Town Centre Living / DHLGH and RIAI Housing Competitions
Castleblayney | Kildare | Roscrea | Sligo

The RIAI is delighted to partner with DHLGH to run the Town Centre Living competitions. The competitions seek to identify and promote innovative design solutions for housing within town centres to encourage town-centre living. The competitions align with the Government’s Housing For All and Town Centre First policies.

Following an open invitation to, and close liaison with Local Authorities, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage (DHLGH) has selected four town centre sites in Castleblayney, Kildare, Roscrea and Sligo.

On behalf of the DHLGH, the RIAI is running four separate competitions for these towns concurrently. It is intended that the winning practices will be awarded the design commission and that the selected sites would be progressed as real social housing projects by the various local authorities, who will appoint the winning design team, to progress through the pre-construction process to construction and delivery, funded by DHLGH.

Prior to registration, it is recommended to read the Competition Regulations and the individual Competition Packs for each site. These can be downloaded from the grid below.

Important Update 3 March 2023

Please note that the Competition Packs have been updated on 3 March 2023 for Castleblayney, Kildare and Sligo to include additional information provided in response to questions received. To access this information, please download the Competition Packs again. There are no additional files for Roscrea other than the Questions & Answers.

Questions and Answers: General Competitions Questions & Answers as well as Questions & Answers for each of the four towns have been published today 3 March 2023 in the folder: Competitions Questions & Answers below. Please download and read these important PDF documents.

The competition is intended to generate design innovation in town centre housing. In order to promote diversity in the response and award of contracts, each entrant (i.e. Architect/Practice) may submit entries for a maximum of any two of the four competition sites.  

Changes to Competition Dates

These date changes are due a technical issue which caused a delay to publication of the advertisement of the etenders Design Contest Notice for the Castleblayney site by Monaghan County Council. Rather than just extending the period for submission of questions for Castleblaney, the DHLGH and RIAI have agreed to extend the period for submission of questions for all four competitions to keep the overall competition programme coherent. This decision has been made to allow for all entrants interested in entering the architectural design competition having an opportunity to submit questions and to be in receipt of responses to those questions within 4 weeks of the submission deadline.  

The new dates therefore are:

Key Dates

27 January – Competition launch / registration commences
24 February – Submission of questions
3 March – Responses to questions are circulated
24 March – Registration closes (5pm)
31 March (12 noon) – Submission of entries       

Competition Juries

Each competition is adjudicated by a separate competition jury and we are delighted to confirm the following Architects as the four Chairs of the Juries:
 

• Castleblayney - Valerie Mulvin FRIAI (Chair)
• Kildare - Miriam Delaney MRIAI (Chair)
• Roscrea - Orla Murphy MRIAI (Chair)
• Sligo - Derek Tynan FRIAI (Chair)