Blog – Page 2 – Irish Architectural Archive

Victoria/Ayesha/Manderley: a ‘House and Home’ blog

Victoria Castle, c. 1915

Victoria Castle is situated on a rocky outcrop overlooking Killiney Bay, Co. Dublin, ‘as commanding and beautiful’ a site, according to the Dublin Penny Journal of 1841, ‘as could possibly be imagined’. Probably designed by architect Sandham Symes for Robert Warren, a property speculator who had made his fortune by selling parcels of land to the then emerging railway, it sits alongside Warren’s other developments of Mount Eagle and Killiney Castle.

Failed speculation prompted the sale of Victoria Castle, and most of Warren’s other interests in Killiney, in 1870. Humphrey Lloyd, Provost of Trinity College, acquired the house at the cost of £5,000, becoming the first of a succession of owners over the next fifty years.

Ralph Henry Byrne, W.H. Byrne and Son, Elevation of Entrance Court Façade, Victoria Castle, 1927

In the mid-1920s an unexplained and calamitous fire gutted the house. A watercoloured dyeline elevation in the Irish Architectural Archive is evidence of the building’s restoration in 1927-8, a project undertaken by its new owner, the wealthy Sir Thomas Talbot Power of the whiskey dynasty. He availed of the architectural services of Ralph Byrne of W. H. Byrne and Son, a prolific office best known for its extensive ecclesiastical portfolio. The cost of the restoration amounted to £5,540 and the works were completed in six months by contractor G. and T. Crampton. A comparison of this elevation of the courtyard façade with photographs of the castle prior to 1928 shows that while Byrne retained much of the character of Syme’s castellated Dalkey-granite pile, he simplified its appearance and modified its tower.

Poster for 1925 film adaptation of ‘She’

After the restoration, the house acquired a new name, Ayesha Castle, after H. Rider Haggard’s sorceress, the original ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’, who rises from the flames in his popular 1887 novel She. It remains in private ownership, and was renamed Manderley in 1997.

Aisling Dunne,
IAA

Edgeworthstown House, Co. Longford: a ‘House and Home’ blog

Edgeworthstown by Lucy Edgeworth, 1825

Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Anglo Irish politician, writer and inventor, inherited the estate of Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, in 1782. He moved with his family from England and, in the words of his eldest daughter, the novelist Maria Edgeworth, ‘the very day after his arrival he set to work and continued perseveringly, fencing, draining, levelling, planting’ to improve the demesne. Over a course of years from 1782 to 1812 Edgeworth also made extensive alterations and additions to the old house, according to his own designs, in order to make a comfortable residence for a large family. (He married four times and fathered twenty-two children.) The remodelling was extensive and resulted in a house with a particularly idiosyncratic exterior.

Edgeworthstown, c. 1880

The Archive holds a small collection of material relating to Edgeworthstown, including a number of watercolours which are attributed to Lucy Edgeworth, a daughter of Richard’s fourth wife Frances Anne née Beaufort, and his twentieth child. One watercolour view shows the south front of the house as it stood in 1825, viewed through the by-now well established trees. A central veranda is clad in a creeper which also covers the three bay extension to the right, added in 1807 to create additional space for the library.

The Library, Edgeworthstown, c. 1880

A second drawing is a pen and ink sketch entitled ‘Maria’s room’; it is inscribed on the rear as being of ‘Maria in bed, face behind curtain, Harriet [Lucy’s full- and Maria’s half-sister] reading’. This sketch is one of a small set of interior scenes which were apparently made by Lucy shortly before she left the family home to be married in 1843. It is an intimate study providing an insight into the very private space of the by then seventy-five year-old much-published novelist.

Maria’s room by Lucy Edgeworth, 1846

Maria’s bedroom was famously small. Even after her father extended it in 1812 by the addition of an oriel window, the room measured a mere ten feet square. The addition of the new window ‘gave great additional light and cheerfulness’.

