Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Kathleen James-Chakraborty reviews ‘One Hundred & One Hosannas for Architecture’ by Shane O’Toole, Gandon Edition. Designed much like a guidebook, to fit into the pocket of a good tweed jacket, and with not one but three ribbons to hold one’s place, ‘One Hundred & One Hosannas for Architecture’ is in fact a collection of essays by Shane O’Toole, Ireland’s most celebrated critic of the island’s contemporary architecture. The book makes a good travelling companion. The brief pieces hold your attention well, but do not individually demand it for very long. Unusually for a book about architecture, it is not illustrated. Perhaps the author and his designers simply assumed that we all carry smart phones, on which we can call up the colour photographs that are too expensive to print. It is also possible that they simply did not want even the buildings that are his subject to distract from O’Toole’s eloquent prose. The volume’s design is handsome without being distracting, although I dread the many late night e-mails from my students on how to cite a book that lacks page numbers. The journey here proves temporal rather than geographic. Almost all the essays have Irish architecture or the celebration of it at their core. Most were written for publication in The Sunday Times. These are particularly effective at communicating to readers with little background; those published in Architecture Ireland, especially the accounts of prize ceremonies in Barcelona, where the focus shifts from buildings to name-dropping, are less successful. At O’Toole’s best, – and he is almost always at his best – he reminds us how the Irish architects who are now among the most renowned in Europe achieved their current position and what other younger Irish architects are following in their wake. The earliest essays date to 1999; only in the middle of the following year did O’Toole begin to address contemporary Irish architecture. The boom and bust associated with the Celtic Tiger does not figure prominently here. Instead one subject traced is the steady rise in first local and then international significance of the architects with whom O’Toole collaborated as Group 91 on the revitalisation of Temple Bar. Since then, while O’Toole has mostly focused on criticism, his former collaborators: Grafton, O’Donnell & Tuomey and McCullough Mulvin in particular, along with the slightly younger partnership heneghan peng, have achieved a degree of international renown that has little Irish precedent. The story of their rise unfolds in O’Toole’s pithy pieces as it happened and with little mention of such accompanying frustrations as the relatively small slice of the pie they were accorded at home, when much new construction before the crash was decidedly subpar and very little was built for many years afterwards. There is no mention of ghost estates or Priory Hall here! O’Toole instead focuses on success. At the same time, his take on what will endure is particularly convincing because it is so firmly rooted in an understanding of both the recent and the not so recent past. His appreciations of the pioneering Irish modernism of Michael Scott and of his subsequent partners Ronnie Tallon and Robin Walker, as well as of the much more controversial Sam Stephenson, are some of the finest pieces of recent writing on Irish architecture. He is also excellent on de Blacam and Meagher, who probably did even more to prepare the way for the current Irish stars. These often affectionate accounts will entice even those Irish readers not already committed to the cause of outstanding architecture. At the same time they are sure to engage those from abroad drawn to the subject by the high calibre of our very best new buildings. O’Toole has a good story to tell, but a larger issue for the concerned local public is how the success he chronicles can be embedded in Irish society as a whole. There is very little in these pages about housing or for that matter about office blocks, two of the building types that do the most to shape the daily experience of Irish cities and even towns, but whose quality is more often than not far less distinguished than it would be if developers were as willing as local authorities were during the opening years of the new century to work with the most talented firms. Hobnobbing with Pritzker Prize winners in Barcelona is no substitute for more affordable apartments of the calibre of the Timberyard. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is professor of art history at University College Dublin.

The suppurating carcass of the proposed Anglo Irish Bank headquarters on North Wall Quay in Dublin became a symbol for Ireland’s economic collapse. Its original architects Traynor O’Toole Ltd – in what is best seen as a fitting gesture – eventually went bust. In plain view of all on Dublin’s regimented riverside, the country ogled five years of awkward nudity as it chaperoned visitors – and emigrants – to the airport and port. The 20,000 sq m skeleton would at last be fleshed when Central Bank bought the site in May 2012 from NAMA for €7m. The morally bankrupt Central Bank was the only agency that could afford it, or at least the only agency that could make the Department of Finance believe that it could afford it. The fable of Aggrandised Construction and the Central Bank starts at Dame Street in the early 1970s when Sam Stephenson of Stephenson and Gibney was summoned by the Goliaths of State Financing to a meeting where they asked him to deliver a behemoth appropriate to their egos in what passed for Dublin’s financial district, and – fresh from stellar controversies over Wood Quay and Fitzwilliam St, to insulate them against inevitable controversy that would arise from their wish for a fifteen-storey building in a Georgian area with a medieval streetscape, that would involve demolishing the attractive 1790s ‘Commercial Buildings’. As with anything to do with the banking sector in Ireland its construction was controversial, though Stephenson artfully proposed a building that was no more than eight storeys. The problem was a breach of the planning permission involving a 30-feet exceedance of the permitted eight-storey height and the complicity of the planning authority. Dublin Corporation, the site shut down in the summer of 1973. A cause celebre for the cynics it was as late as 1979 and only after a public inquiry into the flouting of planning laws and a 400% cost overrun (£10m mitigated only by the payment by Stephenson of a ‘fine’ of £200,000 to the Central Bank) that it could be officially opened. The building is one of a handful of buildings in the world where the structure uses suspensions held from its centre. During construction each floor was built at ground level and then hoisted up with all the fittings and services already in place. Internally the offices are lit by floor-to-ceiling glazing which also gives the buildings its bold, layered, almost striped. appearance. Even though it is set back from the street line, its scale and massing dominates the street and skyline. Since, pending overdue traffic-calming on College Green, Dublin city-centre has no square, its plaza became the natural gathering area for skateboarders and protesters, notably Occupy. Sam Stephenson’s building has become the face of the Central Bank. When Village attacked the regulatory culture of the Bank some years ago it illustrated the story with an image of the building blindfold and with an orange in its concrete mouth. This imposing, impenetrable brute could not keep up with the changes, not only in modern corporate environments but also in society. Stephenson, roguish contrarian that he was, probably wouldn’t have wanted it to. Manifesting the old hierarchical system that served the Bank and the country so badly, the governor and directors occupied the infamous ‘seventh floor’, the city’s attic and a no-go zone for most staff – notably women, designed as it was with no ladies’ toilets – perhaps a last symbolic hurrah of a patriarchy before the spoilsport EEC imported equality standards including an end to the marriage bar that required women to give up their jobs in the civil service when the entered holy matrimony. There were inevitable difficulties with 1,400 staff members spread across six locations – three in Dame Street, and others near Harcourt Street, at Spencer Dock and in Sandyford for its currency centre. In January 2017 the Central Bank said it has completed the sale of its Dame Street premises to Hines and Peterson Group (Hong Kong) at a price of about €67m. Given the impending pedestrianisation of part of College Green, the new owners may well be looking to provide additional retail space at street level, some of which may encroach on space regarded as public. As it is not on Dublin City Council’s record of protected structures much – too much – is possible for this grizzled modernist avatar. Meanwhile the task of completing the new €140m headquarters was assigned to Henry J Lyons Architects, loaded with an implicit imperative to match the symbolism of the Dame St precursor. The 30,000 sq m building they have completed can house 1,400 staff and contains a range of open floor office areas and meeting rooms.Dublin’s quays are famously primarily a balance of small single-plot historic buildings and set-piece public institutional buildings including the Four Courts, the Custom House and more recently the Council’s Civic Offices. The design relates to the maritime history of the docklands with its triangular panels consolingly reminiscent of the sailing ships that once brought trade. Its distinctive colour, which shines like gold in the morning sun, has been criticised as ostentation. The form is made by wrapping the workplace in a simple but sophisticated glass skin which in turn is protected and shielded from glare and solar heat-gain by an outer layer of anodised aluminium triangular mesh panels. The perforation takes the appearance of solidity depending on the light. The concept evolved from a long discussion with Dublin City Council – which feared the appearance would be that of a big steel cage. Before the design stage Henry J Lyons statistically surveyed the staff of the Central Bank so they could envisage the life of a banker over a full week. The staff thought they needed large meeting rooms but instead what they needed was lots of smaller meeting rooms and break-out spaces. In effect conditions have been standardised on the understanding that staff can be moved at any time. There is a cashless staff canteen which accommodates

I recall a vivid simile used by Professor Tom Bartlett when I was a student in UCD. He likened Irish history to a pint of Guinness, “with black representing ownership of the land, and the white froth, including all the political movements, everything else”. Old habits die hard. An obsession with property endures. By the year 2004 Ireland’s rate of private home ownership was the highest in the OECD at around 82%, a proportion that only declined (to 69% in 2014) after the property crash around 2008. Perhaps the evolution reflects the differing approaches of immigrants, many accustomed to rental for life. Now we witness another property boom and renewed scarcity of rental accommodation, which we can trace to the predilections of our peasant forbearers. A nationality derives characteristics from its relationship to the land it inhabits, and draws sustenance from. Over recent centuries, in Ireland as elsewhere, mass urbanisation has occurred skewed to Dublin, but we build our cities on historical foundations. There are two defining, and intertwining, legacies of the Irish approach to land that have seeped into the broader culture. The first is the impact of English colonisation on ownership, beginning in the sixteenth century, and the subsequent partial de-colonisation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second is the dominance of pastoral agriculture, especially cattle, particularly since the late nineteenth century. It is wrong to assume that cattle-farming has always been the dominant form of agriculture in Ireland. Since the first human settlement emphasis has swung back and forth between tillage and pasture. Moreover, the introduction of the wonder crop of the potato in the seventeenth century created a novel opportunity for subsistence on small holdings, and brought poor land into cultivation for the first time. What is clear is that the impact of Irish agriculture, especially grazing, on Nature has been profound and long-standing. According to Frank Mitchell in ‘Reading the Irish Landscape’: “from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape”. This left a mere twelve per cent woodland coverage by the 1400s, well before the most intense period of English colonisation. Today among EU countries only Luxembourg has a lower coverage, and much of our woodland is in the form of sitka spruce plantations that offer little scope for biodiversity. The sixteenth and seventeenth century ‘plantations’ entrapped an overwhelmingly Catholic peasantry, denuded of a departed upper stratum of Gaelic society to restrain its fecundity, in a Malthusian grip of population growth. Describing the acquisition of annual leases by peasants who had previously held land in common under the Old Irish system Seán O’Faoláin said: “The thirst for security is, above all things, the great obsession of the peasant mind. And, in a long view, a deceptive obsession”. Security of tenure under the new dispensation was illusory as land became an asset rather than a collective patrimony. Trade conditions shifted in the nineteenth century and cattle began to enjoy a comparative advantage over tillage because the British had found cheaper sources of grain after the Napoleonic wars. In effect the cheap availability of labour from an Irish peasantry, a substantial proportion living at a subsistence level, became an unwelcome anachronism. The Great Famine was a catalyst for change that brought about the dominance of cattle agriculture under the native so-called Strong Farmer. The key point about this form of agriculture was (and is) that profitability depends on low labour input. Over the long term this conduced to population decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. As the country did not enjoy an Industrial Revolution, except in the north-east corner, this shift from growing food for direct human consumption to raising animals, mostly for meat, on grass led to unprecedented population decline. Ireland is perhaps the only substantial country in the world that has witnessed such a decline since the 1840s when the population reached up to nine million. Today it stands at just over six million on the entire island. In the same period the global population has increased seven-fold! The struggle for Irish Independence was taken up by Strong Farmers, who emerged with enlarged holdings after land clearances, to become the dominant faction of an overwhelming Catholic ‘Nation’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Through a succession of legislative measures – especially Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903 – the British administration sought to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’, allowing tenants to obtain freeholds over much of the country. This allowed their sons and daughters to set about dominating local government, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and later Sinn Féin. They entered the professions, established a Catholic university and eventually won an independent state in 1922, wedded to a conservative pastoral outlook on land. The first Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan (in office from 1922-32), was of that caste, and duly aligned national well-being with the economic fortunes of his class. The overwhelmingly pastoralist Strong Farmers continued to sell commodities onto the Imperial market, and the aspiration of idealists like Robert Barton, the first Director of Agriculture (1919-21), for a reversion to labour-intensive tillage was not realised after independence in 1922. Except, that is, for a period in the 1930s and 1940s when national survival demanded increased focus on growing crops for direct human consumption. The narrow interests of that group have informed our laws and values since the inception of the state, spreading from rural Ireland into an increasingly urbanized society. As O’Faoláin put it: “we have seen the common folk of Ireland rise like the beanstalk out of the Revolution of 1922 and, for a generation, their behaviour was often very unpleasant to watch”. The arrival of mechanisation in the Green Revolution after World War II put tillage at a further disadvantage as, despite enjoying among the highest global yields, on account of the effect of the Gulf Stream, heavy precipitation and high humidity makes Irish-grown cereals, apart from oats, unsuited