risinghome paper 2

Community Paper 2 An M.Arch Research and Design Studio School of Architecture, Planning + Environmental Policy University College Dublin

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risinghome 2 risinghome was set up because as practitioners engaged in education and practice we sensed a vacuum within the profession of architecture. We wanted to act, to participate and to contribute to the conversation on housing.

We invited people to do this with us, to collaborate, to share their expertise and experience on housing policy, procurement, design, construction and use, so the work made might be more useful and more potent. The MArch program is unique in Ireland in attracting students from the UK, Europe, America, Australia, Asia and Ireland and the topic of housing provides fruitful common ground for collaborative design and for shared learning about how people now live and make home, globally and locally. Housing – and the lack of access to it – is also an issue facing all students and graduates and it is already clear to us that students have points of view on the topic that are salient and that come from their own experience and situation.

An intention of risinghome is to build each new semesters work on that which has gone before and to continually reflect and discuss before we proceed. Therefore we exhibit the work at the end and present it inside and outside UCD. We also publish a paper for public circulation to conclude each cycle. This also teaches students visual and graphic communication skills. At the end of the first risinghome studio program we were very pleased to hold our first colloquium, The Housing Crisis – What Do We Need to Do Now, which saw experts in the field of housing policy, research, design and delivery spend a day in UCD discussing the topic. This work – and the critical response to it – provided further foundations for future risinghome studios.

An initial instinct of risinghome remains; it is not appropriate to simply repeat the tasks or methods of investigation of the studio from semester to semester. We are intent on finding ways and means of intervening in the housing discussion and contributing to the conversation that are productive and useful

and that are, crucially, particularly Irish. With a remarkable lack of research and data on what it means to make house and home in Ireland, to be effective, we need to be ambitious and consciously propose, test and reflect on our methods, framing and reframing our questions, not only to find answers but to more fully reveal the complexities of the question.

The MArch program has a growing reputation for developing live-project partnerships with agencies outside the University and there is a strong commitment to this method of learning embedded in risinghome. Live project pedagogy seeks to develop the collaborative and participatory skills of students, skills that are essential to their future practice. Students are supported to establish an awareness of the social responsibility of the architect and are empowered to produce work of exceptional quality that makes a real difference to the communities with whom they work. We have worked previously with communities and agencies who have questions to ask or problems to solve but who do not have the resources to address these. In exchange for offering their architectural skills and insight students collaborate with local-experts, deepening their understanding of architecture and their work.

So this semester we worked differently to last. Having worked in one studio in collaboration with Dublin City Council, this semester we set up three parallel risinghome studios. This allowed us to gain more ground more quickly, to broaden our network of partners and collaborators and to work in three parts of Dublin in parallel. In Lane Dwellers students, having declared a personal view on how one might make home today, were invited to design low-rise / high density housing at mews lane sites in the South Georgian Quarter,

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and in the North Georgian Quarter. In Finding Home, students worked in collaboration with the Irish Housing Network. Students heard stories of how citizens navigate the housing and homeless system in Ireland and they made proposals for new homes, critiquing a live master plan for new houses on Coolock Lane. In This Must be the Place students worked in collaboration with Phizzfest / Reimagining Phibsborough, exploring ways of combining the need for housing and a failing public realm to encourage and support citizens to feel “at home”.

What has emerged this semester is the sense that notions and meanings of home - how we construct it, how we are enabled to find it and feel it and hold on to it; how a true sense of feeling at home depends on how easy it is for us to leave home and go outside and participate in society – need to be addressed in parallel to unlocking the issues of supply, provision and construction of houses. Arguing for home - in its broadest sense- seems like a seam architecture might mine and a location where architects might act . These students have lent their particular and confident architectural voice and this paper is a tribute to their commitment and contribution.

Emmett Scanlon + Orla Murphy Coordinators risinghome program

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Lane Dwellers Living on the Lanes, North and South

Eileen Gray’s open opposition to Le Corbusier’s famous maxim – a house is a machine for living in – encapsulated both the method and the realisation of her work in the architecture and furniture of her later period. E1027, the house by the Riviera that she designed for Jean Badovici and herself, and the furniture that she designed for it, are delicate and precise works of art that respond to the way that human beings are, and the way that we live. Inspired

by Gray’s attitude to house design, we invited students to be conscious of organic as well as mechanistic paradigms, to be aware of the real and the abstract, while combining theory and practice. We encouraged them to work intuitively and with precision, employing the contingent, the particular, the context, and in the full reality of the present-day city.