Edgeworthstown, c. 1860

Unfortunately, however, it was not one of Richard’s better designs: badly built, the window fell out before the end of the century.

It is remarkable to see in Lucy’s drawing the amount of furniture which could be accommodated in the small space: the capacious tent bed, the very tall tallboy, at least two chairs, and what appears to be a washstand. The sketch also includes tantalising items we cannot fully identify such as the object in front of the washstand: is it an embroidery or tapestry screen, or could it be some novel creation of Maria’s ever inventing father?

Dr Eve McAulay,
IAA

A pleasure palace for an archbishop; a ‘House and Home’ blog

House and Home is the title of the Irish Architectural Archive’s fortieth anniversary exhibition and a short series of blogs, beginning with this one, will explore some of the material in this exhibition.

One of the most curious items in the entire Archive collection is an engraved topographical view ostensibly showing a grand Irish house – the maison de plaisance, no less, of the Archbishop of the Province of Munster.

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Although the imprint information is missing from this copy of the engraving, it was originally produced in Paris between c. 1750 and c. 1770 by Jacques (or James) Gabriel Huquier. Known as Huquier fils, he was an engraver, print dealer, wallpaper manufacturer and portrait painter. It is an example of a vue d’optique, a genre of engraving intended to provide the illusion of depth when viewed through a device known as a zograscope or diagonal mirror, hence the image was printed in reverse. Huquier fils produced a number of topographical vues d’optique depicting buildings in Austria, England, France, Germany, Spain and further afield. Most vues d’optique were brightly tinted after printing to enhance depth perception, although this example was not.

Beyond these facts, matters are less straightforward. From the steeple of the church in the background to the arcade supporting the terrace with its extensive formal gardens, to the mansard-roofed palace building itself, nothing in this view is remotely Irish.

What of the Archeveque de Munster? There is not now, nor has there ever been, an Irish cleric with the title ‘Archbishop of Munster’. The closest equivalent is the Archbishop of Cashel and Emly who from 1754 to 1779 was Michael Cox, builder of Castletown Cox, Co. Kilkenny. It would be nice to think that this is a notional French fantasy of what Cox’s proposed new house might look like. But no, a copy of the engraving in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France bears its true title: Vue Perspective du Palais Royal de la Sarcuela, maison de plaisance du Roy d’Espagne.

It is in fact a copy of a 1665 engraving by Louis Meunier of the Zarzuela Palace, Madrid.

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When, where, why, and by whom was the engraving reprinted with a new title and an Irish location? Answers to those questions remain to be found.

Colum O’Riordan,
CEO,
Irish Architectural Archive

Thomas J. Westropp and his Dublin 1916 photographs

Dr Rachel Moss is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin, former board member of the Irish Architectural Archive and current President of the Royal Society of the Antiquaries of Ireland. In February 2016 she graciously agreed to open an exhibition of photographs of Dublin after the 1916 Rising taken by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp who had held the RSAI Presidency in 1916. This blog is based on her remarks on that occasion.

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A civic engineer by training, Thomas Westropp had fostered an interest in architecture from an early age growing up in Limerick. From 1888 (at the age of 28) he was a regular contributor of articles on Irish antiquities to a variety of journals, and these were invariably densely illustrated with his own sketches and photographs. Like many of the antiquarians of his generation, he was keenly aware of the high rate of attrition of ancient buildings in Ireland, and was particularly keen on the use of photography as a method of accurately recording structures that were in danger of being lost. He saw his antiquarian work not only as historical enquiry, but a race against destruction, wrought, as he identified it in the late 19th century, by the ‘deadly triad’ of the road maker, rabbit catcher and treasure hunter.

