Reimagining Existing Municipal Housing

Alexander Mordaunt

Thesis

Proposal: Intergenerational Housing
Location: Dorset Street and St. Mary’s Place Flat Complex, Dublin 1

This thesis explores the built and social character of Dublin’s Northeast Inner City, through the exploration of intergenerational living within the mono tenure flat complexes of the Gull Wing housing estates. The design project offers a modest touch to the existing municipal housing stock that sets out to support alternative networks of families. 

Redefining what is accepted as an architecture of ultimology in this city. A series of layered interventions and strategies attempt to create social sustainability, stabilising the roots of the existing and moving away from the transitory residency that is perpetuated in parts of the NEIC. The design is centred around infills of bedsit towers and circulation cores whilst reimagining the existing mono tenure flat complexes and injecting their hinterland with activity. The design project aims to promote the safeguarding of the future of the NEIC, socially, culturally, and architecturally through Critical Care. Whilst simultaneously exploring how architecture can be used as a tool to push the perceived social norms of what a family unit is.

By testing this design thesis, the resulting project has attempted to apply these objectives in a method that continues to support the deep-rooted communities that have been born and raised in these complexes and that conserves an era of architecture that has been subjected to much judgment and debate.

The proposed strategy for the design project combines the thesis research of the built and social fabric of the NEIC with an attitude towards the chosen site and its complexities. The project maintains the existing density of the site whilst accepting the rigidness of the Zeilenbau plan. The design project is a layering of interventions of infill, retrofit and reimagining existing inhabitable spaces as infrastructure.