Students were challenged to define their own position

in relation to ‘house’ and to investigate that position through the design of a collection of dwellings in the city. Two locations were chosen for the work, both embedded in the contemporary city of Dublin, but derived from urban ideas of the past, places that carry the imprint of previous generations’ attitudes towards change, innovation, conservation or neglect, one to the south of the river Liffey and one to the north.

The proposal was to design low-rise (not higher than four stories) high density (at least 120 units per hectare) housing at mews lane sites in the South Georgian Quarter, and in the North Georgian Quarter. The design development of such housing would explore the interaction between private space and public space, would research and examine the size of private spaces needed to provide a reasonable living ‘envelope’ and also, how meaningful collective

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spaces can be formed through shared courts, squares, terraces and gardens. Students were asked to consider the proposal at the scale of the city, the neighbourhood and the dwelling. The actual lane itself was also to be considered in the design, including proposals for its surface; consideration of the services that run beneath it, whether or not it is pedestrianised, whether or not it is planted, what the lighting system is and all of the implications of these decisions. Essential to the work was an understanding of the importance of threshold, of liminal and interstitial space, and the role of boundaries, surfaces, materials and landscape.

Gerry Cahill, Robert Bourke + Mary Laheen

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2 1. Carving the Block by Edward Horan 2. Photography by Liam Naessens

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3 1. Containing a Square by Claire Chenard 2. Bedsit Tower: Living High but Connected by Liam Naessens 3. Growing Community by Mark Kavanagh 4. Re-imagining the Lanes by Janice Po 5. Urban Infill: Courtyards that Connect by Conor Hyland 6. Housing and Adapting as you Grow by Cian Neville 7 . How Houses make Lanes by Fanni Schildt

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8. Establishing Ground Rules for Making a Community by Luke O’Neill

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EXPLODED ISOMETRIC scale @ 1:150

North Charles’ Lane in the North Georgian Quarter, mews lane to Mountjoy Square East, offered particular challenges to the students’ enquiry. While the streets, lanes and squares of the

concrete frame structure

visionary eighteenth-century city still remain, it is a fractured place, with many vacant lots, badly developed sites, and derelict buildings, as well as some very fine historic buildings.

Some students engaged with the local community to

7x7 gridiron

CONCEPT SECTION scale @ 1:200

investigate the urban quarter and found ways to develop possible programmes, supported by real-life situations.

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Students learned ways of humanizing a degraded public realm in support of imagined communities that would inhabit the neighbourhood they were designing. They engaged with the network of historic lanes, to reconnect the proposed neighbourhood with other existing dwellings and the surrounding city.

Some proposed new semi-public gardens or squares contained by housing for the enjoyment of residents and with some access for the public. The nuances of private, semi-private and public open space were teased out, and the spatial implications of in-between spaces were investigated and designed, as students began to understand how we live collectively today in the city.

In considering their programmes most students sought to provide housing for mixed groups - that is - people of different ages, such as young couples with small children, students living in single rooms with shared facilities, older people; such as you would find in any cohesive community.

Working in a given, although fractured, context, allowed students to re-interpret the earlier city in a twenty-first

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century world.

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South Stephen’s Place and Verschoyle Place, mews lanes in the South Georgian Quarter, form backlands bounded by Mount Street Lower to the North, Mount Street Upper to the South and Warrington Place to the East. They are characterised by the often under-used rear gardens of the Georgian and early Victorian houses to the main streets, which accommodate sporadic mews houses and apartments and commercial surface car parking.

The location was chosen as being typical of the challenge faced when making a qualitative residential place in such a location. Through considered design proposals for mediumrise high-density housing on mews sites, the student response to this challenge was varied and inventive.

Dublin is often described as a “city of houses” defined by long residential plots with constant dimensions between party walls. Some used this order to create a structural rhythm of masonry and brick crosswalls for the site, accommodating a variety of homes in plan and section for dwellers of all ages and family types.

Others proposed new, elevated, inhabited decks and gardens above the existing ground to create a secure residential and landscaped world. The work was informed not only by place and context but also by reference to international typologies of city homes and the relationships between public, semi

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public, private and semi private spaces in urban living.

