Irish architecture has stepped onto the European stage with this year's Mies van der Rohe awards, on the jury of which sat Shane O'Toole. The suburbs, where life today is mostly lived, have been abandoned to an architectural wasteland. It wasn't always so. A century ago, long before the march of the bland McMansions, Frank Lloyd Wright opened a door on a new world with his sweeping, horizontal Prairie houses in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.