Typical page from one fo the IAA Westropp albums

With this in mind he took on the role of curator of the Antiquaries photographic survey from 1894, encouraging members to deposit photographs made using permanent processes that recorded the field monuments of Ireland. By the 1910s, there was a healthy flow of dolmens, crosses and ruined churches and castles streaming into the Society’s collections. The photographic skills of members were not just reserved for pre-historic and medieval buildings. Several active members participated in the recording of Georgian Dublin under the auspices of the Georgian Society, with Ephraim McDowell Cosgrave later depositing his photographs from that survey with the Antiquaries. And the photographic skills of Council member John Cooke were applied to the documentation of housing conditions in the Dublin tenements following the Church Street collapse in 1913, images that were also to join the collection curated by Westropp.

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With this track record for documenting the vanishing past, one might expect that Westropp’s post-Rising photographs were taken at the behest of the Society. After all, both in terms of property and personnel it was far from aloof of the events of Easter week. The Society only purchased 63 Merrion square in July 1917, and in April 1916, their premises and collections were located at no. 6 Stephen’s Green (now Top Shop), neatly sandwiched between the action in the College of Surgeons and the Shelbourne Hotel, where over 100 British soldiers had been stationed during the rising. Westropp had only taken over as President in January of 1916, stepping into the shoes of Count George Noble Plunkett, father of Joseph Plunket who was executed on 4th May, just two weeks prior to Westropp’s photographic excursion. Among the list of new members admitted to the Society at its January 1916 meeting was a certain Thomas McDonagh, and the Hon. Gen. Sec. at the time was Charles Mc Neill, older brother of Eoin McNeill, (the latter who himself would become President of the Society in 1937).

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Yet apparently, the Society was not directly involved in the commissioning of these images. Copies of the photos were deposited with the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College, the Royal Irish Academy and were contained within the albums now in the Irish Architectural Archive, but none made it to the Antiquaries photographic collection. Indeed reading through the correspondence and minute books in the months surrounding April 1916, there is almost an unnatural silence regarding what were referred to as the ‘gloomy and critical’ times in the Society’s journal of that year. Instead, the principal preoccupations that emerge around the time are arrangements for the summer excursion to Limerick. Thus there are endless letters penned by Charles McNeill on what kind of tea the group might expect to get for a shilling a head in the Dunraven Arms and various other hostelries in the area, and a good deal of toing and froing on the number of chara-bangs that were going to be required. There is also a request to the inspector general of the RIC for permission for the group to travel to Limerick. This was granted on condition that no photographs or sketches were made of Limerick castle, or any part of the Shannon estuary south of this.

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In his earlier writing on the antiquities of the Clare, Westropp had expressed his exasperation at the emerging nationalist movement and the lack of importance that it placed on the past. Writing on the prehistoric remains of the Burren he commented ‘so little does the professed patriotism of the men of Clare bear fruit in the care for or preservation of their country’s past, that since I began my work on the county, the ruin of its remains is alarming’. He was also critical of the Romantic view taken by some nationalists who ‘glorying in their country’s early legends’, resented the work of more critical ‘workers’. It was by hard work, Westropp asserted, not by ‘exaggerating things that never happened’ that the ancient glories of Ireland would be secured.

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Sticking to the truth, the facts, was something for which he received criticism in his writing, the author of his obituary commenting on the dense forest of facts that confronted the reader of his articles. But so it was, in the impartial spirit of the archaeologist, rather than the critical liberal unionist, that he took the Dublin photos. The short captions that accompany the photographic prints convey no sense of Westropp’s feelings about what had happened to the centre of his adopted city. He points out the flag staff of republicans on the corner of the GPO, but otherwise information is limited to the location at which the photograph was taken. This is the presentation of the facts. The rights and wrongs of what had happened was left to the individual viewer’s own interpretation.

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It is only in a footnote, added to his presidential address of January 1916, that Westropp alludes to the ‘utmost risk’ to which ‘our libraries, museum and records office’ had been exposed during the week’s warfare in Dublin. Perhaps it was for this reason that he distributed copies of these important photographs to a number of repositories around the city. Either way, we owe him a debt of gratitude for his endeavours.

