Architecture In Ireland Research Articles

“I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of thy house’: Magnificence and Catholic Architecture in Ireland, 1850–1900

Abstract This article explores the deliberate invocation and communication of ideas of ‘magnificence’ by Catholic building projects across Ireland between 1850 and 1900. Through an analysis of the rhetoric and discourse surrounding the construction of three case studies in Tipperary, Limerick, and Armagh, the article identifies shared concerns with articulating architectural magnificence through drawing attention to the site, on architectural detail and formal style, and the high quality of building materials. This emphasis on magnificence is examined in terms of the need to justify and legitimate expansive and expensive building and re-building projects, which often relied heavily on fundraising from communities already under financial pressure. The symbolic importance of magnificence is also explored in the context of the increased focus on the church as the central location of Catholic life and worship in the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, the decision by Catholics to invest in magnificent architectural styles that referenced the medieval cathedrals of France and the classical grandeur of Catholic Rome is repositioned. Rather that framing this as a diffuse architectural eclecticism, the use of these diverse historical exemplars is considered as part of the need to rebuild a ruptured Catholic architectural traditional in Ireland, and to create an architectural identity that expressed triumph over past adversity, as well as confidence in Ireland’s role in spreading the Catholic faith around the world.

Colonial Monasticism, the Politics of Patronage, and the Beginnings of Gothic in Ireland: The Victorine Cathedral Priory of Newtown Trim, Co. Meath

Small relative to its importance as the capital of the Anglo-Norman lordship of Meath, the medieval town of Trim was home to communities of canons regular and mendicants, and among the former were Victorine canons who served as the chapter of a cathedral that was newly-built just outside the town at the start of the thirteenth century. This paper presents a discussion of monastic observance in Trim before and after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, and an exploration of the context of the foundation of the Victorine priory and its cathedral church. It is argued that the Victorine church, one of the first Gothic buildings in Ireland, offers us a glimpse of what was possibly the earliest work of Gothic architecture in Ireland, a now-demolished Victorine house in Dublin.

Art and Architecture in Ireland: Overlapping Fields and the Synthesis of Architectural Knowledge

In the Republic of Ireland, architecture’s objective qualities, particularly its objectified aesthetic ones, are valued within the discipline above all others. Promoting collaborative and socially engaged practice in the field where art and architecture overlap can alter these existing paradigms by emphasizing instead architecture’s social, cultural, and political attributes. The ethnographic methods and theoretical frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu, Leon Festinger, and Ian McGilchrist are employed here to help assess and address current conditions of praxis critically, and to enable a holistic understanding of increasingly diverse modes of architectural practice (aesthetic, critical, technical, and social). This study proposes that adopting some of the mutually supportive systems from the field of art has the potential to subvert the way architectural knowledge is disseminated and produced, and to challenge disciplinary values in a fundamental way.

Review: Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention by Roger Stalley, ed.

Roger Stalley, ed. Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention Dublin: Wordwell, 2012, 226 pp., 75 color and 75 b/w illus. €29.99 (paper), ISBN 9781905569700 The marginalization of the study of late medieval architecture in Ireland results from a series of coincidences, including the treatment of Ireland as peripheral to mainstream European developments; the perception of the Gothic style as a foreign imposition when compared to indigenous forms of earlier eras; the relative unfamiliarity of scholars outside Ireland with the complexities of Irish history; and the limited scale of Irish Gothic construction in a discipline that has traditionally prized technological achievement. In the past, architectural historians structured the field to elevate the great French cathedrals as the standard for Gothic form and meaning, but the spread and popularity of Gothic design elements throughout late medieval Europe in innumerably varied circumstances mean that most Gothic deviates from the “rule.” Recent scholarship—for example, Colum Hourihane’s survey of late medieval artistic production, Gothic Art in Ireland, 1169–1550 (2003)—has attempted to reassess the situation, but the subject of Gothic architecture in Ireland still provides much to explore.1 Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention contributes to that process of exploration. The volume was produced by a team affiliated with the Department of the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin, and its title implies a survey, but the book is a series of connected studies that follow the erection and subsequent fate of Gothic buildings on Irish soil. The authors have the stated intention of producing a multifaceted study of Gothic, incorporating ideas of reception and postmedieval change. The consideration of the longue duree as it relates to buildings has become a useful methodology for scholars of medieval architecture in recent years, but given the political and religious oppression in Ireland since the Middle Ages, Irish buildings can assume charged but shifting symbolic functions that make this approach particularly fruitful here. Roger Stalley’s introduction provides a historiographical grounding …

