 |
| The Dublin Wittgenstein would've seen in 1930s |
Crisis of Identity: Wittgenstein’s take
on Irish Georgian
"The people who
built these houses had the taste to know that they had nothing very important
to say; and therefore they didn't attempt to express anything."
This statement was attributed to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein upon viewing the streetscape of Georgian Dublin during the first
of his visits to Ireland in the 1930s which was recorded on the account of his
close friend Dr Con Drury's 'Recollection’. Like language
architecture is difficult to define. Even though the configuration and
manipulation of materials to enclose and control empty space is universal to
all human cultures, architectural taste and opinion is subjective. Wittgenstein’s
philosophy was of a linguistic nature based on expressing oneself accurately to
which he viewed architecture as a means of self-expression in the same way as
the spoken word. In this one statement Wittgenstein demonstrated his lack of
knowledge of Ireland’s unique colonial history and his inability to ‘read’ the
language if its visual landscape. However, further on in Drury’s article,
Wittgenstein would articulate the tension and consequences of the social
constructionism of Irish Georgian architecture. Even though his field was
philosophy, examining the status of landscape as image and symbol established
common ground between practitioners from a variety of different disciplines
concerned with culture: geography, history, fine art, literature and
anthropology.
 |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1889-1951) Austrian philsosopher |
“Now I know what was meant by the phrase ‘the Protestant Ascendancy.’
These buildings have the appearance of a fortress. But now the gypsies inhabit
the castle.”
In this one sentence Wittgenstein expressed his ignorance of the particular historical
circumstances of this nation. Through many countries in this world were under
British colonialism, Ireland’s history is a distinctly unique one. To
Wittgenstein the Classical façades of the capital were symmetrical ordered
expressions of nothingness. They in fact reveal the story of the architectural
landscape in pre and post-independence Ireland of conquest, the constant
reaffirmation of social and political status and finally its recreation and assimilation
into the broader realm of Irish identity. From a semiotic point of view, the
secondary meaning of these buildings, defined by Panofsky as the reading of
conventional meaning of shared knowledge such as literary and visual sources, is that of the
Anglo-Irish imitation of British tastes. Panofsky asserted those underlying
principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, and
a religious or philosophical persuasion are unconsciously qualified by one
personality and condensed into one work. The systematic association
of these shared design gestures is the architecture of colonisers.
 |
| Lancelot 'Capability' Brown |
The title of David Lloyd’s book ‘Anomalous states’ aptly describes
nineteenth century Ireland’s “crisis of representation.” There was a clear dichotomy
of the Irish population into two opposed classes; the landed proprietors of
Protestant ascendancy gentry; the mass of indigenous rural Catholic tenantry
and later on towards the end of the century a growing, usually Catholic, middle
class who were denounced by the masses for their aspirational attempts at
emulating the Anglo-Irish. This crisis of identity goes back to the Plantations
with the acquisition and reusage of land as well as the Anglicising of place
names. This enforcement of a foreign dialect with the de-familiarization of
homeland would be later depicted in Brian Friel’s play ‘Translations’ (1980)
set in 1833. On acquiring these estates, the new landlords of Ireland set about
landscaping surplus acreage. In tandem with building gardening was extremely
fashionable throughout the eighteenth century. Mrs Delany’s garden at Delville
was one of the first to embrace the naturalistic style of gardening made
popular by landscape designers Lancelot ‘Capablity’ Brown. In a letter of 1744
she describes fields planted in a wild way with forest trees and with bushes
that look so naturally you would not imagine it a work of art. Other examples are of Lady
Louisa Connolly and her sister the Duchess of Leinster who created settings for
the two great Palladian houses, Castletown and Carton in County Kildare in a
typically Irish manner, more in line with Stephen Switzer’s natural wilderness
as outlines in his ‘Ichnographia Rustica’ (1741) where he criticised the
formality of Dutch gardening. This was a reaction to the manicured bare lawns
of rolling grass vistas from the houses as an expression of control. In
addition the social statement this feature was making was an indication of the
wealth of the landowner in being able to afford to either pay teams of
scythe-wielding Irish labourers to keep their pristine lawns in check or keep a
herd of sheep to do the job. Others in a contrived obsession of geometric
perfection employed hundreds of local labourers to drain natural lakes and
bogs.
