The Sunday Times

Lorcan O’Herlihy

When the architect Lorcan O’Herlihy visited Ireland last year, he couldn’t help but draw parallels between Dublin and his home city, Los Angeles. "I counted 55 cranes on the horizon. And that was just through one window in the Jurys hotel," says the Dublin-born artist and designer. Like Los Angeles, he concluded, Dublin city had changed. Now the Irish capital might be able to learn from the west coast city. When O’Herlihy left at the age of 15 in the 1970s, Dublin was erecting the sort of buildings it would tear down just two decades later to create more room in Europe’s newest boom town. The track record of housing in Los Angeles, meanwhile, with its emphasis on low-rise, wide-footprint suburban piles, inspired the term "Los Angelisation" as a loose synonym for urban sprawl. Like Dublin, the city of angels today is adopting a new building language, and O’Herlihy is among its most articulate speakers. LOHA, his architectural firm in Culver City, has shifted its attention from single-family, space-consuming pads to "multi-family" housing, an American term for apartment buildings that can house up to 40 families.