arch @UCD_March #risinghome