#architectural history
Worth Two Buckets of Gold
Worth Two Buckets of Gold
Commissioned by Arthur and Sarah Cooper, this is Coopershill, County Sligo. Its design traditionally attributed to amateur architect Francis Bindon, the house is a square block of cut limestone, three storeys over basement and with a particularly handsome Gibbsian doorcase with Venetian window above. Replacing an older property on lower ground and closer to the river Unshin, work on Coopershill…
A Rich Man’s Extravagance
A Rich Man’s Extravagance
Born in County Down in 1766, at the age of 17 Alexander Henry emigrated to America where he established himself as a merchant in Philadelphia. Some years later, his nephew, also called Alexander Henry in turn moved to Philadelphia where he joined his uncle’s business, but then came back across the Atlantic to settle in England in 1804. The following year, in partnership with his elder brother…
Very Mannered
The 18th century English polymath Thomas Wright has featured here before because of his rightly-renowned work at Tollymore, County Down (Do the Wright Thing « The Irish Aesthete ), but it is apparent that while in Ireland during the year 1746-47, he also designed a number of other garden buildings elsewhere in the country. One of these is a rustic archway at Belvedere, County Westmeath, which…
A Country Retreat
Today known as Mount St Anne’s, this handsome villa was originally called Mount Henry, presumably after Henry Smyth who in the first decade of the 19th century commissioned the building’s design from Sir Richard Morrison: the central recessed entrance with pedimented Ionic portico between bowed bays can also be seen, albeit on a larger scale, on the facade of Lyons, County Kildare, for which…
Killare
After last Wednesday’s entry about the mausoleum at Fore, County Westmeath (To the Fore « The Irish Aesthete), here is the burial site of another branch of the same family. Located in Killare, this one holds the remains of the Nugents of Ballinacor, a property they acquired in the first half of the 17th century. Although confiscated by the Cromwellian government, Ballinacor was subsequently…
A Romantic Hideaway
The story is often told that Martinstown, County Kildare was built so as to provide Augustus Frederick FitzGerald, third Duke of Leinster, with a discreet location in which to meet his mistress. Curiously, the name of the duke’s inamorata is never mentioned, nor any further information given about the nature of the affair. Biographical information primarily focuses on his early support for…
School’s Out Forever
School’s Out Forever
The former National School in Ballintemple, County Cavan, with adjacent house. The buildings stand beside St Patrick’s Church of Ireland church which dates from 1821, and the school, which is the single storey building to the right, was built almost thirty years later as a small plaque beneath the roof eaves explains. Another plaque on the facade of the two-storey neighbouring buildingnotes that…
All Ornament should Consist of Enrichment
All Ornament should Consist of Enrichment
In October 1962 Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, summoned in order to initiate aggiornamento (or modernisation) within the Roman Catholic Church. One of the council’s decisions concerned the manner in which religious services were held. During mass, for example, the clergy were to use the local vernacular instead of Latin and the celebrant was to face members of the…
Of the Highest Standard
Of the Highest Standard
Townley Hall, County Louth is an Irish country house which has featured here more than once before (see Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté* « The Irish Aesthete). Without doubt, one of the most perfectly designed buildings in Ireland, it was the result of a happy collaboration between architect Francis Johnston and his client Blayney Townley Balfour – and also, crucially, the latter’s sister Anna…
Crazy Wonderful
Two doorcases in the entrance hall of Bellinter, County Meath, a house dating from c.1750 and designed by Richard Castle for John Preston. The two doors to the front of the room have the heaving lugging typical of this period but then atop a rectangular panel have caps studded with clusters of guttae. Meanwhile, the doorcase to the rear of the space has clearly been altered, probably in the early…
The Drunken Man of Genius
The Drunken Man of Genius
Described by William Butler Yeats as ‘the drunken man of genius’, architect William Alphonsus Scott was mentioned here earlier this year, with regard to his designs for the model village of Talbot’s Inch, County Kilkenny (see An Act of Philanthropy « The Irish Aesthete). Born in 1871, Scott was the son of an architect who established his own practice in Drogheda, County Louth; after finishing at…
Where The Streets Have No Shame
Where The Streets Have No Shame
Last January Drogheda, County Louth was named one of the dirtiest towns in Ireland in the annual Irish Business Against Litter report – placed 39 out of 40 locations surveyed, only Dublin’s north inner city was judged to be even filthier. Although obviously not an achievement worth celebrating, this information will come as no surprise to anyone who has been visiting Drogheda over recent years…
A Confident Mixture of Styles
A Confident Mixture of Styles
The Coote family has been mentioned here on several occasions. The first of them to settle in Ireland was Charles Coote, an ambitious soldier who arrived here around 1600 and gradually acquired estates, predominantly in the midlands, before being killed at Trim, County Meath in June 1642 during the Confederate Wars. One of his sons, Chidley Coote, born in 1608, participated in the same wars,…
Society Scandals
At the rear of a graveyard in Clonlara, County Clare stands this impressive tomb erected following the death in June 1817 of the Rev. Charles Massy. The second son of Sir Hugh Dillon Massy, he had, like so many other young men in his position, become a Church of Ireland clergyman and as such was permitted to marry. His choice of bride was the 18-year old Mary Ann Ross-Lewin, beautiful and poor…
A Cause for Worry
A Cause for Worry
Like so many Irish towns, Ennis, County Clare sometimes seems determined not to take best advantage, or best care, of its architectural heritage. Nothing better exemplifies this unfortunate state of affairs than Bindon Street, a short stretch of road comprising two terraces facing each other, both holding six properties. A mixture of two and three bays wide, the houses are of three or four…
Final Traces
Rostellan Castle, County Cork is one of Ireland’s great lost houses, demolished less than 80 years ago and obliterated so completely that most visitors to the site would have no idea a substantial residence stood here for several centuries. The original building here is thought to have been constructed by a branch of the FitzGerald family; certainly by the mid-1560s the land it occupied had…
A Reminder
On Monday, the Irish Times carried a report noting that Ireland’s Health Service Executive owns hundreds of unused buildings across the state, some of which have been left vacant for decades (see: HSE owns hundreds of unused buildings, figures show (irishtimes.com)). This will not come as news to anyone who is concerned for the welfare of the country’s architectural heritage: the HSE is…
someone in the notes on that “stop fetishizing old houses” post commented that builders before the 1970s were too concerned with elegance and grandeur, and that was all really just wastefulness
and I think about my apartment, a duplex from 1912, surely built for a middle- or working-class family. spartan, really; quite basic and no-frills. not much to look at from the outside. just like a thousand buildings of similar provenance in the Boston area.