Dr Rachel Moss

February 2016

Finian Tallan

Spine, The Architects Companion, 1908

Donations of material to the Architectural Archive are always welcome. The Archive collects, preserves, and makes available to the public, material of every kind relating to Irish architecture. A donation can comprise anything from a single book, letter, drawing or photo to the entire archive of an international architectural practice.

We were delighted recently to receive a donation by Mr John Lyons of Dublin of documents relating to his grand uncle Finian H. Tallan, architect, of Drogheda, who died in 1908. As Mr Lyons described to us, this professional material was put in a chest and subsequently lay undisturbed for almost 100 years. The collection chiefly comprises books, such as trade catalogues and text books, but also includes a damp-press letter-book (an early means of duplication of documents), and a professional ‘scribbling diary’ for 1904.

Cordelova catalogue, c. 1900

Finian (Finnie) Tallan was born on the 9th January 1881, one of six children of Thomas Tallan a town councillor of Drogheda. His sudden and early death at the age of just 27 cut short what looked set to be a diligent life and promising career.

An architect’s library could – by necessity – be quite sizeable. Tallan’s collection of books is no exception. The surviving volumes number some forty items and give an insight into the various aspects of the working life of an architect at the time. Presumably all practising architects had their own much-consulted copy of The Architects Compendium and Catalogue, a substantial tome of over a thousand pages. Similarly, the volumes Notes on Building Construction and Nicholson’s Architecture would also be much used by the busy architect. The volume An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture by J.C. Loudon (originally published in 1846), would have been a well-known book, and its place in Tallan’s collection possibly points to an architect with a particular interest in the architectural history of rural house design.

Title page

In addition to the structural textbooks and architectural history reference books, there is an extensive number of trade catalogues in Tallan’s collection.

Cover, Henry Hope & Sons Ltd catalgoue, 1904

These not only remind us of all the elements and components an architect of the time had to consider but also they provide an invaluable resource to us – an architectural archive in the twenty-first century – for the conservation architects, interior designers and architectural historians of today interested in the technologies and stylistic features of Edwardian architecture. From the embossed decorations, steel sash windows and ‘sanitary specialities’ of the family home, to the various radiator designs, iron staircases and lift shafts of public buildings, to the coal plates and pavement lights of the urban streets – we have a catalogue for them all.

Cover, Doulton & Co. Ltd catalogue, 1898

Designs for bath decorations, Doulton & Co Ltd catalogue, 1898

Cover, Shanks & Co. catalogue, 1904

The most personal item in the collection is the ‘Scribbling Diary’ for 1904. Along with the letter-book for the years 1903-06, this diary records the communications and negotiations involved in Tallan’s various projects. However, the diary also gives us a unique insight into Finnie’s daily working routine – the meetings and journeys which were all required of this ‘infernally busy’ man. In the absence of any photograph of Finnie, the diary also gives us our only insight into the personal life and character of the man himself: the occasional Tuesday evenings at the Music Society, nights at the opera ‘with the girls’, and weekend visits to Wilkinstown a village near Navan.

Finian Tallan’s Scribbling Diary, 1904 (IAA 2015/60)

Embarking on his career as an architect, Tallan served a three year apprenticeship with Frederick Shaw of Drogheda. He then moved to Dublin where he worked as an assistant to Frederick George Hicks and subsequently in the office of Batchelor and Hicks when that partnership was formed in the summer of 1905. He started his own practice in Drogheda in the same year but a professional relationship seems to have continued with Batchelor and Hicks for some time at least, with some letters being signed ‘Batchelor Hicks and Tallan’. It is likely this was an informal arrangement, perhaps due to the completion of an existing job, or merely a necessary practicality for a young architect setting out on his own.

The letter book details the wide mixum gatherum of jobs which comprised the daily routine of the provincial architect: the many smaller scale surveys, legal cases, drainage problems, alterations and extensions. However, Tallan also carried out complete commissions, such as ‘Little Neptune’, a double fronted house with bay windows which cost £508, for a Mrs Kelly, just beside the sea in Bettystown, Co. Meath. There were also works for Miss Lyons at No. 20 James Street, Drogheda as well as premises for the St Lawrence Gate Cycle Works, also in Drogheda.

