Blog – Page 2 – Irish Architectural Archive

The Knight’s Move

Donal Hickey discusses the Berkeley Library exhibition which he curated in the Irish Architectural Archive’s Architecture Gallery. The exhibition runs until the end of the second week of January 2018.

Berkeley Library Exhibition, Architecture Gallery, IAA. Photo: Paul Tierney

The concept for this exhibition began with discussions with Dr Ellen Rowley when she asked me to look at some material on the Berkeley Library at the Irish Architectural Archive. There I found a small box containing over 280 black and white photographs which begged to be displayed. The images document the progress of a New Library at Trinity College, designed by Ahrends Burton Koralek (ABK) and constructed by G & T Crampton, between 1961 and 1967. From the beginning I discussed this photographic record as a continuous timeline around which a narrative could be constructed to document the evolution and progress of the design and construction of the New Library.

Berkeley Library Exhibition, Architecture Gallery, IAA. Photo: Paul Tierney

The Architectural Gallery is a room I am familiar with from my time working in London. It had a previous existence as the lining of an exhibition room in the Royal Institute of British Architects at Portland Place. A neat symmetry offered itself as I could now revisit my experiences of London architecture while interrogating the origins and influences legible, explicit or implied in the Berkeley library and the archives at the IAA and Trinity College.

Berkeley Library Exhibition, Architecture Gallery, IAA. Photo: Paul Tierney

The presentation of this exhibition is intended to be open-ended for you the audience to imagine other connections beyond those illustrated. Even now as I write I am adding other clues and references which might assist a more complete reading of the design process and its complex influences. It is not hard to imagine the fervour and intensity of ABK’s collaboration which is evident in the final building and explicit in the selection of sketches and drawings of various versions of the project. Architecture is their gift: a silent legible mechanism, a conduit for our experience.

Berkeley Library Exhibition, Architecture Gallery, IAA. Photo: Paul Tierney

As in the game of chess, where the knight’s move allows a piece to move in an unorthodox fashion relative to the other pieces on the board, combining the orthogonal and diagonal directions to shift across both plains, the Berkeley tilted the spatial game in Trinity College, introducing a dynamic relationship with the traditional order of the campus.

Donal Hickey
December 2017

The full catalogue of the Berkeley Library exhibition is available here: https://iarc.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Berkeley-IAF-Pamplet-FINAL.pdf

The Berkeley Library exhibition continues in the Architecture Gallery, Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, until Friday 12 January 2018.

The Architecture Gallery is open to the public from 10 am to 5 pm, Tuesdays to Fridays.

Homes for Workers: a ‘House and Home’ blog

The Dublin Artisans Dwellings Company was a semi-philanthropic private enterprise established in June 1876 to provide quality housing for the city’s working classes, and to make a profit while doing so. Capital raised through share issues and Government loans was used to build houses. The rents collected – and the Company’s rents were always considered high – were used to repay the loans, maintain the building stock, pay dividends to the shareholders, and remunerate the directors.

The Company’s earliest developments were blocks of one- or two-roomed flats but it quickly concluded that flats, though cheaper to build, were less popular and therefore less profitable than individual houses. Most of the Company’s schemes consisted of terraces of single-storey cottages and two-storey houses laid out in groups of parallel streets, a template readily followed by Dublin’s municipal authorities and hence one that came to characterise whole areas of the city well beyond the boundaries of the Company’s activities.

Infirmary Road Scheme, 1885-1886

To control costs and speed of construction, a small number of common house designs was used across the Company’s schemes. The simplest house, designated Type A, was a two-roomed cottage with one fireplace and was in use from the early 1880s to the late 1890s. The Type E cottage, a three bay, three roomed (living room and two bedrooms) single storey dwelling was the most common of all house types constructed by the Company, used in at least sixteen separate schemes from 1883 to 1909.

Type E Cottage, John Dillon Street, 1885

Tyoe E Cottage, Rialto Scheme Extension, 1895

The outbreak of World War I interrupted building activity, a hiatus prolonged well beyond the end of the war by a protracted rent strike. Three further schemes were built from 1929 to 1933. The basic dwelling had now evolved into an eight-roomed house with a kitchen, an internal bathroom, front and back gardens and mains electricity.

House, Rialto, 1933 – the last DAD Co. development

Citing what it regarded as unfair competition from local authorities, who were now providing working-class housing irrespective of profitability, the Company found itself unwilling to develop further schemes after 1933. In 1961 it adopted the policy of selling off its houses and using income generated to invest in purely commercial property. The last of the houses were sold in 1979 and the Company, by now renamed D.A.D. Properties Ltd, was taken over by Rohan Holdings in 1984.

Between 1879 and 1933, the Company built 3,600 dwellings in over thirty major schemes across Dublin City, in Dun Laoghaire and Bray, most of which survive in use to this day. They constitute a legacy of distinctive neighbourhoods and communities established and sustained though the provision of decent housing.