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4 1. Broken Brick Lane of Courts & Gardens by Joanna Permert 2. Making a Street with Houses by Cameron Folens 3. A Garden in the Neighbourhood by Loretta Gerrard 4. Re-engaging the Backlands by Cheryl Wallbridge 5. Walking through Gardens by Vega PĂŠrez-Lozao Calero 6. Making a Community by Cristina Garcia Pujol

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Finding Home in Coolock In partnership with the Irish Housing Network

How do you find a home?

And if you find one how do you keep it?

In June 2016, 6525 homeless people in Ireland were housed in emergency accommodation, of whom 2348 were children. Lack of social housing provision by the State since 2000 has led to a severe shortage of secure tenured social housing.

Coupled with this, rising private rents and mortgage pressures have increased the numbers of people joining council housing lists. Large numbers of homeless families are now placed in emergency accommodation in hotels and hostels.

Speaking at the UCD Festival in June 2016, Fr Peter McVerry said the single most effective solution to the housing crisis is ‘to build social housing’. While this might sound simple, it’s slow implementation is impacting daily on the lives of those living in emergency accommodation.

In Finding Home we aimed to understand more about the boundary between having and not having a home, examining models of tenure, development and housing provision on the spectrum from homelessness to secure domicile.

To inform our studio, we collaborated with The Irish Housing Network who advocate on behalf of homeless people. In a live studio format students engaged with Aisling, Kim, Charlie and Zara four clients of the North Dublin Bay branch of the IHN - to understand and build briefs in response to their experience of homelessness, and to design speculative futures that would respond to their housing needs.

The area in which we worked was a vacant site on Coolock Lane in North Dublin This is the largest of Dublin City Council’s own sites designated for housing. A current masterplan exists which

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students were invited to critique and hack as they formulated proposals in response to Finding Home at the macro scale of Coolock and the detail scale of Home. Some of the themes explored in the students’ proposals include: emergency housing and rapid construction, lifetime adaptability, infrastructure for new communities, edge condition and low-rise high density housing.

Our thanks in particular to Alan Driscoll, Aisling Hederman of the Irish Housing Network for the warm welcome they extended to the Finding Home group, and to Aisling, Kim, Charlie and Zara for sharing their experiences of homelessness with us.

Orla Murphy, Stephen Mulhall + Nuala Flood

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5 1. Retrofitting Suburbia by Malin Holmbom 2. Walking tour of Coolock Lane with Alan Driscoll 3. Meeting with IHN clients 4. Finding Home exhibition 5. Emergency Hotel by Kim Perry 6. Mapping journeys through homelessness

by Nicola Blake, Malin Holmbom, Karolina Kotowska + Ronan O’Domhnaill 6

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2 1. Sharing Life by Josefine Nilsson 2. Pedestrian Suburbs by Ronan O’Domhnaill 3. What Happens Here by Karolina Kotowska 4. Holding the Edges by Julien Chatel & Theo Frieh 5. A Hut for each Child by Camille Medjkouh Boulain 6. What does the Irish Dream House Look Like? by Artur Kusiak

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5 Place, Amenity & Community These projects engaged actively with the existing masterplan.

Julien Chatel and Theo Frieh took on the edges of the masterplan, working in the spaces between the existing and new homes to stitch them together as a ‘thickened edge’. Karolina Kotowska identified wasted ‘green space’ in the masterplan and studied how to spatially adapt this to increase capacity while improving the amenity value of open space. Ronan O’Domhnaill’s project proposes new pedestrian connections into and across the site as a generator of community spaces for housing. Camille Medjkouh Boulain’ sheltered housing for those affected by domestic violence, looks at housing from the perspective of a child.

Artur Kusiak’s courtyard homes tested low rise medium density mat dwellings arranged in neighbourhood clusters that explored the threshold between private, semi-private and public space. And Josefine Nilsson explored how community co-housing could provide an alternative model based on reconsidered relationships between private and shared dwelling space.

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1 Density Efficient use of finite land resources was a common thematic concern. Students sought ways in which to provide quality homes to a medium to high density arrangement. Conor English tested a typology cluster, which, if applied across the Coolock Lane site, could accommodate everyone currently on the Dublin City Housing List. Susan Nakazibwe and Murtada Almoshen’s projects both explored higher rise solutions along the northern boundary of the site that provided family homes and attenuated noise pollution from the adjacent motorway.

