Housing, Architecture and the Edge Condition

Reviews / Votes

"Contrary to de Valera's rural vision of cozy homesteads, Ellen Rowley's pioneering study shows that architecture and the built environment were forerunners of Irish modernity. Using extensive research and arresting illustrations, Irish city planning, rural development and housing policies are brought out of the archives in way that can only illuminate their shortsighted equivalents today. In times of acute shortages and economic protectionism in the new Irish state, slum clearances, suburban schemes and architectural design drew on international developments in Europe, Britain and the United States to give the lie to perceptions of disillusionment and inertia in the post-revolutionary generation. If Joyce's Dublin was a city of words, Housing, Architecture and the Edge Condition is devoted to the often forgotten architects and planners who gave a concrete, everyday expression to the visionary ideals of a new Ireland."

Luke Gibbons, (author) Joyce's Ghosts: Ireland, Modernity and Memory

"Ellen Rowley tells the troubled story of Dublin's housing architecture. She documents its cultural, political and even religious context. In the mid-20th century, housing was a preoccupation of Government policy. Despite their interest, architects played a marginal role in its production. Policy was dominated by political forces and, sometimes, by an unthinking urgency. The middle ground of urban infill sites was where architecture came to the fore, with the thoughtful buildings of Herbert Simms now recognised as exemplars of urban living. Ireland is now in a housing crisis worse than any in the 20th century. There are lessons to be learned from this engaging book."

Sheila O'Donnell, Director, O'Donnell+Tuomey; Univeristy College Dublin, Ireland

"In approaching the phenomenon from an architectural history perspective and assembling a vast amount of previously unseen material, Rowley provides a timely and eloquent reappraisal of a passage in Irish cultural, social and spatial history which hitherto has been at best misunderstood and at worst maligned: the mass production of social housing in twentieth-century Dublin."

Gary Boyd, Queen's University Belfast, Ireland

"If a turbulent programme of subsidised state-built dwellings driven by Nationalist demands and land redistribution marked the final phase of British rule in what became the Irish Free State, housing policies there from the 1930s to the mid-70s proved more nuanced. In this carefully argued account of the Dublin experience, Ellen Rowley traces the complexities and the actors involved - explaining expertly how such divergent estates as those at Crumlin (suburban cottages) and Ballymun (tower blocks) came into being."

Murray Fraser, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK