Where optimism died - Village Magazine

6 2 September 2016

riving down the dreary N11 eight miles out of

Dublin a curious grouping of houses peeks

intermittently over a high County Council-

issue boundary stone wall. It’s just another

far-ﬂung estate. But in 1963 this represented

the modernist dream: open-plan clapboard-fronted

American-style houses with two garages adjoining the

convenient new tree-lined dual-carriageway, one of Ire-

land’s first. You can still catch glimpses of its

adulterated sleek lines and its once-utopian, now often

octogenarian and jaundiced, ﬁrst settlers.

With the rapid uptake in private car ownership the

new professional middle classes had realised they

could set up home further and further away from the

ofﬁce. Speculative builders were only too happy to facil-

itate modern suburbia. Louglinstown – just beyond

Cabinteely - was a buffer zone between city and coun-

tryside cushioned by green ﬁelds as far as the eye could

see, watched over by rural Carrickgollogan and within

striking distance of Killiney Bay, Shankill and Bray, all

then established and desirable. Excitingly half of

Loughlinstown village, including its celebrated ‘Big

Tree’ had been demolished to smooth the tarmac of the

spanking new dual-carriageway.

It was a playground for the 1960s dream.

Shining Shanganagh

Shanganagh Vale tapped the optimism. It was named

after a beleaguered local river, the euphonious name

celebrated by James Joyce: it was originally to be called

the less melliﬂuous Hawthorn Court but individualistic

residents kicked up and changed it.

Shanganagh Vale was utterly undeferential to the

Irish vernacular or the lumpen housing estates on the

way out from the city; it was a-contextual, streamlined,

uncompromising, unIrish, American. Modern.

All of the houses were oriented to give maximum sun-

light throughout the day. The entrance curved the road

around greens of newly planted poplar trees and

detached, single-storey houses hidden by shrubbery.

Reﬂecting the age of the car as symbol of democracy,

the houses originally had double garages and were sur-

rounded by generous roads and inviting footpaths.

Walking around the estate each turn brought secret

laneways and pockets of green. Shrubbery, deﬁant of

boundary lines, made the houses seem to snuggle

together.

It was an opportunity for Merit Homes to create a new

world on a blank canvas, not contextualised. Shanga-

nagh Vale was a Garden City model of out-of-town

suburb away from the morally and physically corrupt-

ing urban centre, surrounded by parkland and

connected to the city centre by unclogged roads. It was

visualised as sprawling down the whole Shanganagh

Valley towards the Ramblers Rest pub in rustic

Ballybrack.

by Emma Gilleece

Where

optimism died

In Shanganagh Vale, in the Dublin

suburbs, the 1960s American dream

was bludgeoned

ENVIRONMENT

September 2016 6 3

Scandinavian-looking, ﬂat-roofed bungalow

Largely intact tiled fronted 3-bedroom, 2-storeyGlimpses of the now-threatened hills, the far side of the widened N11

6 4 September 2016

Builders

Shanganagh Vale was a the ﬁrst

(and last) residential development

for Merit Homes Ltd, a subsidiary of

John Sisk and Sons which still col-

lects some of the land rents today.

The initial modernist development

was phased through four different

house types, ranging from single-

storey flat-roofed houses to

single-storey and two-storey,

pitched roofed four-bedroom

houses.

Architects

It was the ﬁrst residential estate for

the London-based practice, Dia-

mond Redfern Anderson. This was

one of the ﬁrst times an architect

was used to design the new rash of

residential schemes. Other works

by Diamond Redfern Anderson

include Oak Apple Green, Rathgar;

Golden Bay, Lough Corrib, Co.

Galway and Claremount Court,

Glasnevin Dublin.

Architect Denis Anderson, now in

his eighties and retired in Holy-

wood outside Belfast says that:

“Architects shied away from hous-

ing at the time”. The practice is best

known for its celebrated Castlepark

Village, in Kinsale Co. Cork (1969-

72), considered a seminal work of

Irish residential architecture. It is

renowned. By contrast little has

been documented on Shanganagh

Vale.

Arab Quarter

Anderson told Village it had been

important during the design pro-

cess to separate vehicular trafﬁc

from pedestrian trafﬁc - which was

novel at the time. Landscaping was

also a priority to the practice and

the relationship of house to site.

The estate is a combination of pri-

vate and public spaces along with

in-between greens which ease the

relationship between the houses

and the road. high-screen walls

around patios gained the houses

the nickname the ‘Arab Quarter’,

from the confounded local

Edwardians.

All the houses in Shanganagh

Vale were at angles to each other,

with different heights of walls pro-

jecting here and there and vastly

different open spaces, some of

which were not clearly designated

public or private. It all betokened a

relaxed attitude to space and prop-

erty. The word that best ﬁts the

untidy house cluster is one often

heard in Ireland – ‘throughother’.

Denizens could shape it

themselves.

The estate was so green that the

architects were soon receiving

phone calls from the residents com-

plaining about weekend picnickers.

The lanes were ideal for the well-

spoken children of the estate to

cycle their Raleigh Chopper cycles

in ﬁle, and years later to sneak an

occasional unobserved smoke.

Flat Scandinavians

Closest to the entrance are the

Scandinavian-looking, ﬂat-roofed

single-storey bungalows. Architect

Denis Anderson comments that he

took his inspiration from Finland.

House+Garden magazine had

started to churn out issues on Scan-

dinavian homes, which the

perspicacious Irish consumer was

taking notice of.

Vancouver,

Loughlinstown

Again fashionably foreign-inspired,

the Vancouver - the second look

Diamond Redfern Anderson

launched was characterised by a

box-like structure, low projecting

roofs and balconies across the

white wooden-panelled frontage.

