At the Dublin residence above the existing mature trees to the south and east boundaries were protected from all building work. This allowed the maturity of the existing sites ecology to remain, while the building is sheltered from high levels of solar gain in the summer months, and open to sunlight in the long winters.

These buildings were submitted for planning in 2006, and received a Full Grant of Permission from An Bord Pleanála in 2007. Although the dwellings were designed 3 years ago they achieve an ‘A rating’ under the current Building Energy Rating (BER) scheme.

I don’t know how many RIAI Architects are blogging in Ireland – I would be interested to know of course – but as design is becoming more important in many comemrcial processes, I thought we at Wheeler Architectus might pitch in with a few thoughts.

Blogging doesn’t necessarily come naturally to those of us whose main form of communication is visual so expect to see pictures as much as words.

We’re drawing inspiration right now from some of the Irish blogs we see out there. In particular we’ve been looking at Bubblebrothers and Damien Mulley’s work as well as Conor O’Neill. I have also been sharing a few thoughts with Hayden Shaugnessy from GalleryICA on the value of design, and for that matter inspiring art, within the work place. In particular we are looking at the opportunities that are in the current environment to harness great design in to added creativity and productivity in the workforce. I’ll touch on that more specifically a little later as I get more posts up.