Architect Simon Walker is trying to save a Ballsbridge house designed by his late father, the RIAI gold medal winner Robin Walker of Scott Tallon Walker.
He has submitted an appeal to An Bord Pleanála in a bid to stop the redevelopment of number 58 Heytesbury Lane which he believes will "effectively destroy" the house.
The house, which he says is "an important part of our architectural heritage", is only one of two domestic commissions undertaken by Robin Walker.
The other is the 1960s-built O'Flaherty house in Kinsale, Co Cork, which is a protected structure and which earned him one of his two RIAI gold medals.
The house was commissioned by George Hetherington, a former managing director of Hely Thom printers.
Walker says the Ballsbridge house is "of equal quality" to the Kinsale house but is not as well known and has requested that it be included on the Register of Protected Structures. His application for inclusion on the register has been seconded by the Irish branch of Docomomo, the international organisation for the preservation of modernist architecture.
Developer John Callanan is looking to extend the front boundary of the house to align it with houses owned by him on either side.
He is proposing building an additional storey at first floor level providing four bedrooms, as well as internal layout changes and a balcony to the front, as well as a new glass atrium over the existing internal courtyard and the extension of the basement.
Architect Colin Galavan, whose company is behind the design for the proposed redevelopment, says the proposals are a "re-interpretation" of the original design and "seek to sensitively extend the property in line with the new context that exists on the lane. "Good conservation practice allows a structure to evolve and adapt to meet changing needs while retaining its particular significance."
Galavan says he admires the work of Scott Tallon Walker, where he worked for five years, "and in particular Robin Walker's contribution" and says the original house is "an excellent piece of architecture and is typical of its time". But he says the context of the buildings on Heytesbury Lane "has changed utterly" and it is appropriate that the building "should respond to this change and evolutionary growth".
The existing house is a two-storey 155sq m (1,668sq ft) house based on a Pompeiian house plan. Walker describes the flat roofed house as "a rare gem of a building, built in a long single storey pavilion. It has a front courtyard leading to the first suite of rooms. This in turn leads to an inner garden with a glazed roof and on to the bedroom suite and then a rear courtyard.
The house also features built-in furniture designed by Patrick Scott and Robin Walker and an original cork tile floor. It has a study room, livingroom, three bathrooms, a kitchen and a basement with a laundry and boiler room. "This is a matter of rescuing architectural heritage, even though it is only 33 years old," says Simon Walker, "The best architecture from the mid-to-late 20th century is rare enough in this country, so we should start to respect it before it has all been demolished."
He expects there will be other appellants to the planning permission and says support has been pledged by the "Irish Architecture Foundation, UCD School of Architecture,artist Pat Scott and architects Ronald Tallon, Shane de Blacam, Jim Pike and John Meagher, as well as TDs Ruairí Quinn and Ciarán Cuffe".
Robin Walker was educated at UCD and Illinois Institute of Technology and worked in the offices of both Le Corbusier in Paris and Mies van der Rohe in Chicago.
His career with Michael Scott spanned from the late 1940s to the 1970s and he worked on the famous Busáras commission. He won a RIAI triennial gold medal in the late 1960s for the restaurant building in UCD, Belfield.