The Vancouver show-house adver-

tised in the Irish Times on 9

November 1963 was completely fur-

nished and “decorated by Brown

Thomas and Co Ltd of Grafton

Street”. The description reels off

the mod cons of the day: “large

plate-glass sliding windows, which

may be double-glazed if desired”;

“large open-plan lounge and dining

area, with its ﬁne ﬁreplace of brick

and Parana wood paneling”. The

kitchen had “attractive breakfast

bar with an ‘adjoining laundrette”.

Upstairs the bedrooms boasted

built-in wardrobes and dressing

tables. The asking price was £5150.

More than you’d pay for something

red-brick in the inner suburbs. But

then this was a different land with

different rules.

ENVIRONMENT

The Irish Times raved about Shanganagh Vale, November 1963

September 2016 6 5

The Theory

In a literary timepiece, Ruairí Quinn, later leader

of the Labour Party, wrote in the Architects Jour-

nal in 1974: “Anderson’s design approach is a

reversal of the conventional wisdom of the

architecture schools, as he ﬁrst formulates the

solution and works back from there, linking the

various elements together, achieving econo-

mies of design and construction by repeating

details and alternating elements. It is an

approach which is altogether at odds with the

linear method of brief formulation, methodo-

logical analysis, etc., which we have heard so

much of and which seems to have produced

soulless architecture”.

Closed Open Plan

Some might be critical of the lack of boundaries

in the development. But this can possibly be

defended by an egalitarian view that people

should ‘commune’ in the shared village

‘squares’. It was a great place to grow up, kids

in and out of each other’s houses, up trees, out

till all hours with their action men, walkie-talk-

ies and skateboards.

The Residents

The modernist ethos attracted an extraordinary

initial complement of buyers, apparently nearly

all foreign, debating how backward De Valera

was, or the oil crisis, over organic wine from the

popular new Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt or

just possibly, a spliff. In 1963 Ranelagh was for

traditionalists, and bores.

If you wanted to wife-swap with a Swedish TV

producer, Shanganagh was probably the best

place in Dublin for it, though of course being

Ireland and 1963 most of the wives were preoc-

cupied by child-rearing and housewiﬁng.

Inevitably the moment passed. The ﬁrst

phase was perceived as expensive and In 1969

Merit Homes, under pressure from poor sales,

sold out sites to builders such as E.J. Brady and

Co. which according to the Irish Independent of

the day built ‘superb detached luxury bunga-

lows, architect-designed, with central heating,

4 bedrooms”. But the new houses were neo-

Georgian, redbricks. With panes in the

windows. And gables. Not Scandinavian.

There had been ambitious plans for parks

and even swimming pools down the valley but

they were quickly shelved. Fields designated for

a modernist utopia were sold and resold, ﬁnish-

ing up as banal 1970s local authority housing.

All around spec builders ﬁlled up the ﬁelds that

had provided the Arcadian hinterland. Feral

kids marauded around these areas. Two houses

in Shanganagh Vale were burnt out.

Worse still, the roads clogged up with town-

bound trafﬁc and a couple of oil crises made

suburbia unfashionable. The kids grew up and

their parents sick of each other, and the stuff

they’d once got up to.

Everyone planted Leylandia to screen the

decline. Irish people moved in. Communal areas

were colonised by adjoining houses. Jazzy

extensions compromised the orthogonal lines.

Red-tiled frontages replaced some of the

clapboard. As incomes increased aesthetic

giganticism set in. Burglaries and bike theft

ﬁlled the discourse. A residents’ association

wanted the lanes blocked to stop urchins from

Ballybrack stealing apples, staring at sunbath-

ers and stoning the local youth.

Walls were highered and topped with fero-

cious broken bottles. The dual carriageway was

widened, into the manicured front lawnage.

Nobody talked. Everyone got old. Acquaint-

ances who had reared their children

cheek-by-jowl now cast their eyes downward

and ignored each other when putting out the

bins. The white heat had cooled and not just in

Loughlinstown. Ranelagh was now

fashionable.

Today with the additional block walls and

hedgerows there is no opportunity to converse

with the neighbour on the way to the car. The

openness is gone. The dialogue between the

houses is interrupted by obsessional bounda-

ries between yours and mine.

Harriet Cooke proﬁled Denis Anderson in

PLAN in the summer of 1974, long after Shanga-

nagh had started its compromises. He seemed

ambivalent:

“The more we do housing the more I feel… we

should study more and more what has gone [on]

in the past”, he told her.

“The present housing developments all

around the country are diabolical. They com-

pletely ignore the older villages, the network,

and the way the houses were related to the sur-

rounding countryside. I feel very strongly that

we should look to these older towns and study

them to see what it is that’s good about them

and try and, not copy them, but try and get the

same quality. We try as far as possible to

restrict our materials to a minimum and we try

to keep them to the materials that are used in

the locale. You know, if it’s white walls and slate

we use those materials… But we use them in a

modern way… Personally I think it’s more

important to have a good relationship between

the buildings than to have buildings that are

well designed as units, but not well related”.

Dead Dreams

Nearly every building in Loughlinstown Village

stands on the verge of demolition, derelict. Sev-

eral adjoining estates, like once upmarket, still

leafy, Beech Court are to be brutally demol-

ished for higher-density apartments. Just the

far side of the widened dual-carriageway Cher-

rywood with its rolling uplands, was corruptly

rezoned. 10,000 units are planned.

Like Loughlinstown, Shanganagh Vale is a

failure. But it was a grand failure that explored

the bounds of optimism and, for a decade

pushed them. The ﬁrst, modernist, phase of

Shanganagh Vale was completed a half century

ago this year.

In the end residents imposed their own non-modernist aesthetics

Lanes were closed