Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly's mandatory national guidelines on the design of apartments have been widely viewed as a bonus for the building industry, a sweetener to kickstart construction by cutting space standards. But they may also represent a reductio ad absurdum because the figures simply don't stack up. According to the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, which has researched the implications of the new guidelines, it is actually "not possible to design an apartment to the minimum sizes set down in the national standards".
That’s the considered view of RIAI vice-president and housing spokesman John O’Mahony, who has had many years experience in designing apartments as a director of OMP Architects. The anomaly has arisen because the latest set of standards clash with the minimum room sizes for kitchens, bedrooms and livingrooms laid down in another set of non-mandatory design guidelines issued by the Department of the Environment in 2007. In effect, the rooms specified then just won’t fit into the straitjacket now being specified for any category of apartment, whether it has one, two or three bedrooms.
The department’s response to this revelation has been predictable. Rather optimistically, it says that designers and developers “will opt to exceed the minimum requirements” of the latest guidelines – raising the issue of whether the Minister’s downsizing drive was really necessary. The department also suggested that storage could be accommodated in basement areas “so room and apartment size requirements could be met”, even though it would obviously be more expensive to excavate basements for such a purpose – and this could offset any construction savings elsewhere.
Evidence-based policy is crucial, in this as in so many other areas of public life. Without it, we are making things up as we go along. It is now incumbent on the Minister to publish whatever research his department has done to underpin the latest set of guidelines. Then the public would be in a better position to judge whether the new minimum standards are really fit for purpose.