The new president of the Institute of Architects in Ireland is on a mission to transform the urban landscape
Helen Rogers, Property Editor, 4 Jan 2004.

It consumes thousands of acres of space each year, imprisons people in their cars and undermines the ideal of community and belonging to which we all aspire.

It is urban sprawl, the repetitive, uninspiring architecture of the suburb - neither town nor country, a limbo of undifferentiated housing estates dominated by the car because its inhabitants have no access to nearby jobs, amenities or entertainment.

Its very name is laden with negativity - a suburb is a place somehow less than the city to which it is attached. To be suburban is to be defined as lacking in vision, to live with a comfortable, narrow-minded, uninterested complacency about the world around us.

It is precisely because of this boring, unsexy mindset towards the suburb that it has, until recently, been all but ignored by the professionals whose job it is to ensure quality, not just in the buildings we live and work in, but in the neighbourhoods created by those buildings.

One of the few voices in the wilderness campaigning for a change of attitude towards the suburb is leading architect, Anthony Reddy, who has just taken up his post as new president of the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland.

With his pedigree as an influential proponent of a “new urbanism” in the planning of the 60,000-odd homes a year we are currently building, a priority for him is improving the quality of the neighbourhoods being created around our expanding cities.

The trouble with the suburbs of the past couple of decades is that they were never designed as neighbourhoods, he says. “They were largely designed and planned by roads engineers. The car was predominant and roads determined the layout of the estates in which we live.

“These newer estates are very different from the old suburbs we see in the Georgian and Victorian streets we admire in parts of Dublin, Kinsale, Kilkenny and Galway. Those redbrick terraces have high density living - they are planned around a network of buildings that give a sense of community. The people who live there are close to shops, work and schools. That is why they are so successful.”

Reddy acknowledges that since the movement away from suburban sprawl began we have come a long way in a short time. The higher densities now encouraged near good public transport centres, and the fact that a mixture of shops, creches and offices are now favoured by local authorities over the history of planning apartheid which led to the separate development of housing estates, industrial estates and office parks, are all much-needed reforms.

“Creating neighbourhoods with varied streetscapes, terraces, courtyards and significant buildings that go beyond the confines of a particular site are vitally important,” he says. “Area action plans which define a framework for all new development and the recognition that mixed use development with high quality public spaces are better places to live in are very welcome reforms.”

He believes architects need to become much more involved in the planning of the new streetscapes that we will be living in. Part of the problem is the isolation and specialisation of the profession.

“A priority of my two years as president will be to encourage quality in architecture and greater integration between architects, planners and engineers. You don’t see doctors trained as specialists from the beginning. They get a wide, general background before they specialise. The same thing needs to happen with architects.

“The post war expansion of our cities and town is characterised by the work of planners, roads engineers, architects and other professionals working in isolation to produce car-dependent suburbs of bland quality. I want to encourage closer collaboration between the built environment professions to prevent this happening.”

He also wants to continue to lobby for a registration scheme for architects so that only professionals who are fully qualified can advertise themselves as architects and practice as such. At the moment anybody can call themselves an architect and, with the need for higher standards of both design and safety now so predominant, he says this is not a competition issue but a consumer issue.

The RIAI campaign against one-off housing in rural areas is also a sine qua non of his presidency. “One-off houses are unsustainable. Housing in the countryside should be for those who need to live and work in the countryside. It is not in the interests of sustainability that you work in town and commute to rural areas. You must have to show that you work in the countryside before you can build there.

“It is true that some would regard this as an infringement of their rights but all civil society is a contract between the individual and the greater good, between what we give and what is given. A laissez faire society results in poor living conditions. Even in the United States, which epitomises the free market, they have moved away from suburban sprawl to more planned and sustainable development.”

Reddy is director of the large architectural practice Anthony Reddy and Associates which employs 70 people in the elaborately converted Dartry Mills building in South Dublin and also has offices in Kilkenny and Belfast.

The practice is currently designing the huge Westgate project at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham being jointly developed by the Office of Public Works and Eircom. The formal gardens of the Royal Hospital will open into a new public space, a new gallery for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, offices and apartments.

They are also working on plans for the former Nestle site in Kilmainham which they will transform into shops, offices and apartments, and designing a major urban renewal scheme in Kilkenny at McDonagh station.

Reddy himself has had long and close associations with the RIAI and was vice president, treasurer and head of the public affairs division.

Quietly spoken, with the slightly vague and scattered air of the university academic, his commitment to quality and best practice is evident, not just because architecture is about pleasing buildings or cutting edge designs - or even, heresy to say it - its effect on the natural environment but because it has real power over the way we live our lives.

Now that urban is so hip and chic, life in the suburbs can encapsulate the isolation and boredom of the wasteland of disconnected buildings that make up some parts of the outer edges of our cities. For Tony Reddy, this is the heart of the matter.

“The pace of expansion of our cities will continue because the demographics of this country are still of a young population in need of homes. The profile of the family is changing and the direction is away from larger four bed homes to smaller houses and apartments.

“But instead of just building sprawling houses, we need more compact cities and suburbs where the quality of urban living is as good in the newer parts as it was in the older core. The older values should be reflected in suburbia. Huge tracts of open land are wasted on roads systems on which we spend long hours sitting in cars trying to get to work or to shop.

“We need networks of streets where people can walk safely to shops and schools and have access to amenities and entertainment as well as to good public transport links to the city. It’s a continual process and the quality of design in the city centre now compares with the best of other cities internationally.

"Temple Bar raised the flag for the rest of the city and the Docklands, Grand Canal and Smithfield have followed suit. We need to apply the same standards and principles to the suburbs. ”