In association with
 |
20TH CENTURY ARCHITECTURE IN IRELAND 20th Century Architecture in Ireland is a thorough catalogue for the summer exhibition of the same name at the D. A. M. in Frankfurt (and more recently, in an abridged form, at the RIBA). This is, apparently, the first-ever compendium of twentieth-century work in both the Republic and Northern Ireland. It plots various architectural manifestations from a surprisingly weak Arts and Crafts Movement (Lambay Island, by Lutyens, being a splendid anomaly) through the elegant Miesianisms of Scott Tallon Walker in the 1960s to the so-called Figurative designers of today. An important theme of this trajectory at least for the South is the loosening of Anglocentrism via a general fixation on the United States to an appeal for place-making situated within a consciously European context. The catalogue with, unfortunately, several factual and graphic errors divides into an initial family of essays, chronological and thematic surveys which address many historical and social issues, and a subsequent presentation of 57 selected schemes from Henman & Cooper’s Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast (1900-03) to O’Donnell and Tuomey’s Blackwood Golf Club nearby in County Down (1992-94). Some essays appear superfluous; an interesting topic concerns the Free State’s self-expression between the Wars (inevitably, most projects reviewed are in the Republic). If architectural focus in the 1980s was on the city and urban form, there is now perhaps a new concern for rural planning and an appreciation for landscape. Missing is an analysis of the financial and psychological impact of EU membership and some sense of management of today’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy: twin successes on which the shapely, colourful and literate work of recent years is dependent and of which it must to some degree be representative. RAYMUND RYAN |