R.S. Wilshere and his Modern Schools in Belfast: an Architecture of Individuality

From time to time since his death in 1961, R.S. Wilshere has been referred to as a leading figure in the development of Modern architecture in Ireland, and his series of schools built in Belfast between the two world wars has been cited as an important part of that story. Yet the full significance of his schools has not hitherto been discussed in detail, while the full extent of his building achievement has not been outlined anywhere. The great esteem in which Wilshere and his Belfast schools were once held by contemporaries, however, merits both the recounting of his life and overall career, and an explanation of the nature of his special achievement in schools architecture.In addition to the twin aims of re-establishing Wilshere's reputation as an architect of more than usual worth and revealing the notable qualities of some of his schools, this exploration of his career and buildings also points to other themes of the inter-war era which have not been fully explored elsewhere and would benefit from further research.

La búsqueda de la identidad nacional de Irlanda a través de la arquitectura eclesial

En los comienzos del siglo XX, Irlanda se va liberando de cuatro siglos de dominio inglés. Este proceso, iniciado formalmente en el siglo anterior, más exactamente a partir de 1829, con el Acta de Emancipación, proporciona a la Iglesia Católica irlandesa una mayor confianza en sí misma en cuanto a la manifestación externa de su recién recuperada libertad, a la vez que en las siguientes décadas, ya camino de la nueva centuria, se va haciendo económicamente más poderosa y comienza a desplegar una nueva energía en un impresionante programa de construcción de iglesias, fundamentalmente de gran capacidad y en áreas urbanas. Por otro lado, muchos sacerdotes irlandeses comienzan a formarse fuera de Irlanda, y otros empiezan a viajar más a menudo, de modo que al volver a su país traen consigo ideas para satisfacer las necesidades de la Iglesia Irlandesa, aplicándolas sin reflexionar sobre la tradición perdida. De esta encrucijada surgen las dos principales corrientes: Neogótico y Neoclasicismo, a las que luego se superpone el hiberno-románico. En paralelo aparecen algunos intentos de construcción de iglesias ligadas a las corrientes modernas imperantes en Europa, y que no se pondrán verdaderamente en marcha hasta los años 50 del siglo XX.Dentro de este contexto, la presente comunicación tratará de responder a las siguientes cuestiones: ¿Satisfacen el neogótico y el neoclásico las ansias de afirmación nacional irlandesa a través de la arquitectura eclesial? ¿Qué factores o circunstancias desencadenan la aparición del estilo hiberno-románico? ¿Qué características distintivas marcan este estilo? ¿Qué validez logra alcanzar el hiberno-románico como estilo nacional irlandés en la arquitectura eclesial? Dentro de este estado de cosas, ¿cuándo se puede hablar plenamente de una moderna arquitectura eclesial en Irlanda? ¿Cuál es la respuesta de la arquitectura eclesial irlandesa ante el nuevo enfoque litúrgico del Concilio Vaticano II?

Public architecture in Ireland, 1680–1760. By Edward McParland. Pp 252, illus. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. 2001. £35.

Public architecture in Ireland, 1680–1760. By Edward McParland. Pp 252, illus. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. 2001. £35.

