In 2009 Irish architect Dominic Stevens imagined and built a three-bedroomed €25,000 house. He also gained acclaim by making the plans freely available online in order, he wrote, “to pay back some of the social debt”. Houses, to Stevens, are clearly more than assets; and architecture is a way of thinking about living, as much as it is stone and steel.
Now he has imagined Alice, and with her a small book about the spaces we create, and the spaces in between. There are illustrations too, stylised sketches by Stevens of the buildings in question, and initially it is a little confusing. In a series of letters, Alice reminisces with Dominic about their UCD studentships and Berlin days, detailing her hopes and dreams for future buildings, and their ultimate reality. But is Stevens remembering or creatively imagining? Alice is actually invented, and it all feels very meta.
A Berlin-based section focuses on individual famous sites. Let go of a desire for hard facts, and stop worrying about what is history and what is story: there is a handy appendix of more concrete details. Instead, let the idea take root about how people, their actions and emotions complete the circle of architecture. A beautiful short passage, Staircases and People, gives you a perfectly satisfying sense of what it means to live in a well-designed apartment community, and by extension, what we lose when we build badly.
You also have to ignore the occasional smattering of architectural adjectives, which otherwise threaten to disrupt the flow. Windows are rational, a railway is muscular, and there are orthogonal spectacles (to do with right angles). An unhappy woman lives in a Mies van der Rohe house in the woods, and a young boy helps complete a Peter Zumthor chapel. Things become steadily more experimental, with poetic fragments that may be a little too elusive for some. Then we come to Ireland.
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In this final intriguing section, Stevens dips into the myths and histories that underpin our vernacular architecture, and goes deeper still, to imagine the mood of the rocks and stones, the soul of the land. “They say nature is gone from this place […] they move things around, is that really creation?” Turning to writing doesn’t mean Stevens has abandoned architecture. He continues to create, experiment in, and excel at both.