Carnegie Library, Drogheda (Photo: Brendan Grimes)

Tallan’s main work, however, was the sizeable project of the Carnegie Library in Drogheda for which his design was selected by competition. From the diary we can see the workload required by such a commission, and the many days which went in to working on the plans. Tallan’s attention to detail was such that several letters deal with the issue of the railings to the front of the building, about which he specifies that ‘the spikes must be close enough together to prevent children getting astride of [them]’. The job went to tender early 1904 and the contract was awarded to Gogarty Brothers; the library was opened by Cardinal Logue 16 April 1906. The letter-book includes a Statement of Account for the building which shows a total cost of £2,315.5.0, of which Tallan’s fee was £108.15.0.

The building is a mid-terrace, three-storey over basement design; it is an elegant, understated facade which carefully fits in with the existing streetscape. Built of red brick with contrasting grey limestone dressings around the windows and door, it has been described as ‘Jacobean Gothic’ in style. Even though it is no longer in use as a library it remains today as a handsome testament to the talent of a hardworking young architect who sadly died long before reaching his prime.

Dr Eve McAulay,
July 2015

Curator’s Choice: Dromana Estate Map (IAA 94/73)

The Irish Architectural Archive has initiated the occasional exhibition of objects selected from the collections by a member of staff. These ‘curator’s choice’ items are whimsically chosen, picked because they are interesting or beautiful or appeal to the individual eccentricities of a particular staff member. They are to be found on display in the first floor rooms of 45 Merrion Square.

The first ‘curators choice’ is this estate map of Dromana demesne and Villierstown, Co. Waterford, produced in 1751 for John Villiers Stuart (c.1684 – 1766), 1st Earl Grandison, by the otherwise unknown surveyor Henry Jones. The map is unusual in the number and detail of the architectural elevations with which it is adorned.

Grandison, known as ‘Good Earl John’, was an improving landlord who had the village of Villierstown constructed on his estate specifically as a centre for linen manufacture. Across the top of the map is shown the neat row of village houses built to accommodate the Ulster linen workers who were to be brought to the village to help establish the new industry on a sound footing. At the centre is an inn, presumably required to accommodate the merchants and traders who would flock to deal in the locally produced linen.

This experiment in social engineering ultimately failed, and linen never became the cash crop of the area. However, Villierstown found other ways to thrive and, although few of the buildings are recognisable from the map, it remains to this day one of the neatest of the planned estate villages in Ireland.

Down the right-hand side of the map are depicted the principal buildings of Dromana demesne, including Dromana House itself, with its prominent Gibbsian doorcase.

The house was much enlarged in the 19th century, so much so that this door was reduced to providing access to a rear courtyard. However, the demolition of the later additions in the mid-20th century resulted in the Gibbsian entrance becoming, once again, the main door. Other structures depicted on Jones’s survey, including the terraced garden, the ‘Rock House’ and the boat house, still survive.

The map was found in a second-hand book shop in England by James Howley and purchased by the Archive in 1994 with the aid of the Friends of the National Collections.

Irish War News

A Relic of 1916

The Irish Architectural Archive has a very clear collecting or acquisitions policy. If you like, you can read it here but what it boils down to – and the clue really is in our name – is that we collect architectural material. We define ‘architectural’ pretty broadly; we are interested in material of any kind relating to buildings of every kind across the length and breadth of Ireland. Even so, not everything in an architectural collection falls within this all-encompassing definition. We have numerous waifs and strays, items with tenuous or no architectural connections. In 1994, while sorting through a large collection of press cuttings about architects and buildings, we found one such stray; a small, folded, tattered sheet of newsprint which on closer examination turned out to be an original copy of Irish War News, the newspaper issued by Republican forces on Tuesday 25 April 1916, exactly 99 years ago tomorrow. It bears on its back page the ‘Stop-Press’ news that the Irish Republic has been declared.

