ABSTRACT
The Coombe North housing scheme in Dublin’s Liberties by Delany MacVeigh Pike Architects represents a critical moment in the evolution of social housing in Ireland, demonstrating a movement away from a modernist tabula rasa approach to city planning, towards a contextual response to existing urban fabric, culture and material. This chapter sets the political and architectural context of Dublin in the 1960s and 1970s, still dominated by road infrastructure as the primary driver of urbanism, but one challenged by nascent community activism. It describes the project’s genesis and development, led by the Liberties Association and posits the Coombe North as a uniquely local conduit for international thinking on social housing, influenced by the LCC, Team X and Townscape, while simultaneously inflected by a careful reading of the local condition.
