Sir, – Eamon Ryan’s hymn to the potential of the Land Development Agency (LDA) to play a more significant role in responding to the housing crisis (“A housing solution has been under our noses all along”, Opinion, November 3rd) is sadly typical of discussion about Irish housing in that it completely ignores the quality of urban design and architecture in new-apartment building.
Now in receipt of billions of euro from taxpayers, the LDA is set to have an immense, historic effect on the quality of life (or lack thereof) throughout our cities. Ryan focuses solely on the financial model this agency can deploy, but the financial viability of building apartments is not the only metric that counts.
The late, much-lamented Irish Times journalist Frank McDonald (who so often led the fight against the vandalisation of Dublin and elsewhere with poor housing) wrote, in an August 2023 article, that the LDA “looks set to deliver officially substandard homes ... where quantity trumps quality”.
Elsewhere he was utterly scathing of that organisation’s apartment design typologies, arguing that the agency was codifying a “race to the bottom” in what we can expect from new-apartment building. His publicly available submission on the government’s plan to significantly downgrade what we can, at a minimum, expect from a new apartment building also pulls no punches around the key role he believed the LDA played in that shameful and extraordinarily myopic decision.
RM Block
I challenge any architect or urban planner to dispute the following: The LDA, across the many thousands of apartments it is building, strips out even minor architectural or design complexity in favour of rigid, regressive and cheaper approaches.
While there would be a justifiable uproar if a private developer building on a huge scale was championing poor design standards, the LDA’s grim “vision” for rental apartment life in Ireland has, it seems to me, largely escaped media scrutiny. No doubt, however, within a decade or less, there will be much lamenting of the fact that, yet again, quality urban design was not a priority for new homes. – Yours, etc,
ANDREW QUINN,
Clongriffin,
Dublin 13.