 |
| Castletown House, Co. Kildare purchased by the State in 1994 |
This was the landscaping pursuits of colonisers. However some
Anglo-Irish landlords manipulated the natural Irish landscape for either
aesthetic or functional reasons and in doing so they have changed the
vernacular language of certain parts of the country just as they did with the
renaming of the townlands. The two native Irish oak tree species, Quercus robur
(pendunculate or common oak) and Quercus petraea (sessile oak) fell victim to
the reshaping of the countryside Oak had a spiritual importance to the Celts
and were protected by Brehon law. Of the 62,000 townland
names in Ireland, 13000 have reference to trees and 1,600 have some derivation
of ‘dair’ the Irish work for oak, e.g. Cill Dara (Kildare) meaning ‘Church of
the Oak.’ Landscaping was not just a frivolous activity to satisfy aesthetic
tastes; it became a social and economic necessity. It was one thing to clear
the land of forests and lakes but it was another to incorporate evidence of
Ireland’s independent Celtic past as part of their demesne design. Round towers,
ruins of abbeys and monasteries were used as follies and eye catchers for the
pleasure of the landowner. Not
 |
| Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough |
only did the retention of an older building or
ruin in the vicinity of a contrasting new building help to project a sense of
progress but it can be seen as an
overall analogy of the acquisition of tangible structures with evocative
overtones of past grandeur, high kings, native saints and Roman Catholicism. The earliest recorded
proposal to use a ruined building building as a garden ornament has already
been noted in Sir John Vanbrugh’s letter to the Duchess of Marlborough of 1709.
In this he urges her to retain the ruined shell of Woodstock Manor as an
eye-catcher to close the vista in the new park at Blenheim in addition to its
picturesque qualities. Owing to the fact that
this was before the fashionable taste for follies typified by Alexander Pope
the Duchess demolished the ruin. When the taste for follies did become popular
at times they were even faked by landscape architects.
To interpret and understand landscape design in its entirety the
dwelling of the landowner on the estate must also be taken into consideration.
These were the 'Big House' to use the Irish vernacular. In ‘Classic Irish
Houses of the Middle Size’ Maurice Craig points out that the term itself
indicates more about the position of the landlord than it does about the actual
size of the residence. In Post-Independence
Ireland the meaning of the term “big house” has become a general expression for
large and threatening institutions, particularly prisons and mental hospitals.
For the Anglo-Irish novelist, the gentry house became the most compelling
symbol of ascendancy ideologies and survival. Roy Foster reminds us that it can
also be read as insecurity not just triumphalism that lies behind the
architectural stamp of ascendancy culture on the landscape. Defensive architecture
became an inspiration for landscape design such as the castellated façade of
Glin Castle which was gothicised in the 1780s. These defensive motifs
have the associated connotations of keeping outsiders out on the peripheries
literally and socially. The fate of actual Big Houses in the twentieth century
reflects the working out of such rupture and turbulence in Irish history.
During the struggle for independence from 1919 to 1921 and the subsequent civil
war, nearly two hundred Irish country houses were destroyed as the symbols of a
colonising force, sometimes without considerations for the policies of their
owners.
These quiet residences were attacked due to the understanding of the
power of the image. Still other houses withstood the years of political crises
only to fall victim to the inability of their owners to maintain them or to the
neglect of a new national ambivalent about its colonial heritage. For instance
Lady Gregory’s Coole Park, the eighteenth century Big House that served as the
centre of the Irish Literary Revival, was torn down in 1941, reputedly for the
price of its stone. W.B. Yeats prophesised
its coming ruin in a dignified appeal to posterity
Here traveller,
scholar, poet take your stand
When all these rooms
and passages are gone
When nettle wave upon
a shapeless mound
And sapling root
among the broken stone
(‘Coole Park, 1929’)
 |
| Coole Park, Gort, Co. Galway sold to the State in 1927. Demolished in 1941 |
Similarly in 1961, a few years after Elizabeth Bowen found herself
unable to meet the costs of maintaining Bowen’s Court, the house dating back to
1776 was demolished by a new owner who was more interested in acquiring fertile
farmland then in preserving a historic mansion that entertained such literary
guests as Virginia Wolf.
