A handbook on Irish rural housing design, free online – printed version to come…
Materials Let’s turn our attention to what our building is made of and what the external materials are going to look like… The safest planners option is for them to accept materials that match the existing or match other houses Read More …
Continuing on from the recent posts about Japanese architecture, comparisons with Irish rural architecture and why the planners aren’t as keen on a more avante-garde approach to design in Ireland; one of the things I hadn’t quite appreciated was the Read More …
Chapter 5c Rural Housing Handbook ~ The Details Let’s now get down to the nitty gritty details of traditional Irish, rural architecture… I’m focussing in this section just on one element – the roof details; other similar analogies can also Read More …
Back to the ‘Form’ again… In the course of my blogging, the cage I rattled the most that got some of the most vitriolic replies concerned the idea that maybe we should not forget that houses should be architecturally pleasing Read More …
Size isn’t everything… Now we’ve looked at the basic form, I’ll be discussing later more imaginative forms but I think it’s time to draw our attention to size and the increasing preoccupation with ‘doing it large’. I’ll say first of Read More …
Now, this is going to be a juicy section; how can we marry an energy efficiency with a design that the planners (and clients) are happy with. Interestingly enough, rural Irish forms are a perfect fit for energy efficiency – Read More …
Rhythm and Repetition So, we’ve established that we need a ‘big idea’ that holds our design together and that in the right places we should be allowed to have a higher percentage of glazing on the southern facade (northern climates); Read More …
So, I’ve introduced the concept that every good house should have an overriding ‘big idea’ – something that separates it from the rest. In essence, in the same way that Twitter breaks the world down into 140 characters, you should Read More …
This next chapter is probably one of the most difficult aspects to nail down; the title of the chapter is ‘What’s the big idea’, with the main premise that every good house should have (at least one) main concept or Read More …
So where do we start when first designing in relation to the sun? Well as architects you are effectively the spinning plate man at the circus; you know the one that spins a plate on top of a bendy pole, Read More …
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