It has been a bad time for Liam Carroll, Dublin's most prolific builder. His company, Zoe Developments Ltd, has been denounced by a High Court judge as a "recidivist criminal" for breaching safety standards on its building sites and he himself has been described as "a disgrace to the construction industry".

This followed the death of James Masterson, a 24-year-old worker, when he fell from a height on Zoe's development sites at Charlotte Quay, near Ringsend, and the recitation of a lengthy catalogue of casualties and convictions for breaches of the health and safety code at this and other sites.

It is the kind of publicity Zoe and Mr Carroll could do without. The 47-year-old Dundalk-born mechanical engineer, who became the main engine of urban renewal in Dublin, has never given a formal press interview. Any of his quoted comments over the years have been gleaned from bearding him on sites.

Mr Carroll is not like other property developers. Not for him such badges of success as expensively tailored suits and top-of-the-range cars. Instead, he drives an ordinary Toyota and can usually be seen wearing a tie-less check shirt, pullover, anorak, jeans and Wellington boots, just like any of his workers.

Yet he has built more apartments in Dublin's inner city than all other developers combined; a running total of at least 3,000 units. He moved in from Fisherman's Wharf and Portobello Harbour to build dozens of schemes, usually in rundown areas where sites could be acquired cheaply.

Zoe has completed schemes on three sides of Mountjoy Square, on Arran Quay and Usher's Quay, on Bridge Street, Francis Street and Newmarket in the Liberties, on Brunswick Street, Dorset Street, Gardiner Street, Green Street and Bachelors Walk, and there are numerous others to come.

Most of these schemes are in designated urban renewal areas, where tax incentives are available both to owner-occupiers and investors. Many of Zoe's customers are first-time buyers gaining a foothold on the housing ladder, but more than half of the units would have been sold to investors for letting.

Notoriously, Mr Carroll did not employ a single qualified architect to design any of his earlier schemes; instead, he designed them himself and had a team of technicians "work up" the drawings. He once claimed that architects were "only interested in designing penthouses for fellows with Mercs".

Zoe's lack of competent architectural advice and his own devotion to meeting minimum standards are reflected in the quality of many of his schemes, particularly the earlier ones. Purchasers got only the bare minimum, usually shoebox-size single-bedroom apartments laid out on long, narrow, artificially lit corridors.

Balconies, where they were provided, were of the clip-on variety with just about enough room for a few pot plants. Storage space was non-existent, with even the upper level of a hot-press fully taken up by a heavy duty PVC cold water tank, and the "landscaped courtyards" merely car-parks with trees.

Kitchens were always - indeed, still are - small windowless galleys in alcoves tacked on to the end of living-rooms. Nearly every apartment was single-aspect, looking out only in one direction, even if it's to the north. And such amenities as roof terraces were unknown, at least until recently.

Portobello Harbour (1990) consists of two terraces of single-aspect town houses laid out back-to-back on the spine of the building. Those on the Grand Canal frontage, itself a neo-Palladian travesty, are four storeys high, with one room on each floor and a staircase so constricted that it has proved difficult to get double beds in.

Even Bachelors Walk, arguably the most important site in the heart of the city, got the Zoe treatment. Behind mock-Georgian facades, the company installed a scheme which consists of 334 units, of which 290 are single-bedroom units, all laid out along corridors which are 4 ft 2 in wide. Yet Zoe Developments never had much problem in off-loading such schemes through its longstanding agents, Hooke and MacDonald. Month after month they were able to claim another sales coup as scheme after scheme sold like hot cakes to a public largely uneducated in what to expect of apartment living in a European city.

It is only within the past two years, more than half a decade after he started out, that Liam Carroll has engaged architectural advice; first from a Malaysian architect, who designed Zoe's muscular scheme at Gardiner Street and Parnell Street, and later the firm of O'Mahony Pike, which is responsible for Charlotte Quay, which includes a 16-storey tower (following an appeal to An Bord Pleanala).

Zoe's standards have undoubtedly improved as a result of this architectural input. Mr Carroll has also had to comply with new guidelines for apartment design issued by the Department of the Environment in 1994. Though still minimal, these standards have at least introduced a more varied mix of unit types.

More recently, to widespread astonishment, Mr Carroll found himself on the jury for an architectural competition, co-sponsored by Zoe and Dublin Corporation, to find the best design for an apartment scheme on a site part-owned by each of them at Church Street and North King Street.

The winner was Grafton Architects, a highly respected practice run by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, which had won numerous awards over the years. Mr Carroll must have found it difficult to accommodate himself to their high architectural aspirations and is known to have referred to them as "the girls".

While this scheme is under appeal to An Bord Pleanala, Zoe is working on several others, including Brunswick Street, Cornmarket, Great Strand Street, Upper Abbey Street and Charlotte Quay. The sheer extent of the company's output must make the sites difficult to control, especially with its minimal management structure.

Liam Carroll buys all the sites personally rather than at arm's length through estate agents. Indeed, one of the secrets of his success is his prowess at site assembly, and he goes back again and again to reluctant vendors until he clinches a deal. He has also rarely had to contend with a refusal from Dublin Corporation's planners.

Yet he still seems to have little concept of being involved in the creation of a permanent legacy to the city. Though he has now overcome his suspicion of architects, it remains axiomatic that architects can only produce good architecture if they have good clients. Based on what it has built, Zoe cannot be regarded as a good client.

This week it emerged that the Irish Home Builders Association is expected to review Zoe's membership at its next meeting in December. Liam Carroll's nightmare must be that, if the decision goes the wrong way, Zoe could also be excluded from the Construction Industry Federation's guarantee scheme, making its apartments unsaleable.