There are over 40,000 protected structures in Ireland, commonly known as listed buildings.<\/p>\n
Several have fallen into disrepair and many others that are in state ownership are proving challenging and expensive to modernise and retrofit to today’s climate standards.<\/p>\n
Recently, the HSE decided to transfer the James Weir building in Dublin 8 to the Land Development Agency.<\/p>\n
On RT\u00c9’s Behind the Story, Assistant Professor of Architecture in UCD Orla Hegarty explained why buildings are protected.<\/p>\n
“People might think it\u2019s just about the architecture or the architectural quality of the building, but actually the reasons for protecting them are very, very broad,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It also includes things that have an artistic value, cultural value [or] scientific \u2013 so it might be a building where something was invented.<\/p>\n
“Once it\u2019s either a proposed protected structure, or a protected structure, it has that protection that you can\u2019t endanger the building \u2013 or do things without permission,” Prof Hegarty added.<\/p>\n
She said that if people ignore a notice from the local authority about preventing a structure from becoming endangered, the authority can take action.<\/p>\n
“If they see a building that\u2019s in danger or deteriorating, and they can\u2019t find the owner or the owner\u2019s not acting, the local authority have powers to actually go in and do repairs on that building and access the site – and then look for the owner to pay for it afterwards,” she explained.<\/p>\n
Prof Hegarty said there can be a misunderstanding about what can be done with a protected structure.<\/p>\n
“The level of protection doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t do anything with this building, it just means you have to pause before you do anything \u2013 and you have to think carefully about what you do,” she said.<\/p>\n
Prof Hegarty believes that the way new buildings are considered is changing.<\/p>\n
“They\u2019re financial assets now,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I suppose historically buildings were built to serve a purpose \u2013 people needed somewhere for nurses to live or people needed housing \u2013 and now we see a lot of speculation in property.<\/p>\n
“The value of the asset has a different value than the use of it, we\u2019ve seen a huge amount of replacement of office buildings around Dublin \u2013 they\u2019re all looking very international, very glassy.<\/p>\n
“But the key thing with them\u2026. is office buildings designed with really large open floor plates are really hard to convert (to apartments),” Prof Hegarty added.<\/p>\n
You can listen to Behind the Story on the RT\u00c9 Radio Player. You can also find episodes on Apple here<\/a>, or on Spotify here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are over 40,000 protected structures in Ireland, commonly known as listed buildings. Several have fallen into disrepair…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-581756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}