To Not Design Is To Cost The Earth

Design creates culture.
Culture shapes values.
Values determine the future.
- Robert L. Peters

For twenty years the Irish Architecture Foundation (IAF) has borne witness to the transformative impact on communities that excellent design principles, processes and practices afford. At a time of significant social, spatial and climatic crises, so endemic they no longer need naming, IAF proposes that design thinking and action offer not barriers to progress, but innovative, radical and useful ways to advance our social and spatial lives on this island.
To Not Design Is To Cost The Earth is a temporary collection of architecture. This collection barely describes the range of work typically undertaken by architects on the island of Ireland today. From furniture to infrastructure, from our birth to death, from home to school, on the pitch or in the park, the world in which we live together is one that is first formed, and then sustained, by design. Gathering diverse evidence of architectural intelligence and influence in this manner is a collective act of resistance to emerging political narratives that would suggest our development priorities might not benefit from design, will not be made more joyful through aesthetics, or be more useful, accessible and sustainable by regulation and standards.

First shown in Dublin in 2025, this expanded London edition of drawings and photographs now includes a selection of recent films on architecture and place, commissioned by the IAF. Together, these films, drawings and photographs – featuring work by both public and private sector architects – champion and tell stories of the value of architecture and design in our everyday life. More than this however, this exhibition presents an opportunity; for architects and other publics to recognise the value of architecture should not only be measured economically. Indeed the value of this exhibition itself is to invite audiences to consider that failure to put architecture and design to work to meet the challenges people face today – may not necessarily save money, but is likely to cost the earth.