ABSTRACT
Throughout the twentieth century, the Irish public and authorities championed the individual single-family house, or cottage. Indeed, its proliferation at Dublin’s edges is surely the dominant and most compelling aspect of this history. But there are other issues and typologies to consider, namely the inextricable link between Irish housing development and an enduring slum-clearance project, and the appearance and disappearance – like an ebb and flow – of remarkable flat blocks across Dublin’s streetscape from the early 1930s until the mid-1970s. These flat blocks might be understood as ‘the other’, and therefore the remarkable adjective becomes justifiable. They stand in contrast to their cottage counterparts: where the flat block was urban, the cottage was suburban; where the flat block was formally modernist, the cottage terrace was formally traditional.
