Housing, Architecture and the Edge Condition

Ellen Rowley is an architectural and cultural historian who has written extensively on twentieth-century architecture in Ireland. She is editor and principal author of More Than Concrete Blocks: Dublin City’s Twentieth-Century Buildings and Their Stories – an ongoing research and educational project into Dublin’s built environment between 1900 and 2000, commissioned by Dublin City Council and co-funded by the Heritage Council of Ireland. Volume I, 1900–1940 was published in 2016 and Volume II, 1940–1972 will be published in 2018. Ellen co-edited Irish Architecture 1600–2000, Volume IV of Art and Architecture of Ireland. She is a research associate at the School of Architecture (APEP), University College Dublin, Ireland, and she has been the consulting curator of Dublin’s tenement history at 14 Henrietta Street, a new museum of Irish urban life and housing. Along with housing and the meaning of ordinary architecture, Ellen is deeply interested in the influence of the Catholic Church upon Ireland’s built environment and is working on a research project, The Architecture of Catholic Ireland, 1940–1980.

Introduction: Three grounds – telling the story of housing architecture in Dublin 1. Irish architecture and its culture, 1930–1970 2. Clearing hovels and building homes: Architectural endeavors in Dublin's housing reforms, 1931–1945 3. Building on the edge: Dublin’s suburban housing drive of the 1940s 4. How we might live: The architecture of ‘ordinary’ housing from the late 1940s to 1950s Dublin 5. Housing the collective: Multi-storey dwellings in Dublin, c.1930 to c.1970 6. Some thoughts...: New and old housing from the 1960s into the 1970s Bibliography. Index