Type C House, Dun Laoghaire, 1896. Loaned for copying by Gregory Dunn, 2016

The business records of the Dublin Artisans Dwellings Co. were acquired by the Archive in 1979, with a second tranche arriving in 2000. Photographs of the Company’s architectural drawings were acquired in 1990, while dozens of the original drawings, once presumed destroyed, were deposited with the Archive by the Military Archives in 2015. In 2016 Greg Dunn loaned for copying an original drawing for a C type house in Dun Laoghaire. Most recently, in 2017 a series of files from the early 1960s to the late 1970s detailing the sales of individual properties was acquired via the National Archives of Ireland. This latest acquisition will soon be incorporated into the main collection catalogue which is available here.

Colum O’Riordan
July 2017

Trophy extension: a ‘House and Home’ blog

Proposed new billiard room for Mr E. Winston Barron, Woodstown House, Co. Waterford, Ashlin and Coleman, 1904 (76/1.168/64)

Woodstown House is an elegant Regency villa overlooking Waterford harbour. It was built, or rather an earlier house was substantially altered, in 1823 by Robert Chapland Carew, later first Baron Carew, as a present for his wife, Jane Catherine Cliffe. The architect was George Richard Pain. A year before their wedding, Jane had attended ‘the most famous ball in history’ held by the Duchess of Richmond in Brussels on 15 June 1815, the night before the Battle of Waterloo. It is said that Jane danced with the Duke of Wellington. Born in 1798, she died in 1901 aged 103.

The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball by Robert Alexander Hillingford (1870s)

Woodstown remained in Carew hands until 1903 when it was sold to Edward Alphonse Winston Barron. He asked the architectural firm of Ashlin and Coleman to make proposals for alterations and additions to the house, a somewhat unusual choice as the practice was almost exclusively known for its Gothic ecclesiastical works. George Coppinger Ashlin was a son in law of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the Gothic revivalist par excellence, and formed a partnership with Pugin’s son, Edward, in 1861. Pugin and Ashlin eventually became Ashlin and Coleman in 1903. The choice of architects might however be explained by the fact there was a Barron family connection to the firm. Sir Henry Page Turner Barron, Edward’s first cousin, had employed Pugin and Ashlin to work on Ferrybank Catholic Church, in Co. Waterford.

Woodstown House, 1985 (IAA survey photograph)

Ashlin and Coleman proposed a Classical re-rendering of the façade of Woodstown, and the additions of a gallery, a library with neo-Celtic decorations and a new billiard room. Top lit, with deep upholstered settees and a convenient lavatory, this would have been a distinctly masculine space ideally suited to the military man and bachelor which Edward Barron was.

Proposed new billiard room, detail

As it happens, none of Ashlin and Coleman’s proposals for Woodstown were executed. In 1945 the house was purchased by Major Dering Cholmeley-Harrison who later owned Emo Court, Co Laois. In 1967 he let Woodstown House to Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the assassinated US president. During her stay she described it as ‘typically Irish — 39 bedrooms and one bathroom’.

Jackie Kennedy during her visit to Ireland, 1967, with Desmond Guinness in Castletown, Co. Kildare (IAA photo)

Anne Henderson,
IAA

A residence for Mrs Bagwell : a ‘House and Home’ blog

Laurence McDonnell

The architectural practice of McDonnell and Dixon was formed in 1917 by Laurence Aloysius McDonnell and William A. Dixon and based at 20 Ely Place, Dublin. Both men were born in Dublin. McDonnell served his articles with J.J. O’Callaghan, while Dixon was trained by McDonnell before becoming his partner. The practice still continues today at the same address.

McDonnell and Dixon, Unfinished perspective of a proposed residence for Mrs Bagwell, Bagenalstown, Co. Carlow, c. 1920. Pencil on paper, 380mm x 550mm, 2008/16

This residence for Mrs Bagwell is a charming Arts and Crafts influenced two-storey house in a style which might best be described as early twentieth-century British colonial. A flight of steps leads to a small terrace, demarcated by ball finials. The centrally placed entrance has large tripartite windows on either side and is surmounted by a substantial cornice which runs the width of the building and visually supports the slated mansard roof. The façade is completed by projecting bays at either end of the house, each with three sash windows embellished with shutters. At first floor level the roof is punctuated by dormer casement windows and surmounted by two fine stone chimneys. Despite the number of different window types, the façade reads as a coherent and satisfying whole.

This is one of two elevations in the same hand – that of Laurence McDonnell – for a house for a Mrs Bagwell. The alternative scheme has a full-height first floor rather than a mansard roof.

McDonnell and Dixon Detail of alternative proposed residence for Mrs Bagwell, c. 1920.

The drawing is unfinished but includes the lone figure of a woman in a long skirt, a portrait perhaps of the otherwise yet-to-be-identified Mrs Bagwell. Unfortunately it has not been possible to identify the house or to say if either this, or the alternative scheme, was ever actually built.

Mrs Bagwell?

Simon Lincoln
IAA

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.

palacio-zazuela-caza--644x362

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.

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