Creating a sense of place is the most important challenge facing architects in the design of new suburbs. In the past (and even now, depressingly), all we got were swathes of squat two-storey houses, acres of useless open space, big wide roads and lots of walls, railings and palisades to mark the boundaries. So when South Dublin County Council commissioned Seán Harrington to design social housing in Balgaddy, west Dublin , he was determined to create a sense of place - for the people who would live there, of course, but also to arrest the eyes of passersby "so they would remember where they've been because they saw something interesting". Balgaddy A, as the scheme is tagged in the council's programme, was a realisation of the great Monty Python line: "And now for something completely different . . ." It came with a three-storey crescent facing south on Griffeen Avenue, inspired by the gentle curves of Georgian crescents in Edinburgh, with smaller houses to the rear. At each end of the crescent, there are taller four-storey buildings - "bookends", in effect - to make it even more distinctive, and splashes of vibrant colour, too. No wonder this scheme was highly commended in the RIAI Silver Medal awards last March for making an architectural statement in an area overwhelmed by formless sprawl.
