An exhibition at Collins Barracks offers lessons for a sustainable future - from the architecture of our past, writes Catherine Cleary
Welcome to a different kind of one-off house. This is built using local materials. The walls are thick, and the roof provides warmth and sound-proofing that the most expensive materials struggle to match. A central hearth heats the house. Everything has a place and a function, and it nestles into the landscape as if it grew out of the fields. It is built with all the green technology available to the modern homeowner. It is an Irish cottage.
It is difficult to shake the thatched cottage free of its dusty old cultural associations. There are the postcards, the kitsch and the cliches. Looming largest of all is the peasant past that we have fled for the comforts of the new rural house, with its 280sq m (3,000sq ft) minimum, half-acre of decking and an en-suite for every occupant.
Lessons for a sustainable future from architecture of the past are contained in a fascinating exhibition that opens on Thursday at the National Museum of Ireland's decorative-arts-and-history branch, at Collins Barracks in Dublin. Called Whitewash and Thatch, it is a selection of 38 architectural drawings completed in the 1930s and 1940s to record what was already a dying way of living.
The exhibition records two surveys, the first by Swedish ethnographers as part of the first survey of Irish housing and the second, drawings by UCD architecture students from the 1940s.
Patricia Clancy spent student summers as a member of this group called the Material Culture Survey Group. Her first posting was to Lusk, in north Co Dublin, where a delicate watercolour, under her maiden name, Patricia Almond, depicts a farmyard with a busy red hen. A photograph from the time shows her finishing a drawing in a tent in the camp where the students worked and lived.
Clancy remembers the occupants of the houses as being quite welcoming, allowing the young students access to measure and record everything about their homes. In the Galway village of Menlough they were largely Irish-speaking, so one student was picked as the translator. "We were beside the sea, and we enjoyed it. There were dances in Galway, at the Hanger in Salthill," she says.
Clancy went on to work with the Department of Health, where she worked on designs for sanitoriums under Noel Browne, and with the architect Michael Scott.
Over three years the students surveyed five villages; the others were Curragh, in Co Waterford, Clogherhead, in Co Louth, and Curracloe, in Co Wexford. They painted watercolours and drew pen-and-ink floor plans, showing the thickness of the walls and the simplicity of the layout. One drawing of a byre house in Co Mayo records the metal ring in the wall to which the animals were tethered when they were brought into the house at night.
The late Robin Walker, of Scott Tallon Walker, was another of the student surveyors. Rosa Meehan, the exhibition's curator, says: "He went on to have a reputation for being so modern, but the simple lines that you see in his drawings in the vernacular are part of that, and he was obviously very talented."
Work by the Limerick-born artist Seán Keating is also included in the exhibition, detailing the interiors of some of the cottages with pastel works of dressers and settles that evoke the smell of turf smoke.
"The studies were the first to really classify the Irish home," says Meehan. "And they show an east-west divide in the design." Houses along the east coast had a small lobby inside the door, behind which lay the hearth. Houses in the west were direct-entry, with a door on the long wall and the hearth at the end wall.
As part of the exhibition the museum asked the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland to recommend architects whose designs reflect vernacular design. One is Mayo-based David Power, whose design for a two-bedroom house in Louisburgh was based on the traditional Irish cottage, with a long, shallow plan and large, open living space. Solar panels coupled with underfloor heating dispel any idea that a return to vernacular means draughts and discomforts.
The old idea of the kitchen dresser is interpreted in a bespoke standalone kitchen that "explores the house's austere and simple theme", according to a description written for the house's exhibition in the institute's 2006 awards. "This homely economic house does not seek to dominate the landscape. Rather it engages with it, through its simple form and the views from within."
The size of the house - 90sq m, or 970sq ft - makes it an interesting prototype, according to Power. A large proportion of Irish households are made up of one or two people, so smaller houses could return to the landscape. "At the moment you have a situation where family sizes are getting smaller and houses are getting bigger."
Whitewash and Thatch opens on Thursday at the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, Dublin 7. There is a free talk, on April 24th, by Patrick Shaffrey on the structure of traditional towns and villages. (1890-687386)