Establishing a sense of place in a suburban wilderness

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Archiseek / Ireland / News / 2004 / April 8 2004: Establishing a sense of place in a suburban wilderness

The wilds of west Dublin is not the type of place where you would expect to find architectural statement. For this is a really bleak suburban landscape with endless swathes of squat two-storey houses, acres of useless open space, big wide roads with traffic to match and lots of walls, railings and palisades to mark the all-important boundaries. "All of it looks like this - you can't remember where you've been because there are no landmarks, no sense of place anywhere," says Seán Harrington of Howley Harrington Architects. "Everything is two-storey - all mono-cultural, mono-class, mono-use - and there are hardly any shops, workplaces or facilities of any kind."

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