there are flowers molded in the chunky, cast-iron radiators
there’s a design of concentric circles in the carved door-lintels
many buildings of this type have a little stained-glass window somewhere
I think about ornate door hinges in the staff wing of a country estate from 1878. think of patterned wallpaper in a mansion’s kitchen, from 1797. I think about purely functional spaces someone looked at and said, “this needs beauty”
the past was certainly guilty of waste in many ways. but I cannot call making a house more than just a box to live in one of them
It is my strong conviction that one of the most human of impulses is to take the necessary and make it beautiful.
As an architect student the knowledge that people think building industry was wasteful in the past as opposed to now drives me absolutely crazy. People do really think adding some decorations was a waste of resources?? Wait until they learn about the massive amount of building complexes with structures vulnerable to moisture damage, but can’t be reasonable fixed because of how the said structure is constructed. Or the building materials used in was majority of big buildings that can’t be reasonably reused. Or that these factors lead to buildings being abolished after only few decades. Or that the building industry produces most green house gasses out of all industries mainly because of the massive use of concrete, which production is extremely energy consumptive.
On the other hand we have a lot of several hundred years old buildings everywhere. Before the hyper-capitalist industrialization of the construction industry during the past 100 years, buildings were usually made out of simple structures, that could be easily fixed, maintained and reused, which made them last centuries easily. Brick and wood structures are a common examples of these. They are breathable natural material, which have very little change of moisture damage if designed and maintained properly. They are also reusable, especially bricks, and wood is also of course biodegradable.
Concrete elements are complex structures and vulnerable to construction mistakes and also extremely hard to fix, a recipe for disaster. They are also cheap, which is why they are so often utilized. Which is also why there’s much less concern over how long they last. If it’s cheap and it’s unusable after couple of decades, that’s not a big loss, it probably payed itself back in that time already, and you can just built a new one. This is what industrialists think. They don’t have to use these barely livable structures, they’ll just take the profit. There’s also no point in putting money to make something beautiful that’s not meant to last. It creates a cycle, buildings are made poorly because it’s cheap, no one wants to maintain or protect them because they are already barely livable and ugly, and they are much quicker abolished.
Whatever anyone thinks of any old or modern styles, it’s just indisputable fact that during the last century building industry has become infinitely more wasteful. And I would and will argue that beauty is not a waste, beauty has function. At it’s core architecture is about creating shelter and living spaces for people and creating a boundary between humans and wilderness. So it’s main goals in my opinion should always be creating a better environment to live for humans and creating a boundary that facilitates a symbiotic relationships between humans and other species. I think beauty has a crucial function in those goals. Beauty makes life better. Weather it’s in art, literature or home, it makes us happy. Additionally it inspires humans to maintain beauty. Residents of a city get all up in arms when someone tries to abolish a building or park many of them love. People want to take care of their living space, if they enjoy living there. If they don’t, they just want to get away from there or change it. And what is more destructive to our relationship to other species than destroying all of our home planet by over-consumption or resources?
Beauty is important, but it’s also subjective. The conversations about what period did beauty right are quite tiresome. We can discus them and their differences, but when it comes to applying value judgements, it comes down to personal taste. I love a lot of historical, modern and post-modern architecture. Not all of them of course, but I think you can make beautiful things with rich colors and details and also clean shapes and limited color palettes. But I think we can all agree that profit motivated mass production of poorly made buildings does not allow a lot room for beauty, if any.
Earlier this year I posted about the planned but never completed world’s tallest building, Phare du Monde, designed for the 1937 World Fair in Paris with a winding ramp spiraling all the way up its terrifying altitude. What I didn’t know until reading Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte’s collection Is That All There Is? this week is that he’d done a story about the very same tower and the same result I’d pictured occurring if the tower had become a reality: SCRBRWBRO!
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