Dublin Town Planning Competition 1914

The Dublin Town Planning Competition 1914 collection is the latest new and exciting collection to be added to the UCD Digital Library. The collection brings together important early 20th century urban planning resources from three different locations (UCD Library, Special Collections; UCD’s Architectural Library at Richview; and the Irish Architectural Archive).

The Competition was held in 1914, and its aim was to “elicit Plans and Reports of a preliminary and suggestive character…which may be of value towards the guidance of the future development of the City in its various directions”. Eight entries were submitted in total, each relating to the Greater Dublin area, taking in Howth, Glasnevin, Ashtown, Dundrum and Dalkey, and arranged under the following main headings: communications, housing, and metropolitan improvements. The submission by Patrick Abercrombie, Sydney Kelly and Arthur Kelly was awarded the prize in 1916; however, due to the political and historical events of that era, the winning entry was not officially published until 1922, with the final Civic Report not published until 1925. Out of the eight entries, only three are known to have survived, and these are being made available online for the first time together, as part of this collection.

If anyone has information regarding the whereabouts of the missing five entries, please contact the UCD Digital Library at digital.library@ucd.ie.

While none of the proposals were implemented, this is a rare opportunity to imagine what Dublin could have looked like, had history not intervened. The collection can be viewed in the UCD Digital Library at http://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:33058

The UCD Digital Library is an institutionally supported, preservation-oriented digital repository that holds a heterogeneous collection of resources from UCD’s cultural heritage repositories and an increasing number of data assets captured or produced by UCD research activities.