This article is from page 52 of the 2005-10-04 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 52 JPG
WHILE some might feel it’s a classic case of ‘closing the stable door after the horse has bolted’, Clare County Council nonetheless last week issued the second edition of its ‘Clare Rural House Design Guide’, aimed at setting higher stand- ards for rural housing design.
According to the council’s planning office, these design guidelines will make it very clear that housing develop- ment in rural areas needs to be of a high quality and should complement rather than dominate its surroundings.
The new rural house design guide takes account of new national guide- lines on sustainable rural housing. Liam Conneally, Acting Director of Planning with the Council said “it is the princi- ple aim of the new House Design Guide to create a clearer understanding of the components of good house siting and design. Without a well informed public it 1s difficult to achieve the high qual- ity building design that the landscape of Clare deserves”.
Conneally commented that “the land- scape of County Clare is one of its greatest natural assets and the achieve- ment of a high quality built environ- ment in the county is important to its physical and economic well-being. We all share in the responsibility to achieve this end; local authorities, design and building professions, building industry, chents who commission buildings and the community itself,”
He emphasised “the new House De-
sign Guide recognises that contempo- rary design can develop interesting and attractive buildings that contribute to the landscape character of the county.”
He stated that “the guide does not pre- scribe design but draws to the attention of applicants, architects, builders and their agents the benefits of drawing on traditional design elements in the design of new buildings and to give special consideration to siting, materials and orientation in the design process.”
Responding to the launch of the De- sign Guide, Liscannor based architect Alex Russell commented, “in the ideal world the proper profession would do the proper job, and there wouldn’t be any need for planners to impose design parameters. However, in the context of Clare, where a broad range of people think they can design, and have had a go at doing so in the past, with disastrous consequence, the council obviously felt that the need had arisen to produce such parameters”’.
Russell views the guidelines as a “kind of rescue mission’, although he concluded, “for large swathes of the county, they arrive, after the event”.
Russell aired concerns that the guide- lines seemed to be misguided in that they are directed towards the visual look of a house and also relied on a cer- tain interpretation of traditional archi- tecture. He suggested, “it would be bet- ter to guide in terms of proportion and scale and the arrangement of the build- ing, rather then prescribing in terms of visual or aesthetic appearance”.
Paul Conway, partner at Leahy and Conway Architects, Ennis said, “ a number of rural counties have produced House Design Guides in recent years. Considering the extremely poor quality of siting and design of much of what was built throughout the countryside over the past few decades, these guides have, at least, been well intentioned, though some are more successful than others.
He continued, “The new Clare De- sign Guide is aimed at the ‘user’, whom I understand to mean the people who will live in the houses. It is a reason- ably good effort, with new sections on modern design, conservation and an improved section on sustainability, and most professionally qualified architects will welcome it. A lingering concern re- mains as to how it will be operated by the planning authority, with the danger that it will be used as a rule book where the ‘good’ examples illustrated are to be badly copied without reference to the particular siting or circumstances, and an innovative design is reyected because it does not match one of the approved models”.
Conneally, for his part encouraged members of the public and house plan designers to use the design guide when preparing planning applications for one-off houses in the county.”
The House Design Guide is available at libraries throughout the county and at the offices of Clare County Council, Unit 1, Westgate Retail Park, Kilrush Road, Ennis at a cost of Eurol5 per
fe) 94