Mediterranean styling meets southside suburbia
Some Irish architects have recently played with white, slight, light while others have embraced the shaggy eco look and we have all learned valuable design and living lessons from this. Although there are those who are still going around in the equivalent of 1970s flares – the small windowed, pitched roof standard stock of house that has been around for ever and tends to duck below architectural movements such as Modernism and High Tech although it did have a bit of a passing chat with Post-Modernism. Now what are architects to do? White boxes will take their place in Ireland’s architectural history but that trend is so last decade. And while the grander international designers have pushed computer design packages and materials technology into looped, twisted and deconstructed buildings it may take a while for house owners to demand same from their architects. Yet a warm but calm extension in Glenageary, Dublin, by Cast Architecture does bring in influences from larger jobs that at least one of its two directors has worked on. Emmett Scanlon spent nine years with Grafton Architects who used tiles on the dark hatted Soltice Arts Centre in Navan; its upper half is clad in dark limestone marble tiles from Italy. “So there is that continuous thread,” says Scanlon. “Architects are informed by every project they do.”
