Can there be anyone, anywhere in Europe, in a better position to pursue a major retrofitting programme of existing council housing stock than Ali Grehan?Certainly, as the city architect at Dublin City Council - Ireland's largest landlord with 24,000 homes on its books - she knows the authority is better placed than any developer or housing association in the country to roll out a mass retrofit initiative. Grehan is one of a rare and dying breed of local authority chief architects as well as being an ambassador for the World Green Building Councils' #BuildingLife campaign, and her vision for revamping Dublin's ageing council housing is bold.She also wants to go big, building boundary-pushing retrofit schemes that have more impact than easy-to-overlook, pocket-sized prototyping. She wants to 'ramp up' retrofit. 'I'd really like us, in city architects, to lead on a large retrofit project,' she says. 'It would be good to do something at serious scale, something high profile and very visible, that we could all learn from.'
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