A touch of nature
Alan Powers
In 1966, for two weeks, my family rented a cottage near the sea in Donegal. It was built of whitewashed rubble stone, with golden thatch fastened with pegs. It had been 'restored' by an English owner, but there was not much in the way of plumbing. She explained that if it rained a lot we should open the two facing outside doors into the main room so that the rainwater could run in one side and out the other. I thought it was lovely but the rain that August was not heavy enough to require this action; we enjoyed seeing similar cottages still inhabited by the local people, although an even greater number were abandoned piles of stone with brambles and elders growing up inside.
The exhibition Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture at MoDA, on the Cat Hill campus of Middlesex University, curated by Aoife MacNamara, does its best to dispel the golden glow of any such memories. No one would continue to live all year round in such a cottage if they had any chance of acquiring a well-sealed front door and some proper sanitation. Where the old buildings survive at all, they tend to be in the hands of outsiders, for seasonal use.
Since the Seventies, however, a number of former Irish emigrants (for some confusing reason the exhibition organisers use the word immigrant to describe those leaving as well as those arriving) have come back and sunk their earnings in new bungalows, while those at home with the means have copied them. For planning reasons, this often means demolishing the existing dwelling in order to build a new one on the same site. Many of the designs for Irish bungalows are taken from a popular pattern book, Bungalow Bliss by Jack Fitzsimmons, first issued in 1972 and since reprinted in 1.1 editions. The book's success owes much to the fact that it is not only a design manual, but tells you how to build the drains and everything else yourself. The mocking title of the exhibition is taken from a recent attack on this much deplored phenomenon by Frank MacDonald, the environment correspondent of the Irish Times.
The purpose of the exhibition, which takes Donegal as a case study for what is a much more widespread phenomenon, is to challenge the assumption that new bungalows must always be regrettable and wrong. It is largely presented through photographs, by Paul Antick and Andrew Kearney, of the new houses and their occupants, mostly with the deliberately alienating character cultivated by Martin Parr (whose garish photographs of the British at the seaside have set a fashion). They are accompanied by snatches of interview text, edited in documentary-film fashion, which allow the bungalow owners to justify their choices. The main photograph on the exhibition leaflet shows a green Statue of Liberty, with a working light in her hand and a floodlight in the grass at her feet, on a hill in front of a reasonably inoffensive bungalow, on whose mown lawn is a little whitepainted wellhead, certainly not in use for supplying the house with water. It is a gift for the photographer, but as with Parr's photographs we are not sure whether we are expected to sympathise, show distaste, or laugh. If only the former, then the photos are scarcely appropriate, for they play mostly for the second two responses, although, as can be the case in Ireland, the exuberance of the Statue of Liberty redeems it from any accusation of halfhearted vulgarity.
The bungalows are open to criticism less for their design, or even their materials, than for their prominent siting on otherwise unbuilt-on hillsides. Experience in
England over many years has shown that while planners can go some way towards encouraging a reflection of local style in new houses, the results will busily copy materials and details, failing entirely to reproduce the wished-for spirit of the old houses, which seldom seem to conflict with their surroundings and usually make them more beautiful. Siting, scale and the design of approaches and driveways all contribute to the failure. Vernacular houses do not charm us just by age and familiarity, but by some secret of building that we have lost.
Remembering how my uneducated eyes were gratified by that Donegal cottage, I believe that it is not as hard to recover it as it seems, although a lot of effort has been exerted for little permanent profit in trying to discover the secret and bottle it for sale. 'High style' architecture in Ireland is rather good at present. Can any of these new stars offer a replacement to the Fitzsimmons pattern book which would, in the words Einstein is supposed to have used of Le Corbusier's Modulor — a proportional system for architecture — 'make the good easy and the had difficult', without forgetting the things that the bungalow builders want? The bungalows seem to need less in the way of architectural design than a little landscaping to give back a touch of nature to their barren mown lawns, gravel driveways and dwarf conifers, and the same goes for a great many 'desirable residences' in England as well.
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