T hose closest to the original school of modernism — the Taliesin West academy founded by Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona in the 1930s — don’t seem to sense the irony.

The world-famous college is close to broke, its landmark buildings are crumbling and its critics say the modernist movement itself is in need of an upgrade. They accuse the orthodox modernists of not being, er, modern enough.

Modernism, which emerged during the first world war, has been defined as the deliberate pursuit of new and modern methods in architecture.

As the debate rages between the older and the emerging schools of design, one American newpaper has defined the battle as The Roundheads v the Cavaliers.

However, in Ireland at least, orthodox modernism as prescribed by Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and various practitioners of the Bauhaus movement, is in the ascendancy.

As an architectural pool, Ireland traditionally has been a backwater with little one-off significant home design taking place. Indeed most of those who made an international reputation for themselves had to leave first, with only a few notable exceptions.

But the new generation of designers now leading a revival in one-off architect-designed homes at home are almost all orthodox modernists with straight lines, cubes and boxes on the brain.

The winners in this year’s Architecture Association of Ireland (AAI) Awards prove the point.

The overall prizewinner is a cube-shaped minimalist affair conceived by Dermot Boyd of the Boyd Cody practice, one of a handful of practices making an impression with the puritan principles of what you could term good old-fashioned modernism.

The house is constructed on a mews site at the back of his client’s period property at Alma Road in Monkstown. In fact the client, who remains anonymous, gets two boxes for her money because it is basically a timber cube within a brick one.

Simplicity itself, the design faciltates a supreme economy of space, with optimum natural lighting provided by a series of large and expertly placed windows.

“The client has been living in a big old period house and wanted something smaller,” Boyd says.

“She gave me a pretty open brief but wanted it to be well insulated, full of light and to be warm.”

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