Galway City Council has an exciting opportunity for the role of Assistant Architect on the basis of a 2 year specific purpose contract and is inviting applications from suitably qualified persons for the above competition.

The Assistant Architect works as part of a multi-disciplinary team within Galway City Council’s Planning and Housing Directorates to deliver key local authority services which include social housing, recreation and amenity provision and community development. 

The role requires a clear knowledge and understanding of local authority services and its key stakeholders and relationships, local government structures and its democratic role and mandate, current local government issues, future trends and strategic direction of the sector, management and implementation of change, and Public Works Contracts.

The Assistant Architect shall operate under the direction of and report to the Senior Executive Architect to which they are assigned.  They must undertake those duties as assigned to them by their Supervisor.

Notwithstanding the requirements of the post successful applicants may be assigned to any service area/role within the Local Authority at an analogous level by the Chief Executive at any time.
 

The main objective of the Architect’s department is the delivery of Housing. We do this in two ways; in house design and working with consultants (Coady’s, O'Briain Beary, TAKA, Hall McKnight to name a few). At present we have three major housing developments on the boards along with a new homeless centre and smaller infill projects.
We also collaborate with other departments within the City Council to work other types of projects including the Conservation/Heritage (The Three Castle Project) and Economic Development (Parklets).
The Galway Charter/Infill Strategy:

A major focus of the Architects Department is the delivery of the NDP’s 50% projected increase of population over the next 20 years, half of which should be on brownfield development. That means that we should be planning housing in the existing footprint of the city for 20,000 people over the next 18 years. The Architects department have led on the discussion of an Infill Strategy which would look at the potential for mapping the city to achieve compact growth. We are currently working with the Academy of Urbanism, RIAI Urban Design Committee and the Irish Cities 2070.

Galway Charter/Irish Cities 2070

A key background for the urban block analysis is the work done to date that sees that the expansion (Urban Sprawl) of Galway is not a sustainable pattern of development. The key role of the work is to make vacancy assessments of every block and to create ‘mini-plans’ to understand the building capacity of the city as a whole. If it is possible to understand the latent existing development potential of the city there is an argument for more focus on brownfield an town centre first developments.