'As easy as plugging in a fire' Modernity, Morality and the Mespil

Described as the ‘most modern block of flats in Dublin’ and the biggest such scheme in Ireland at its completion, the architecture of the Mespil apartments enjoys a complex history of social innovation and domestic mechanisation. Set within a sylvan landscape inherited from an eighteenth-century mansion on a prominent canal-side side at the edges of Dublin’s central city, it was developed in its entirety by Irish Estates – a branch of the Irish Life assurance company – and realised in two distinct phases by two different architects: W. J. Convery and later Tyndall Hogan Associates. The Mespil was designed to accommodate a new urban white-collar workforce of mobile singletons and couples mainly in one-bedroom apartments and bedsits with temporary tenures. This chapter investigates how, in the socially conservative and religious Ireland of the 1950s, the Mespil represented a radical break from cultural and architectural norms.