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Copies of Irish War News are quite rare, rarer even than original copies of the Proclamation though not as valuable. A small, undated, newspaper clipping stuck to the front of ours records that a copy of the Proclamation sold ‘recently’ for £7 and a copy of Irish War News ‘of which journal only one issue was printed, the price being a penny’ fetched 25s.

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Our Irish War News will shortly be handed over to the professional conservation care of Liz D’Arcy of Paperworks Conservation Studio who will clean and stabilise it and reunite the separated halves, making it fit for inclusion in the Archive’s first exhibition of 2016, of which more anon.

Colum O’Riordan,
24 April 2015.

Cinema building and the Strongest Woman in the World

In 1985 the Irish Architectural Archive acquired an album of photographs recording the building of the Savoy Cinema, O’Connell Street, Dublin. With twenty-five images spanning the period from July 1928 to January 1930, the images show key moments in the construction process and are of interest for a whole host of reasons. They detail, for example, the speed with which a building of this period was erected, the nature of the construction site, with flat-cap wearing labourers in their shirt sleeves,

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and its ‘railway’,

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and the very modern looking structural steel (including the skeleton of a never-completed internal dome).

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The site billboard records not only the astonishing scale of the enterprise – a 3,000 seat cinema – but also the complete project team,

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while the post-construction images reveal in some detail the highly-ornate ‘Venetian’ themed decorative scheme, with its elaborate ‘Bridge of Sighs’ proscenium arch and ‘Doge’s Palace’ curtain, all of which must have been quite overwhelming to the Dublin audiences of 1930.

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Also captured are fragments of the buildings which formerly stood on the site,

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and some of the surrounding buildings, for instance those on the south side of Cathedral Street and the west side of Upper O’Connell Street.

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But, as so often with purely architectural photographs, it is the incidental details which bring the album to life. The construction was obviously a source of interest and amusement to Dubliners, whether alone

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or in crowds.

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Cars were rare but not unknown, though starting them could be a bit of a bother.

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It is legitimate to wonder how or why a pram might have been left unattended at the site entrance.

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And just when you thought mobile advertising hoardings are a relatively modern invention you find that the Dubliners of 1928 had their ass-drawn antecedents.

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The real wonder of this shot of course is the dramatic news that Katie Sandwina, the World’s Strongest Woman, is making her first visit to Ireland. Famous across Europe and North America, Katharina Brumbach (1884-1952), aka Katie Sandwina, could bend iron, out-pull horses and lift her husband above her head with one hand. Now what film could be more exciting than that?

Colum O’Riordan,
February 2015

Pretty as a Picture: pattern books from Palladio to Fitzsimons

Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms and other Rural Buildings, Joseph Gandy (1771-1843), 1805.

Recently the architectural critic Shane O’Toole donated to the Irish Architectural Archive a book which had belonged to his father, a copy of Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms and other Rural Buildings, published in 1805 by the English architect Joseph Gandy (1771-1843). This ostensibly simple work contains page after page of designs, some of them deceptively modern in appearance, displaying ideas for ‘modest’ country residences. It is an important addition to the growing collection of architectural pattern books held by the Archive.

Residence for a Curate and Family, with a Cellar under the Parlour, and two or three Bed-chambers above. Plate XVII, Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms and other Rural Buildings, Joseph Gandy, 1805.

The history of the pattern book is a long one. Its origins can be traced to the Ten Books on Architecture of the Roman architect Vitruvius (c. 80-70 BC). However, the idea of pattern books really came of age with the publication of I Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture) by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) in 1570. Villas and palazzi of refined elegance and beauty were displayed on his pages, and through the wide dissemination of the book, available from the 1660s in English translations, the Palladian style became an inspiration to architects from Christopher Wren to Inigo Jones to Edward Lovett Pearce. The Archive holds a copy of the 1742 edition of Giacomo Leoni’s translation of the Quattro Libri which once belonged to James Gandon, and later to William Henry Byrne.

