The Republic gets loose

Emmett has written the keynote essay in the Irish Issue of the Architect’s Journal which is published today. You can find out more about this edition here. An extract is printed below.

Building again (an extract from The Republic Gets Loose)

“If, in the end, these words are some search for a specific identity of Irish architecture, perhaps it is time to consider that no such thing exists, not definitively. To assert otherwise is to establish and then police boundaries, to exclude all potentially available forms of action, practice or individuals who have something to say or something to do in architecture. To demand otherwise is to seek to mine or extract what ‘the Irish do’, to replicate it at best, control and then deny it at worst.

Identity is a porous, socially determined thing.  Ireland has been restless, changing, rebuilding, even against its will, for centuries. Here, there should be no fear of the changes architecture faces nationally or internationally. It is perhaps those specific winds that have always supported the architecture on the island of Ireland, to breathe.”