Live in a bank, church or shop. It’s one solution to the housing crisis

Some so-called innovative solutions to our housing crisis can lead to waves of anger and depression, or so I discovered watching How to Live Mortgage Free with Sarah Beeny on Netflix. Beeny’s solutions seem to involve being gifted land by your parents, falling in love with a carpenter, engineer or other form of building expert, and not worrying about such flash extravagances as running water, electricity or cupboards. Add in those inducements to Van Life that tend to imply life is one long holiday in picturesque spots, and we seem to have shifted from high-end property porn, to low-grade poverty porn. So who might have the answers?

Launching as part of Open House Dublin: the annual opportunity to explore all buildings great and small, Housing Unlocked sees architects and designers coming up with ideas. Ranging from grand plans to convert churches, former bank buildings and vacant shops, to small ideas for big change in rural towns, there is a lot to inspire.

The results of an open call for ideas, Housing Unlocked, is a joint project between the Irish Architecture Foundation (IAF) and the Housing Agency, so while the ideas are fascinating, there’s also the attendant potential that this is an exhibition that could make a difference.

“We want to tackle the issues in a way that change happens,” confirms IAF director, Nathalie Weadick. Recalling a tense debate on housing, organised by the IAF for a previous Open House, she says the aim is to move the conversation on, bringing an awareness of how architects can help. “The housing crisis isn’t a problem of architecture, but architecture can be part of the solution.”

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Bob Jordan, chief executive at the Housing Agency, is keen to find ways to see all viable solutions through, promoting policies and encouraging at grassroots level. Set up in 2012, the agency is tasked with “delivering sustainable and affordable housing for us all” and Jordan wants to make the most of all opportunities. “If it ended with the exhibition, I’d be extremely disappointed,” he says. “The exhibition is saying: here are the ideas that we think can be carried forward, that can have an influence on our housing system. There is an opportunity in every town and village and city in Ireland to do something with some of the ideas that are here,” he concludes.

Fifty five entries were shortlisted, of which eight create the exhibition. All 55 will be detailed in a forthcoming book. It’s a heady mix, in which bank buildings house community spaces below and apartments above, back lanes are revived, vacant shop spaces become work-from-home offices, roof terraces create gardens complete with lawns to kick a ball, and churches retain space for worship while also accommodating places to live. Weadick expects audiences to include Local Authority officers, planners and community activists, as well as the wider public, and the architects involved have been asked to back their ideas up with notes on how many housing units each intervention would yield.

McCullough Mulvin’s Valerie Mulvin says her team’s approach has been driven by the idea that “the vacancy and dereliction in Irish towns could be solved by a hundred small ideas, not one big one. It’s a strategic way of working that reinforces the original shape of the town and doesn’t propose an expansion at the edges,” she says. “Instead, it moves that energy back into the middle.”

Go into their room in the exhibition, and come back with a way out of all this,” confirms Weadick.

Meanwhile, with hundreds of bank branches set to close around the country, Tom Cookson’s and Sarah Carroll’s exploration of how to use some of these beautiful buildings is fascinating. There may be less flexibility in church rezoning, given Dublin City Council’s recent rejection of a submission by the Dublin Archdiocese to blanket rezone all 33 of their sites. Blanket rezoning is a bit of a blunt instrument, so perhaps that’s no surprise, but perhaps the more subtle proposals by David Lawless and Sophie Kelliher, which include retaining spaces for worship and preserving the architectural heritage of the churches in question, might yet persuade.

The solutions and ideas in Housing Unlocked are, crucially, practical. They don’t involve living off-grid in a converted horsebox, or pretending to be happy in a hen house. Yes, our housing crisis presents a grim challenge, but as Weadick points out, if you go into it with that mindset, you’ll likely come up with grim solutions, as we have in the past. Instead, she quotes architect Jean Philippe Vassal, speaking at the IAF last year and describing housing as “the most beautiful challenge for architecture”.

“The architects have responded in that spirit,” she says.

Home4Community: JFOC Architects, and collaborators Lagan Homes and Common Ground explore how you can have density AND your own front door and back garden.

Eco:Cube: O’Mahony Pike Architects and KSN Project Managers check out low carbon options by means of modular homes.

Model Housing — Urban Horticulture: Donaghy and Diamond Architects look at Dublin’s Liberties to see what opportunities are hiding in plain sight.

Thirty-Three Churches: David Lawless of FKL architects, Sophie Kelliher, and Niamh NicGhabhann of the University of Limerick explore the potential of church buildings.

Building Societies: Tom Cookson and Sarah Carroll see how we can cash in on regional bank buildings.

Start Spreading the Mews: SFA42′s Stephen Foley, Stephen Wall and Sara Acebes Anta find potential in the urban mews.

The Working Home: EWA’s Emmet Walsh and Fiona Gill look at how the remote working and digital retail revolutions can together offer surprising opportunities.

Join the Dots — 100 Small Ideas for Sustainable Change: McCullough Mulvin Architects rise to the challenge with a catalogue of brilliant potential, based on Mountrath in Co Laois.

Housing Unlocked is at the Science Gallery, Dublin from October 14th to January 21st. Open House Dublin runs October 14th-16th