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Bibliographie des (Euvres de Denis Diderot 1739–1900. By David Adams. Réflexion utopique et pratique romanesque au siècle des lumières: Prévost, Rousseau, Sade. By Guillaume Ansart. Situation 53. Memory and Desire: Rétif de la Bretonne, Autobiography and Utopia. By Peter Wagstaff. Faux titre 115. Le Chevalier Bayard. By Jacques Autreau. Liverpool Online Series: Critical Editions of French Texts 3. Edited by Richard Waller. Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth‐Century England. By Richard A. Barney. Hogarth: Representing Nature's Machines. Edited by David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée and Peter Wagner. The Prime Minister of Taste: a Portrait of Horace Walpole. By Morris Brownell. Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800. By Philip Carter. French Opera 1730–1830: Meaning and Media. By David Charlton. Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS634. Michel‐Jean Sedaine (1719–1797): Theatre, Opera and Art. Edited by David Charlton and Mark Ledbury. Religions en transition dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Edited by Louis Châtellier. SVEC 2000:02. Samuel Johnson in Historical Context. Edited by Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine‐Hill. Jane Austen: The Parson's Daughter. By Irene Collins. Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees. Edited by Deidre Lynch. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Enquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 4. Edited by Kevin L. Cope. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Enquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 5. Edited by Kevin L. Cope. Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe. By Andrew Curran. SVEC 2001:01. John Soane: An Accidental Romantic. By Gillian Darley. Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungs‐roman, 1750–1850. By Lorna Ellis. L'Annonce et la nouvelle. La presse d'information en France sous I'Ancien Régime (1630–1789), By Gilles Feyel. The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society 1660–1720. By Perry Gauci. Des beautés plus hardies… Le théâtre dans la France de I'Ancien Régime (1750–1789), By François Genton. The Nation, The Law and the King, Reform Politics in England, 1789–1799. By Jenny Graham. Lanham. Hogarth. By Mark Hallett. Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid‐Eighteenth Century. By Bob Harris. Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy. By Jonathan M. Hess. The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond. Edited by Clare Hornsby. Those Delightful Regions of the Imagination: Essays on George Romney. Edited by Alex Kidson. Saint‐Simon and the Court of Louis XIV. By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, with the collaboration of Franqois Fitou. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.Leonhard Horowsku Institute fur Geschichtswissenschaft, Technische Universities Berlin Boswell un libertine mdancolique. Sa vie, ses voyages, ses amours et ses opinions. By Maurice Levy. Rhetoric and Natural History: Buffon in Polemical and Literary Context. By Jeff Loveland. SVEC 2001:03. Public Architecture in Ireland 1680–1760. By Edward McParland. The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England 1760–1800. By J. C. S. Mason. Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650–1850. By Robert Mayhew. Studies in Modern History.The Clothes That Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth‐Century Culture. Edited by Jessica Munns and Penny Richards. Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714. By Bridget Orr. Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry from Burns to Haney. By Fiona Stafford. John Berwick, Engraver on Wood, 1760–1795; an appreciation of his life together with an annotated catalogue of his illustrations and designs. By Nigel Tatters field. Painting the Cannon's Roar: Music, the Visual Arts, and the Rise of an Attentive Public in the Age of Haydn, c.1750 to c.1810. By Thomas Tolley. Universal Right. By Giambattista Vico. Trans. and ed. by Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl. Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment. By Elizabeth Susan Wahl.

Review: Public Architecture in Ireland, 1680–1760

Review: Public Architecture in Ireland, 1680–1760

The architecture of psychological management: the Irish asylums (1801-1922).

This analysis examines some of the psychological, philosophical and sociological motives behind the development of pauper lunatic asylum architecture in Ireland during the time of the Anglo-Irish union (1801-1922). Ground plans and structural features are used to define five psycho-architectonic generations. While isolation and classification were the prime objectives in the first public asylum in Ireland (1810-1814), a combination of the ideas of a psychological, 'moral', management and 'panoptic' architecture led to a radial institutional design during the next phase of construction (1817-1835). The asylums of the third generation (1845-1855) lacked 'panoptic' features but they were still intended to allow a proper 'moral' management of the inmates, and to create a therapeutic family environment. By the time the institutions of the fourth epoch were erected (1862-1869) the 'moral' treatment approach had been given up, and asylums were built to allow a psychological management by 'association'. The last institutions (1894-1922) built before Ireland's acquisition of Dominion status (1922) were intended to foster the development of a curative society.