Part of the title page of 1742 edition of Giacomo Leoni’s translation of Palladio’s Quattro Libri with the signature of James Gandon. The William Darcy who also signed the page is otherwise unknown.

Architectural treatises soon developed into more than discussions on the use of the classical orders for grander houses and public buildings, so that by the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries they became a means for architects to display their suggestions for more modest buildings. British architects such as John Plaw, Francis Goodwin and John B. Papworth produced books on rural residences, villas, cottage ornée, gate lodges, cottages and farm buildings. Irish examples of the genre are quite rare but include Twelve Designs of Country Houses by ‘A Gentleman’, published in Dublin in 1757, and Lady Helena Domvile’s Eighteen Designs for Glebe Houses and Rural Cottages, 1840, all the rarer because of the gender of the author.

House 4 from Eighteen Designs for Glebe Houses and Rural Cottages, Lady Helena Domvile, 1840.

Gandy stated in his introduction to Designs for Cottages that he was influenced by a Board of Agriculture publication discussing the need to improve ‘the conditions of the Labouring Poor’. He notes that ‘we should combine convenience of arrangement with elegance in the external appearance’, and says his designs are ‘offered as hints for the consideration of Country Gentlemen, and others, who build, and who are sufficiently aware of the use and importance of consulting Architects upon these occasions, by which disappointment, and eventually great expenses, may be avoided’. For Gandy, the pattern book is an architectural calling card, advertising an architect’s abilities and encouraging potential patrons to seek out his professional services. He never intended that anyone would actually build from these published drawings.

Bungalow Bliss, Jack Fitzsimons, first edition, May 1971.

Guides, manuals and pattern books didn’t die away after the 19^thcentury, and thanks to another recent acquisition here at the Archive we are reminded of that. In 2013, Jack Fitzsimons placed in the Archive a set of each of the published editions of his seminal Bungalow Bliss, a series of design books that served as a template for so many houses in the Irish countryside, later donating many of the original drawings for the first edition. From 1971 to 1998, through at least twenty-six reprints and twelve separate editions, Fitzsimons’s books included drawings, details of services, information on grants, town planning, contracts and decoration for modest two- to four-bedroom homes. For a fee (£10 in 1970) the full set of measured drawings and specifications could then be ordered. Robert Molloy TD, the Minister for Local Government, noted in the introduction to the first edition that, while property developers provide housing for the urban dweller, for the rural and small town resident the site, design and construction of a house had to be done ‘on his own initiative’ and therefore help was needed. Fitzsimons added that ‘while [the book] is intended primarily for those with little or no knowledge of the subject it is hoped that it may also prove a useful reference book for those already engaged in any sphere of housing’. Here was a pattern book from which the author did intend people to build. And build people did.

Design No. 1. Bungalow Bliss, Jack FItzsimons, 1971.

Aisling Dunne,
Irish Architectural Archive,
October 2014.

An experiment in sustainable architecture

Frank Gibney (1905-1978) was an architect and planning consultant whose career spanned the period from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. A planner before the profession really existed in Ireland, he prepared detailed plans for several towns including Tralee (1939), Drogheda (1940), Navan (1943), Waterford (1943), Cavan (1945), Listowel (1947), Ballina (1950) and Tullamore (1950). Although perhaps now best remembered for the villages and developments which he designed for Bord na Móna workers in the 1950s, the connections he established when working on these town plans led him to work as a housing architect for at least sixteen different local authorities. From dozens of ‘one-off’ rural cottages for Kerry County Council to large urban housing estates for Waterford Borough, Gibney’s houses are to be found right across the country.

Layout drawing for Bord na Mona housing scheme, Ardra, Bracknagh, Co. Offaly (St Broughan’s Park). Frank Gibney Collection, IAA (2014/63).

St Broughan’s Park, Co. Offaly. (c) Google.

