Nathalie Weadick, who runs the Irish Architecture Foundation (IAF), is so thrilled by the success of its second Open House event last month that she's hoping to extend it to Cork and Limerick next autumn.

Describing it as "the biggest architectural event in Ireland", she says Open House has given people an opportunity to "re-engage with the urban fabric that maybe we otherwise take for granted", and even excited their imagination about the possibilities of architecture.

Architect Alan Mee, who acted as one of the guides for Gerry Cahill's "Back to the Street" tour of the Liberties, says it was amazing to see how this Open House event "changed how people felt about architecture" simply by looking at things in a different way.

Weadick sees this as a new "cultural self-confidence", and says the IAF wants to give everyone a chance to consider the built environment - "to look at it, talk about and, by demanding better standards, improve it" - especially with so much still being built everywhere you look.

With the Minister for the Environment John Gormley commissioning a review of the Government's architecture policy, the IAF is aiming to inspire further public engagement with the subject by staging a series of debates, under the working title "Debate the State" - or maybe the state we're in.