Ultimately though, their failed legacy was rooted in their failed promise: the swimming pools did not come, while any landscaping that was realised was paltry. Archive correspondence shows housing architect, Simms, in prolonged and repeated battles just to realise pram sheds or washing lines or children’s swings. Social infrastructure was always the last element to be made across Irish public housing estates, reinforcing British town planner Patrick Abercrombie’s 1922 warning to the Irish about ‘putting a valuable jewel into an ill-designed setting’. The flat blocks – Abercrombie’s ‘jewel’ – may have been well built and decently detailed, bringing levels of domestic comfort to new Dubliners and former slum residents alike, but the setting was wanting; more ‘not-designed’ than ‘ill-designed’.
The flats in urban Ireland were residential outliers; alternative dwelling types, soft-modernist ‘others’ to the pervasive two-storey single-family pitched-roof houses in new suburbs. Notwithstanding the flats’ modernist leanings, their mark upon Irish architectural histories has been more anthropological than technical or formal. With the Rialto scheme, the heady mix of anthropology (the local) and domestic technology (the modern) was writ large, not least in its nomenclature. It became Fatima Mansions. Elsewhere, through the early 1950s, people moved into St Teresa’s Gardens, St Brigid’s Gardens, St Laurence’s Mansions. Named after holy favourites, Mariology and the occasional local martyr or political hero (Phil Shanahan, Leo Fitzgerald, Alfie Byrne), all of whom were beloved by Dubliners, we are reminded of the omnipotence of the Irish Catholic Church at this juncture, and indeed, of the religious fervour inspired by the Holy Year of 1950 and the Marian Year of 1954.
So far, so Catholic.
Through Catholic association, brick expression and low densities, such schemes were explicitly adapted to local tastes and values. Influenced by forms in Britain, Holland and Austria, the Dublin four-storey blocks were unique with densities of forty flats per acre and twenty-five percent site coverage; in Britain, the figures were sixty flats per acre, thirty-three percent site coverage and block heights of five storeys. Why then have most of this generation of flats fallen victim to the wrecking ball?
In a word: antipathy.
One early expression of official antipathy came through the 1939/43 Inquiry into the Housing of the Working Classes in the City of Dublin. It reported that in terms of public health, the level of ‘cramping and confinement’, ‘the drudgery of stair-climbing’, the lack of privacy and attendant space for coal storage and laundry facilities were all ‘undesirable’ factors of the new urban flat schemes, concluding that the city-centre flat dwelling was too small for healthy family living (Report of Inquiry, 1943, p.118).
Having built 1,002 flats following the Housing Acts of 1931/2, Dublin Corporation let out the new flats for less rent than it did its new suburban cottages, despite the fact that, as the Inquiry found, the flats had cost almost double to construct. Antipathy grew. During WWII, flat building ceased while drawing-board schemes such as the Rialto example were only taken up by the late 1940s. In 1952, an Irish Times editorial stated that Dublin flats ‘cannot be as healthy as houses in the pure air of remoter suburbs […] they are not “homes”. They cannot satisfy that instinct which exists in nearly every Irish man and woman to possess a “home of their own”, when the same landing is shared with half a dozen other families’ (Irish Times, 25 April 1952, 5). And two decades later, in October 1972, antipathy boiled over to the extent that the new Minister of Local Government, Jim Tully, stated that he would not sanction any local authority housing over three storeys, except in streetscapes where such massing was necessary or appropriate.
So far, so much antipathy.
Tully was reacting to the perceived deficits of the recently completed Ballymun Estate (1965-9, 3,021 units) at Dublin’s northern edge, which notably comprised Ireland’s first tower block flats. With its seven towers, nineteen spine blocks and ten walk-up blocks, Ballymun was defined by flats even though there were also some 400 houses (18.4). All the housing forms were generated by mechanised systems – a French precast concrete one, complete with heating coils embedded in floor slabs for the flats, and an English system which made lightweight houses. Occupied by 1969, by the early 1970s the media and academia were already intent on reporting the estate’s demise. Pointing mostly to the delay in projected services (town centre/ swimming pool/ golf course) and to the slovenly maintenance of the technology (lifts), ultimately the towers, which housed people in tall, tall buildings, became the socio-architectural scapegoat.
