Taking stock - the future of Irish housing

Architecture or Revolution? Revolution can be avoided.

So ends a text written just over a hundred years ago in 1923 by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Insightful, occasionally melodramatic, often self-aggrandising, but always compelling, Vers Une Architecture would become a highly influential panegyric on the promise of modernism. ¹

Le Corbusier argues that architects must drop historicist aesthetics and attitudes and instead take up new, engineering-inspired sensibilities to create useful, mass-producible architectural objects and relationships capable of responding to the key issues exercising the zeitgeist. On the latter, he is clear: ‘The house is the problem of the epoch.’

A large proportion of the energies of the modernist project throughout the mid decades of the 20th century were devoted to the problem of housing – the realisation of new forms, types of spaces, and methods of construction that could respond to the slums and unsanitary environments the period had inherited from the industrialisations, urbanisations, and inequalities of the previous century.

Written in a time of social, cultural, and economic extremes, Vers Une Architecture’s vision for social cohesion effected through a technologically inspired architecture was produced, albeit temporarily, imperfectly and sometimes controversially, decades later in the social contract realised within welfare state structures across Europe and beyond. Central to this was the redistribution of wealth into publicly owned spaces and services.

But also critical was the development of architectural research into the social, technological, cultural and yes, environmental, complexities of how housing could be designed and delivered. And this in turn realised new agencies of public architectural practice – architects as public or civil servants, as bureaucrats – before the term became pejorative – operating (often anonymously) in large, interdisciplinary teams and delivering at its best affordable, social housing schemes replete with integrated infrastructures of transport, landscape and publicly shared services and amenities – architectures of housing, in other words, that were both conceived and capable of reaching beyond the bald provision of units, to effect ideas of community.²

In the Housing Question written in 1872, Frederick Engels proposes not only the inevitability of housing crises under capitalist conditions but also a repeating response, ‘they are merely shifted elsewhere!’.³

Just over 20 years ago in 2004, at the height of the so-called Celtic Tiger, as a young academic, I wrote a polemical opinion piece for an Irish architectural journal. It was titled A House-buyer’s Guide to the History of Ireland.⁴ As the title suggests, the piece tried to provide a wry commentary on the apparently universal acceptance of the commodification of housing as a good thing.

It referred, amongst other things, to the uncritical adoption by Charles Haughey – despite his nationalistic narratives of resistance concerning tensions in Northern Ireland – of the British Prime Minister Margeret Thatcher’s economic and ideological policies on housing provision: i.e., sell everything, and let the market provide. It was Thatcher, after all, who suggested that there was no such thing as society. In the United Kingdom and in Ireland, public architecture dissipated. Local authorities no longer built housing. Developers did.

The public paid a huge price for the Celtic TIger construction boom. Photo: Pawel Szymczuk from Pixabay

To précis where I left off in 2004. We had the Celtic Tiger. We had collections of housing units built in isolation. In the wrong places. Lacking infrastructure. Developers made lots of money and borrowed more. Banks apparently made lots of money. We had the crash. Private developers lost lots of money and could not pay back what they had borrowed. Banks lost the lots of money that they thought they might have had.

You know the rest. We paid for them. We produced perhaps the epitome of post-society housing: the ghost estate, a new vernacular for 21st century Ireland. We paid for those too. We paid for it all, and almost certainly more than if the State had just built the housing in the first place, and in the right places. And on top of this, the indignities of austerity and its, ongoing, effects on social cohesion – costs, social, political and otherwise, that are still unknown.

It is now October 2025. Over 20 years later. Still, as Engels would have predicted, a housing crisis. A lack of supply. In recent days, the coalition government announced tax cuts for developers. One can argue that generally the primary motive of developers is to realise profits. If profit is not apparent, development does not take place. And inevitably, what is considered less quantifiably profitable – communal amenity, infrastructure, public services, i.e., the stuff, along with adequate supply, of social cohesion – is generally of peripheral interest to the private sector. If possible, and in spite of development plans and planners’ best intentions, these aspects will be elided. Watch this space.

The other thing that tends to disappear under private speculation and the pressures of profitability is research and experimentation. Modernism and the public architectural agencies generated in the mid-20th century came up with a variety of alternative means to resolve slums and other inadequacies – to address the problem of their epoch. The problems of ours are more complicated. They certainly concern housing, and certainly housing as a critical piece of social infrastructure, but also housing in the context of climate change and the necessity to reduce energy usage and embodied and functional carbon across all the actions and tenets of architecture.

The future of housing is not technological. It is not engineering. The future of housing requires a sophisticated, multi and interdisciplinary researched-based approach to design that understands and responds to both housing’s tangible and intangible elements – all its potential forms and relationships, from holistic futures-orientated long-term economic costings, users’ needs, to biological processes – not as a reactive compulsion but as a creative reaction to possibilities and opportunities. Imagine housing that is not only carbon neutral but actually provides sustainable energy; imagine housing fused into hybrid forms with elements of landscape and agriculture to grow food, recover water, clean environments, ameliorate mental and other health conditions; and so on. And in the process ultimately saves money.

As the Dublin architect, educator and writer Gerry Cahill says, the function of architecture is not to give people what they want: It is to give them what they thought they could never have.⁵ And if the public infrastructure no longer exists to realise housing that is sheltered from the short-term pressures of commodification and provide more than quantifiable elements, then practices of architecture must combine with other research environments and expertise, and all architecture’s communicative and creative energies deployed to realise and test new paradigms, ones that seek to embody, demonstrate and advocate social and environmental cohesion.

About the author

Gary A. Boyd is Full Professor of Architecture at University College Dublin and PI on ACME: the Architecture of Coal in Modern Europe (ACME) (2025-2030) a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant. He was project leader of a Getty Foundation Keeping it Modern grant (2018-2021) which won the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland (RIAI) Prize for Research in 2021, and his monograph Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining and Modern Britain (Lund Humphries 2023) - the result of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship - won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion (SAHGB) in 2023. He teaches design and the history and theory of architecture.

References and further reading

1. Le Corbusier (1923) Vers Une Architecture (translated into English as Towards A New Architecture, 1931).
2. See for example, the works produced by Sydney Cook as borough architect in Camden in Mark Swenarton (2018) Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing. London: Lund Humphries. Cook’s innovations took place within a post-war London County Council Architects’ Department inspired by the organisation of the architectural programme and architects of the Miners’ Welfare Committee/Commission in the 1920 and 1930s via John Henry Forshaw who was chief architect to both successively. See Ruth Lang (2014) Architects Take Command: The LCC Architect’s Department, Volume 41, How the Build a Nation, no. 3, 32-6; also Gary A. Boyd (2023) Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining Modern Britain. London: Lund Humphries. For Irish examples of housing architectures and approaches to social cohesion see Gary. A. Boyd, Michael Pike and Brian Ward (eds) (2020) Irish Housing Design 1950-1980: Out of the Ordinary. Abingdon: Routledge.
3. Frederick Engels (1872) The Housing Question, in Der Volkstaat. (opens in a new window)www.marxists.org. Accessed 08 October 2025.
4. Gary A. Boyd (2004) A House-buyer’s Guide to the History of Ireland, in building material no. 11 (spring) edited by Anna Ryan. Dublin: Architectural Association of Ireland (AAI).
5. See Eimear Arthur and Michael K. Hayes (eds) (2025) Care and Consideration on the Work of Gerry Cahill Architects. Dublin: Type.