2 1. Housing Cluster by Conor English 2. At Home in the Sky by Murtada Almohsen 3. How Great can these Blocks be? by Susan Nakazibwe

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Retrofitting & Adaptation The need to provide a fast alternative to temporary hotel emergency accommodation prompted Nicholas Cunningham to propose an adaptable rapid-build structure for immediate housing provision, which would then be adapted over time to a community hotel, as permanent dwellings are provided locally. Nicola Blake’s design calls on self-build theory in providing basic, affordable and adaptable timber frame homes which families can grow and expand as their resources and needs change. Malin Holmbom identified existing capacity in the existing houses in the environs of the site and proposed retrofitting them to accommodate higher densities. Magdalena Scholz explored the necessary infrastructure that that should support quality housing and how that might be pre-built to allow future adpatable and

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modular housing to be plugged in.

2 1. Coolock Community Hotel by Nicholas Cunningham 2. What else does Housing need? by Magdalena Scholz 3. Flexibility in Housing by Nicola Blake

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This Must Be The Place (We’ve Waited Years to Love) Housing and Public Realm in Phibsborough In partnership with Phizzfest / Reimagining Phibsborough and in association with Create

The arrangement of streets, roads, parks, gardens, alleys and left over spaces that taken together define the public realm do not positively contribute to the quality of life of the local inhabitants of Phibsborough. Research undertaken by Phizzfest / Reimagining Phibsborough in consultation with the wider community supports the negative perception and impact of the public realm on civic and community life in this part of Dublin. Yet people who live there and know this place also believe that it is an area of immense civic potential, located as it is on Broadstone Park and built on the Royal Canal.

Falling between political boundaries and with development halted due to eccentric planning processes Phibsborough must be the place we’ve waited years to love. Students were invited to respond to the reality of this public realm and

political context, to build on the work already begun by their community partners and to work to unlock the civic potential of this place by and through design.

As students in their first year of their Masters program, the design projects were also situated within the design and research framework of risinghome. Students were encouraged to consider how notions and realities of the public realm and house and home intersect and how the public realm might be used to frame a discussion on housing and vice versa. Rather than accepting public and private life as distinct parts of everyday life that stop and start at our front doors students instead considered public and private life as mutually supportive, a view fundamental to building sustainable communities. Combining housing and public realm is intended to dissolve

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socio-spatial barriers, to enable more people to feel at home in their community and for individuals to participate in collective life beyond the front door.

This first iteration of Out.Post.Office. shows ideas and strategies to address aspects of Irish housing and public realm simultaneously. This strategy certainly has economic advantages and while further work is required to prove this, in our financially focused times it surely makes sense to build housing that both provides homes and makes public life better.

Out.Post.Office was funded to work in Phisborough under the auspices of the Government Policy on Architecture implementation program.

Emmett Scanlon, Laurence Lord + Michael Hayes

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4 1. Exhibition at UCD Architecture, December 2016 by Ste Murray 2. Cafe Survey Phibsborough 3. Dalymount Park Tour 4. Presentation to Phizzfest / Reimagining Phibsborough January 2017

by Ste Murray

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Streets, Lanes, Canals Several projects are embedded across Phibsborough in an analysis of the latent potential of existing local infrastructure of back lanes, front streets and canals. The analysis shows how space, in currently discarded lanes, can be maximized and made suitable for new housing and neighbourhoodscaled public spaces.

Main street has much to offer if new models of public-livework are considered and buildings designed specifically to support them. Abandoned silos along the canal are reworked to make rest stops for cyclists to pause in Phibsborough as they make their way east and west along a new national cycle route. To mark the western edge of the town as the city turns into countryside, a new housing silo is made within a reconsideration of how we now live providing a more social, economic and optimistic way of living in the future.

1. Chloe Spiby Loh 2. Ozan Balcik + Patrick Bendall 3. Tamara Turemis 4. Alex Martinez

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5. Alanna Holmes

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1. Bing Chen 2. Sadhbh Hynes 3. Judy Li

1 Cross Guns Cross Where the Royal Canal intersects Phibsborough Road is locally understood as the northern threshold into the town. Here three projects aim to make a better functioning and more defined public realm. An existing and empty brick building is reworked to provide interior rooms for community use. New row housing to the west proposes a way of making private homes on the public canal. To the east Cross Guns snooker club is rehoused and a new type of shared living space provided. The public realm is subtly reworked and a wider bridge is added to make this place safe and usable for local residents.

