Robin Mandal looks like an ex-rugby player, but appearances can be deceptive. Even though he went to Willow Park School and Blackrock College, he says he never played rugby because “it’s such a rough game”. Instead, he explored some of the great cities of Europe.
Mandal, who is the new president of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI), grew up in Calcutta. His father was an Indian lawyer and his mother was Irish; they met in London during the second World War when he was in the RAF and she was working as a nurse, and moved to Calcutta afterwards so he could practise law again.
“I lived there until I was 12 and then I was sent to boarding school in Dublin. Between the ages of 12 and 16, I used to go out three times a year, staying in different European cities en route, usually at the expense of the airlines. It was an incredible experience,” he says.
Mandal isn’t sure why he decided to study architecture. “I just thought I’d like it,” he says. So he went to UCD at a time when its School of Architecture was being run by the “Flying Circus” – talented tutors who flew in from London, Glasgow and elsewhere. “They were great.”
Survival plan
After working for other architects, he set up in practice on his own, mainly designing private houses or renovating protected structures (he has a master's degree in conservation). There were also projects for a developer before he decided he was "not really that sort of architect".
Mandal shares a former Methodist chapel on George’s Avenue in Blackrock with two other architectural practices; it was the first in Ireland, dating from 1842. But even during the boom, he was careful not to expand beyond “three architects and a book-keeper”. When it all began to implode in 2007, Mandal and his colleagues made a three-year survival plan to see them through the recession – and now it’s entering the seventh year.
“We never took any dividends, so we had built up a stack of finance to see us through the lean years.”
One of Mandal’s most unusual projects was the National Emergency Co-ordination Centre in Government Buildings – an “enormously complex” project that involved “making spaces where people could think”, including a room with a hollowed-out table for 40 officials.
Asked if we had learned any lessons from the boom-and-bust, Mandal says: “I don’t think we have – yet. When we come out of survival mode and enter review mode, we might realise how close we came to being uncivilised. The kind of society we created gave me huge discomfort.”
But Mandal, who’s married and has a 21-year-old daughter doing social studies at UCD, can still “identify with a lot of the good things, like walking through the parks or getting on a bus”. Really? “Yeah, the free wifi on the buses is fantastic. It works for me, more than a BMW.”
His “overriding ambition” for the two-year term as RIAI president is that “architects become more ordinary, instead of being seen as a luxury”. Thus, he’s “very conflicted about awards celebrating excellence because they can alienate people just seeking betterment”.
In the wake of the Building Regulations row within the RIAI – where members objected to its compliance with the initial legislation and sought amendments – Mandal also wants to reach out to the members. “There has been a problem of communication and, as president, my priority is to get over that issue and bridge any gaps among the membership.”
These “gaps” were dramatically underlined by the huge attendance at an extraordinary general meeting of members last October, when some 500 architects packed into a windowless room in Dublin’s Alexander Hotel to debate the institute’s stance on the Building Regulations.
Now, Mandal wants to open up RIAI council meetings with “live stream/webcasts/tweets and chats”, according to his formidable work programme for 2014. (Two former presidents who led the revolt – Eoin Ó Cofaigh and Joan O’Connor – are on the new council).
175th anniversary
To maintain "Chinese walls", he intends to separate the functions of the RIAI's full-time director, John Graby, and his newer role as registrar of professionally qualified architects in Ireland.
This year also marks the RIAI's 175th anniversary, so the new president says he wants to use this as an opportunity to engage with wider society on the role of architects and good architecture in delivering a better built environment – next time round.
Defective structures: amended Building Regulations fall short
The amended Building Regulations due to come into force on March 1st will not protect consumers because anyone who buys a new home that is later found to be defective would have to sue those who certified it as compliant, according to Robin Mandal.
The new president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) says it is seeking a mandatory system of insurance for latent defects, saying this is essential. But this would require legislation – and that could take some time.
“You can’t have consumers relying on the courts in defective building cases,” Mandal says. “If it’s meant to protect consumers, you can’t do that by leaving them with the only option of suing the certifiers” – architects, engineers, builders or whoever.
The institute is also pressing for compulsory registration of building contractors – something promised by Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan, but not due to be delivered until next year. This also needs amending legislation, which may be a while away.
Under the new regulations, assigned certifiers, who can be registered architects, engineers or building surveyors, will inspect building works at key stages during construction.The assigned certifier and the builders will both certify that a finished building complies regulations.
Mandal says that there was “horse-trading” over the amended regulations, with the statutory instrument – now titled Building Control (Amendment) Regulations S.I. 9 of 2014 – being revised several times at the behest of “stakeholders”.
A copy of the final draft, seen by The Irish Times , shows numerous amendments to earlier versions of the text, as representatives of architects, engineers and builders in the "stakeholder forum" sought to have their concerns addressed by the regulations.
The Department of the Environment “don’t normally do that, but they had to because the first draft was uninsurable, so they had to set up the stakeholder engagement to deal with this”, Mandal says. In the end, inevitably, the final version was a compromise.
On behalf of the RIAI, Mandal wrote to the Minister seeking to have the implementation date for the new legislation deferred until it could be shown that local authorities were geared up for the new regime. But the March 1st deadline remains in place. "The law is the law, and we have to comply with the law. We were concerned it would put a huge strain on local authorities that they may not
be able to handle. There may not be a deluge on March 1st, but it will happen soon after if the economy does pick up." One issue the department would not concede on was an inspection regime, whereby new buildings would be examined by surveyors during construction.
The department wanted to avoid any public liability for latent defects, even though Priory Hall – with no inspection regime –has cost Dublin City Council €4 million so far.