Even though Irish architecture was built in the same method and style as
England, it is an individual story, as distinct from that of England. Christopher
Hussey, editor of Country Life observed in the 1930s that Irish Architecture ‘developed
along the lines that have only a general reference to English practice. This could be due to the fact
that remarkably few architectural books were published in eighteenth century
Ireland, and few that were are concentrated in the 1750s. For early eighteenth
century stuccodores like Michael Stapleton who have to reply on their patron’s
awareness of trends in England or the slow trickle of imported English pattern
books such as George Richardson, Michelangelo Pergolesi, James Gibbs, Isaac
Ware and William Adam provided most of the vocabulary of the practitioners. Curiously patrons after
1800 did not make these decorative decisions but in fact this aesthetic
expressive was left up to the whims of the builder. However when patrons did
make such décor statements they did not slavishly imitate their Continental
contemporaries. They generally stuck to the Palladian style in a reaction to
the Baroque style prominent in mainland Europe. The most outstanding
characteristic of the Irish house was the ‘largeness of scale.’ For Hussey this
peculiarly Irish phenomenon was due to a series of causes, including the
cheapness of labour. Funny that Wittgenstein should have been making his
statement in the 1930s when other were discussing how Ireland contributed so
much to Georgian architecture such as the discovery of the Castletown drawings
by Edward Lovett Pearce who was not given significant attention except for an
article in the Irish Builder in 1931.
Misguided perspectives of our colonial past and the gathering bitterness
of a looming Easter Rising anniversary led to the demolition of sixteen
Georgian buildings in the 1960s on Fitzwilliam Street to make way for the ESB
Headquarters (1970) designed by Gibney Stephenson & Associates. It was once
the longest expanse of intact Georgian architecture anywhere in the world.The Georgian vista that existed until then consisted
of almost a mile of continuous houses passing through two squares. Drury no
doubt brought this street to the attention of the critical Wittgenstein. They
have since tried to undo the wrongs of the past by restoring Number Twenty Nine
as a reproduction of life in eighteenth century Dublin. The look of the
building can be imitated but alas not the genius loci. Another example of the tension
of the loom 1916 anniversary was the destruction of the very unpopular Nelson
Pillar by the IRA on the 8 March 1966.
Those ultra Republicans who chose to take out their
frustrations on the big houses were selective in their task. They ignored such
houses as Avondale, the 523 acre estate situated at the southern end of the
Avonmore Valley in Rathdrum, County Wicklow where Charles Stewart Parnell was
born and lived all his life.The
celebrated ‘uncrowned king’ of Ireland was a landowner himself. The house
originally designed by James Wyatt and completed in 1777.
It was handed over to the state in 1904 with repairs carried out in 1935. It is
now the Forestry School run by Coillte. Conversely Patrick Pearse moved his
school St Enda’s from Ranelagh to the Hermitage, an eighteenth century house in
Rathfarnham surrounded by park and woodland haemorrhaging money since the day
it opened.
 |
| Exterior of Stonborough House |
Looking at Wittgenstein’s one and only completed
design it is no surprise that the Georgian paradigm ‘had nothing very important
to say.’ Stonborough House 1926-1928
is a tangible expression of his philosophical theories in ‘Tractatus
Logio-Philosophicus’ (1921). It is a white cube, absent of all ornamentation, polished
concrete floors and curtainless windows. His influences by his friend Adolf
Loos who once did a paper called ‘Ornament and Crime’ are evident. Wittgenstein
was reading Freud at the time who argued that unconscious forces seethed below
a purportedly ordered and elegant society so this could also account for
Wittgenstien’s abhorrence of decoration. This is a stark contrast to the
finishes and furnishings of Georgian dwellings.
 |
| Interiors of Stonborough House |
In the post-colonial nostalgia to recreate what
Ireland supposedly was like before the Plantations, De Valera announced the
start of Ireland’s cultural exclusiveness with the naming of Catholicism and
Irish was the first religion and language of the country in the 1937
Constitution. The once dubbed Land of Saints and Scholars which attracted
scholars from all over Europe in the quest for knowledge and learning now
proclaimed its policy of self-induced isolation. This ironically made Fianna
Fail as guilty as the ascendency of sectarianism; of favouring one set of value
systems over another. Therefore it is important that the current generation
fully embraces all aspects of our architectural past by investigating the
negatives and positives of the Georgian ideologies as expressed in their
environment. The landscape is a legacy of past economic and social order and it
produces meanings which vary over time as different ‘readings’ or constructions
are put on it. For Wittgenstein philosophical problems have
their beginnings in the feeling of being lost and in an unfamiliar place and
philosophical answers are in the nature of finding one’s way back.
This image of turning back, of finding not as moving forward towards a gal but
as being led back, is pervasive in his later writings and that is what Ireland
has to do to fully appreciate her Georgian landscape.
