Affordable Housing, Holles Street, Dublin
This building provides a one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartment on each on the six floors over an entrance lobby, shop and raised garden. A shared walled garden is also provided on the roof.
Continuing the grand scale of Holles Street, the building acknowledges the adjacent configuration on St, Andrew’s Court while also negotiating the disparate and dispersed nature of Fenian Street.
The concrete floor plate is simply repeated around a lift shaft and clad in a modulated pattern of storey-height 600mm wide terracotta panels and 1800mm wide steel-framed windows, which undulate across and around the faces of the building.
Stairs and winter-gardens for both apartments cantilever from the floor plate and are clad as ‘clip-ons’ enabling long views of the raised garden and Merrion Square respectively.
The main spaces of the apartments are arranged along the southeast face and circulate around fixed storage units. Continuity is opened up between rooms to facilitate the playing-out of everyday life: breakfast in bed, dressing for dinner, time for homework.
In a similar way, the ground floor opens up to the everyday life of the city, animating oblique views through the depth of the building. A wall angled precisely North-South brings a shaft of midday light into the raised garden, drawing the eye through the entrance lobby to the stairs and street beyond, past a safe and pleasant passage to St. Andrew’s Court.
