1972 – Castlepark, Kinsale, Co. Cork

Conceived as a holiday village, Castlepark is a variation on the Irish vernacular village, located on a peninsula in Kinsale Harbour. Constructed between 1969 – 1972, there are five housing types creating a variety of spaces and clusters reminiscent of the traditional clachán clusters.

The first phase comprised 19 homes of five different house types, ranging from single-storey two-bedroom cottages to two-storey three-bedroom houses. These were grouped around three sheltered, gravelled courtyards of differing scale, while six more homes, also part of the original design, were built after. An extension to the village – 31 houses in two clusters – was designed in 1982 but not constructed.

Ruari Quinn, a former Irish government minister and architect, wrote in his review for the Architects’ Journal:

“He (Anderson) talks enthusiastically of his response to the site and the urban aesthetic of Kinsale. He is an intuitive designer who claims early on to have abandoned the tee-square and worked with models and sketches in an attempt to design a mixed housing cluster, which would evoke and draw from the traditions of the area.… Anderson’s design approach is a reversal of the conventional wisdom of the architecture schools, as he first formulates the solution and works back from there, linking the various elements together, achieving economies of design and construction by repeating details and alternating elements. It is an approach which is altogether at odds with the linear method of brief formulation, methodological analysis, etc., which we have heard so much of and which seems to have produced soulless architecture.”
Architects’ Journal, 30 October 1974

The development was awarded a European Architectural Heritage Year Award in 1975, and a ‘Highly Commended’ in the RIAI Housing Awards. According to Shane O’Toole “After it was passed over for the 1971-73 RIAI Silver Medal for Housing in favour of Ronnie Tallon’s own exquisite home in Foxrock, the blowback was so fierce that the Institute decided no individual house would ever again be eligible for the Housing Medal.”