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Meet You At the Park Parade In order to unlock the spatial and amenity potential of Broadstone Park a number of subtle interventions are proposed to break down the existing boundaries and to draw more people into and across the green space. An existing tunnel is reopened to connect this park under the North Circular Road and to the library. The library is given a new address to a new public space behind where an existing store building is repurposed into a new community room. A new live-work housing building completes the eastern edge of the space. An existing abandoned green strip is planted and populated providing the last part of the strategy to connect Broadstone steps and park to the Royal Canal edge.

1. Jรถrg Grefer + Melf Otzmann

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2. Stephen Gotting + Robin Fontaine

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2 1. risinghome 1 Exhibition by Aisling McCoy 2. risinghome 1 Exhibition Opening / Shelley McNamara (Grafton Architects) by Aisling McCoy 3. Peter McVerry & Hugh Campbell by Aisling McCoy Inside Cover: risinghome 1 Exhibition, June 2016 by Aisling McCoy Back Cover: risinghome 2 Exhibition by Ste Murray 1

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Participants risinghome 2 Semester 1 2016-17

1 Lane Dwellers

Finding Home

A Public Home

Claire Chenard (France) Cameron Folens (Ireland) Cristina Garcia Pujol (Spain) Loretta Gerrard (Australia) Edward Horan (Ireland) Conor Hyland (Ireland) Mark Kavanagh (Ireland) Liam Naessens (Ireland) Cian Neville (Ireland) Luke O’Neill (Ireland) Johanna Permert (Sweden) Janice Po (Hong Kong) Vega Pérez-Lozao Calero (Spain) Fanni Schildt (Finland) Cheryl Wallbridge (Australia)

Murtada Almohsen (Ireland) Nicola Blake (Ireland) Julien Chatel (France) Nicholas Cunningham (Ireland) Conor English (Ireland) Theo Frieh (France) Malin Holmbom (Sweden) Karolina Kotowska (Poland) Artur Kusiak (Poland) Camille Medjkouh Boulain (France) Susan Nakazibwe (Ireland) Josefine Nilsson (Sweden) Ronan O’Domhnaill (Ireland) Magdalena Scholz (Germany)

Ozan Balcik (Ireland) Patrick Bendall (Australia) Bing Chen (Ireland) Robin Fontaine (France) Jörg Grefer (Germany) Stephen Gotting (Ireland) Alanna Holmes (Ireland) Sadhbh Hynes (Ireland) Judy Li (United States) Chloe Spiby Loh (United Kingdom) Alex Martinez (Ireland) Melf Otzmann (Germany) Tamara Turemis (Austria)

Title: RisingHome 2

Visitors

Staff

Authors: Scanlon, Emmett; Murphy, Orla; Lord, Laurence

Sheila O Donnell (UCD) Peter Caroll (A2, SAUL) Darragh Breathnach (UCD) Declan Redmond (APEP) Michael Pike (UCD) Tara Kennedy (CCAE) Rae Moore (UCD) Ben Mullen (UCD) John Tuomey (UCD) Alan O Driscoll (IHN) Aisling Hederman (IHN) Marian Fitzpatrick (Phizzfest) TIna Robinson (Phizzfest) Dorothy Smith (Phizzfest) Ann Phelan (Phizzfest) Lucy Jones (Lucy Jones Architects) Rosie Lynch (Callan Workhouse Union) Karen Foley (Landscape UCD)

Robert Bourke Gerry Cahill Nuala Flood Micheal Hayes Mary Laheen Laurence Lord Stephen Mulhall Orla Murphy Emmett Scanlon (Coordinator)

Published by: UCD School of Architecture,Planning & Environmental Science ISBN: 978-1-910963-13-5

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Supported by Irish Housing Network Phizzfest / Reimaging Phibsborough Two Boys Brew / Woodstock / BangBang

Copyright with all authors / UCD Architecture

This risinghome exhibition + newspaper is part of a program of housing research and design established in 2016 as part of the M.Arch program at UCD Architecture.

This edition has been published on the occasion of SHOW UP, the end of year show of the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at UCD, June 2017.

www.risinghome.eu www.ucd.ie/apep @UCD_arch @UCD_March #risinghome