Search for ‘small bang’ designs for inner city
A competition to find new architectural designs for the sites of former Georgian houses demolished in Dublin city centre will be held by Dublin City Council on Saturday. Some 17 groups of architects and architecture students have been asked to design replacement residential buildings based on individual plots of former Georgian houses on Dominick Street which had been demolished over the 1950s and 1960s and replaced with social housing flats. The complex, built in 1970, was one of five due to have been redeveloped through a public private partnership (PPP) between the council and developer Bernard McNamara.
Following the collapse of the PPPs last year, the council decided to go ahead with the redevelopment of social housing on the east side of the street in 2011. It will release sites on the west side for private development at a later date.
City architect Ali Grehan said the competition resulted from concern about the poor design quality of many “infill” schemes for former Georgian plots in the inner city and loss of appropriate scale when several plots were accumulated for a development.
