Architects were urged to use their skills in a ' braver, more daring and progressive way' at the recent Architectural Association of Ireland (AAI) Awards. Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, reports

Irish architects, according to Dominic Stevens, "have forgotten the importance of their craft, and have become window dressers, designers and style merchants . . . making chic bits of architectural jewellery to adorn the back gardens of the bourgeoisie".

Stevens, who turned his back on Dublin when he relocated his practice to Co Leitrim in 1999, appealed to his fellow architects to use their skills in a "braver, more daring and progressive way" and seek to make a real difference at a time in Ireland when so much is being built.

He makes this provocative plea in the lavishly illustrated catalogue for this year's Architectural Association of Ireland (AAI) Awards exhibition, which features quite a few cool, smart domestic extensions and conversions for clients with firmly upward social aspirations.

Stevens was on the jury that selected the winners, and he saw it as "appropriate at the moment in this very overworked, rushed, overblown economy of ours" that the AAI's Downes Medal should go to a particularly special project which offers "a retreat from all that".

Poustinia, at the Rosminian House of Prayer near Slievenamon in Co Tipperary, was "the immediate favourite of the jury", according to Slovenian architectural critic Andrej Hrausky, not only for its architecture, but also its "symbolic answer to frenetic living".

Designed by Bates Maher Architects, Poustinia is a series of self-contained cabins set aside for silence and prayer. "It's a perfect project to get as an architect - a beautiful place, an attractive brief, and then, of course, you can begin to make something of it", Hrausky said.

Stevens thought the way it was made was "lovely" - a word not often used by architects. "It's doing exactly what it should. And because it's this contemplative space, the minimalism, the language that it uses, makes sense. It speaks of stillness, it speaks of contemplation."

Ciarán Benson, the jury's distinguished non-architect, observed: "I think it achieves architecturally to a superb degree what it wants to achieve psychically, which is that combination of self-forgetfulness and serenity, while at the same time being part of an ambient world."

As for the award-winning houses in this year's exhibition, he saw them as models derived from international best practice "being actualised in our turbulent, contemporary national building frenzy [ amid] concerns about rapid and irrevocable landscape destruction".

Benson, a former chairman of the Arts Council, pulled no punches. "The implications of planning failure for the diminishing quality of Irish life in the coming 10 years - much of the responsibility for which is due to the venality and/or short-term focus of politicians - are sobering."

He referred, in particular, to the "avalanche of one-off housing" in the countryside that it is producing a "rather discordant folk architecture" with "à la carte" designs. "The result is often jarring, ugly, disfiguring, and actively subtracting from the look and 'feel' of the locality."

But Hrausky only saw the high-quality, architect-designed private houses entered for AAI awards, saying these seemed to suggest that there was a "special know-how in Ireland which enables them to be built" because "you rarely find anything similar in central Europe".

Carmé Piños, the other foreign assessor, found that even domestic extensions "tend to be treated with great dignity and taste, while managing to avoid the trap of excessive detail that architects all too often fall into whenever they are faced with a limited space".

Boyd Cody Architects' radical renovation and extension of a small semi-detached house at Sorrento Heights in Dalkey was praised by Benson as "disciplined, spare and elegant", though Stevens said he was "kind of sick today of looking at bourgeois, expensive, minimal houses".

"What makes this house work, for me, is the fact that its living spaces are on a piano nobile. The bedrooms achieve a privacy by being downstairs, and then you come upstairs to the living spaces that can be open and have these amazing views out over the treetops."

Boyd Cody also got a special mention for their infill house in Rathmines, though the jury was dubious about the huge window of the main bedroom, concluding that the clients were exhibitionists - a reversal of The Valley of the Squinting Windows, as Benson put it.

ODOS Architects won an award for another corner infill house, in Stoneybatter. Behind its dark chocolate-coloured walls and timber cladding lies a modern home full of light and space. "It's quite magical, this thing that glows at the end of the street," as Stevens said.

"There's a magic in this building in that it's so blank outside, and that makes the inside space very private." But Hrausky wondered about the colour. "Do you have black chocolate? Or is it like a chocolate dark brown?", he asked. Piños said: "It's 90 per cent cocoa. Almost black."

Donaghy and Dimond Architects showed what can be done to turn a cramped and run-down "living over the shop" building on Francis Street into a comfortable family home, over a design studio at street level, by extending upwards by one floor and thrusting out the bathroom.

According to Benson, it demonstrated "what's possible for relatively small budgets in the centre of often difficult urban areas, to make something very interesting, lovely to be in, and also good to look at from outside" - even for neighbours wary of domestic extensions.

"We've seen so many tight situations of trying to fit these things into corners, when in fact there's always the roof up there you can add on to", Stevens said. Hrausky agreed, saying architects must always be more innovative in finding a solution with little money available.

The smallest of the award-winning projects was a little library, with a floor area of just 8.5sq m (91sq ft), tacked on to the back of a house on South Circular Road by Noel J Brady. "I love the feeling that went into making this. I would like to stay here!", Piños exclaimed.

Benson was also very impressed. "If you think of the way Dublin is going, a lot of young people are trying to get houses like this, but they're very constraining, space-wise. So they're open to doing something quite adventurous, and I think this works extremely well."

Much more startling, and immensely more expensive, is Niall McLaughlin's total revamp of a Victorian house in Crouch End, London, for its art collecting owners: "It was to appear, from inside and outside, that a very delicate new house had been built inside the old one. On opening the stained-glass front door, the surprise is palpable: an arrangement of linked vertical spaces stretches in a spiral from the top of the house to the bottom. From here you are taken on a journey through the main spaces, viewing the art from many different directions."

As Hrausky observed, "it's a modern house hidden in this Victorian house", made to display modern art to best advantage. Piños was more dubious.

"Rather than preserve this house like an empty house, it would be better to make another house in another place," she said.

Two award-winners were institutional projects - Grafton Architects' latest extension to the 19th century Parson's Building for Trinity College's Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, and McCullough Mulvin's new lecture theatre for Engineers Ireland in Clyde Road.

Grafton's brief was to make sense of a "confluence of disparate buildings" as well as provide additional research and teaching spaces. New was kept separate from old but connected at different levels, while a podium "stretches, bends and folds" to rationalise the site.

"It's doing something very complex, and that's why it looks complicated, but actually once you understand it, it's quite clear," Stevens commented.

It's "making a building that wraps around an existing building", andthe whole area is tied together by the podium.

McCullough Mulvin faced a different sort of problem in Clyde Road. Their original (1988) mews lecture hall no longer met the demands of engineers thirsting for further education, so a subterranean tiered lecture theatre was built in the garden, beneath a planted roof.

"It's eaten out of the earth like an amphitheatre, and then the real garden folds above it," Stevens said. Benson thought it was "amazing" while Piños saw "a lot of humour in it, and in the relationship with the old house. This building is like a crouching animal in the back garden."

The jury was less impressed by Tom dePaor's pair of half-buried houses in the Liberties, suggesting that they were probably uninhabitable. Another "special mention" went to FKL Architects for their landmark apartment towers at the Dolphin's Barn end of Cork Street.

More plaudits went to Gerard Maccreanor's block of 63 "live/work" units in the Ijburg development zone on the eastern fringe of Amsterdam. Dominic Stevens said it all: "I would love if this apartment scheme was in Dublin. It would lift the standard of everything."