Gibney’s working method for both the local authority and Bord na Móna housing was to set out schemes using a basic palette of generic house designs. Lay-out drawings show the placing, in block plan, of houses on particular sites, with an indication of which house types are to be built. This approach led to obvious efficiencies in design and construction costs. While the houses themselves are basic and repetitive, distinction and variety was given to each scheme by the use of ‘feature’ houses, more elaborate versions of the core types, inserted to add emphasis or punctuation. But what really makes Gibney’s schemes stand out are the distinctive layouts. His oval design for a small estate of 20 houses in Stradbally, Co. Laois (Brockley Park), or the tadpole shaped Bord na Móna estate at Bracknagh, Co. Offaly (St Broughan’s Park) are just two examples, both deriving their curving forms from Gibney’s careful consideration of site, aspect and orientation.

Layout drawing for housing scheme for Laois County Council, Stradbally, Co. Laois. (Brockley Park), 1950. Frank Gibney Collection, IAA (2014/63).

Brockley Park, Stradbally, Co. Laois, 2014. IAA

During the construction hiatus enforced by the Second World War, Gibney had time to indulge one of his many interests – building with clay. ‘Emergency conditions’, he wrote, ‘have forced us to look inwards upon our own natural resources and to extract therefrom the maximum substance for the primaries of life – Food, Fuel, Clothing and Shelter’. When it came to the last of these, shelter, Gibney proposed a ‘practical… simple’ solution – the clay cottage. After all, he says, ‘there is nothing new here, for the building of dwellings in rammed earth and thatching of roof with straw, reeds or heather, was at one time a thriving Craft in our country’.

Proposed Clay Cottage for Castlecomer Collieries, 1943. Frank Gibney Collection, IAA (2014/63).

In 1943 he produced a drawing for a Clay Cottage for Captain Prior-Wandesforde of Castlecomer Collieries. This was to be no mere paper exercise; a sample cottage, based on the drawing, was in fact erected at Cloneen Co. Kilkenny, a few miles outside Castlecomer. A basic bungalow, traditional in plan yet – as Gibney was anxious to point out – nearly twice as large as contemporary local-authority-built labourers cottages, the Clay Cottage was finished in early 1944 and was ’warm, dry and comfortable.’

Construction was straightforward: ‘the walls, two feet thick, are constructed with sub-soil clay from the Cottage garden, removed immediately from excavation without watering and rammed hard between timber panelling. Straw reinforcement was only used in the internal partition walls, they being twelve inches thick. Surfaces of walls were plastered and lime washed white. The windows are timber double hung sashes fitted into wood jamb linings and cills built in the walls as part of the panelling.’ The fireplaces and chimneys were brick-built and the cottage was supplied with a flushing toilet, hot and cold water, ventilated sub-floors and a ‘modern drainage system’. The thatch was treated with ‘fire and vermin solutions’.

Clay_Plan2

What made the building truly practical for Gibney – and particularly ‘sustainable’ in the modern sense – was the fact that ‘practically all material was found on site – clay from [the] garden, timber from nearby oak-trees, straw from harvest, and all work executed by local Craftsmen’. Even the boiler, located in the living room, was made by a local blacksmith. So fired was he by the success of the Clay Cottage that Gibney could see nothing but a bright future: ‘the writer believes that this mode of construction could be considerably developed in alleviating Rural Building problems, both in housing, farm buildings, workshops, Community halls, and even small Churches’. Alas it was not to be. The increasing availability of more modern building materials after 1945 meant that even Gibney himself had to abandon clay for concrete. But perhaps the Clay Cottage was an idea ahead of its time.

Copies of Frank Gibney’s town plans (2013/9) and drawings from his architectural practice (2014/63) were donated to the Irish Architectural Archive by his son, also Frank Gibney. Work is ongoing to catalogue and make accessible this record of the work of a remarkable and fascinating man. All quotations above come from an unpublished note by Frank Gibney attached to his Clay Cottage drawing. For more on Frank Gibney and his work see his entry in the IAA’s Dictionary of Irish Architects.

Colum O’Riordan,
IAA,
August 2014

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