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| Part L Revealed |
Since the announcement last September by the Minister for the Environment of substantial improvements to be made under Part L of the Building Regulations, speculation has been rife in the construction industry about what the details of the updated regulations would entail. Jeff Colley examines some of the key parts of a regulatory improvement that will help the Irish construction industry to modernise and meet the demands of a rapidly changing world.
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Official magazine of Easca  |
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Case Studies
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Page 1 of 8
With the building of a new house in Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland
has become only the third country to feature the work of Frank Lloyd
Wright. Jason Walsh
visited the site to see if Wright's designs might just represent the
kind of thinking required in today's energy-conscious buildings.
Tucked-away in the middle of the county Wicklow town of Greystones is a newly built house of unusual architectural significance. Built in 2007, the house, a remarkable two storey modernist affair, was completed a full forty eight years after the death of its designer, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Born in Wisconsin in the United States in 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright is surely one of the best-known historical figures in architecture. Now seen as America's greatest architect and a titan of modernism, it's easy to forget that Wright had a turbulent career, coming in and out of favour with blistering intensity.
Like his European modernist contemporaries Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Wright is an architect not only revered by his profession but also well-known to the public at large. Le Corbusier's work has come in for some criticism for its alleged 'dehumanising' properties – Wright's greatest contribution appears to have been to have combined the clean, rationality and democratic aspirations of modernism with architecture of a form and on a scale that humans can relate to. Unlike Le Corbusier, no-one ever describes a Wright building as totalitarian.
In part it appears to have been his humanism that appealed to Marc Coleman, the proud owner of Europe's only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building, completed in late 2007 in Greystones: "It was so futuristic but also so human. Frank Lloyd Wright is the only deceased architect whose work people are still building," he explains.
Coleman's house, the first Wright design to be built outside of his native United States and Japan, is a late Wright design, dating from the final year of the architect's life, 1959. It was commissioned for Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Wieland and due to be built in Maryland, USA but never was due to the Wieland's financial problems.
"The drawings sat there until I came along," says Coleman. "Wright's work is site specific and our site was almost identical, topographically speaking."
This is an important point. As an architect Frank Lloyd Wright didn't work on the 'cookie-cutter' principle banging out endless repetitions of his work without regard to their inhabitants needs or their location and site. Instead, Wright's work is, at least in part, defined by its site specific nature.
Not only that, but Wright's work is administered by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, a body that is fiercely protective of the architect's work and legacy.
Happenstance and good fortune played a central role in Coleman's choice of the design for his house. He contacted the foundation and explained that he wanted to build a Frank Lloyd Wright house and discussed the available options. Coleman says the foundation had a total of 380 un-built designs: "They trawled through them and offered us four. Three required extensive modification but this one was a perfect fit."
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