Rent: apartment blocks and their uses

In 1974, pursuing his interest in the infra-ordinary – ‘the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the back-ground noise, the habitual’ – Georges Perec wrote about an idea for a novel:
‘I imagine a Parisian apartment building whose façade has been removed … so that all the rooms in the front, from the ground floor up to the attics, are instantly and simultaneously visible’.
In Life A User’s Manual (1978) the consummation of this precis, patterns of existence are measured within architectural space with an archaeological sensibility that sifts through narrative and décor, structure and history, services and emotion, the personal and the system, ascribing commensurate value to each.
Apartment comes from the Italian appartare meaning ‘to separate’. The space of the boundary between activities is reduced to a series of intimately thin lines: the depth of a floor, a party wall, a window, the convex peep-hole in a door, or the façade that Perec seeks to render invisible. The apartness of the apartment is accelerated when aligned with short-term tenancies. Here Perec’s interweaving of personal histories over time using the structure of the block, gives way to convivialities of detachment: inhabitants are temporary, their personalities anonymous, their activities unknown or overlooked.
Borrowing methods from Perec, to move somewhere between conjecture, analysis and other documentation and tracing relationships between form, structure, materiality, technology, organisation, tenure and narrative use, this paper interrogates the late twentieth-century speculative apartment block in Britain and Ireland arguing that its speculative and commodified purpose allows a series of lives that are often less than ordinary to inhabit its spaces.
Henri Lefebvre described the emergence of an ‘abstract space’ under capitalism in terms which can be applied to the apartment building: the division of space into freely alienable privatised parcels which can be exchanged. Vertical distributions of class and other new, contiguous social and spatial relationships are couched within a paradox: the building which allows such proximities is also a conductor of division. Apartment comes from the Italian appartare meaning ‘to separate’. The space of the boundary between activities is reduced to a series of intimately thin lines: the depth of a floor, a party wall, a window, the convex peep-hole in a door, or the façade that Perec seeks to render invisible. The apartness of the apartment is accelerated when aligned with short-term tenancies. Here Perec’s interweaving of personal histories over time using the structure of the block, gives way to convivialities of detachment: inhabitants are temporary, their personalities anonymous, their activities unknown or overlooked.

A box in the field: modernity and the barn in twentieth-century Ireland

This paper argues that the modern barn in Ireland is a complex social and architectural phenomena that is without, or has yet to find, a satisfactory discourse. Emerging in the middle third of the twentieth century, the modern barn – replete with corrugated iron and I-sections – continues to represent a presence in the Irish landscape whose ubiquity is as emphatic as its flexibility. It is, however, its universal properties that begin to suggest connections with wider narratives. The modernising aspects of the barn that appear in the 1920s and 30s begin to conflate with a rhetoric of architectural modernism which was simultaneously appearing across Europe. But while the relationship between high modernism’s critique of what it divined as the inspirational qualities of utilitarian buildings – Walter Gropius on grain silos, Le Corbusier on aircraft hangers etc. – has been well-documented, in Ireland this relationship perhaps contains another layer of complexity.
The barn’s consolidation as a modern type coincided with the search for a nation’s cultural identity after centuries of colonial rule. This tended to be an introspective vision that prioritised rural space over urban space, agriculture over industry, and imagined the small farm as a central tenet in the construction of a new State. This paper suggests that the twentieth-century barn – as a product of the mechanisation of agriculture promoted by the new administrations – is an iconic structure, emblematic of attempts to reconcile the contradictory forces and imagery of modernity with the mores of a traditional society. Moreover, given a cultural purview that was often ambivalent or even hostile to the ideologies and forms of modernity, the barn in Ireland is, perhaps, not so much the inspiration but the realisation of an architectural modernism in that country at its most pervasive, enduring and unself-conscious.

The Dublin Lock Hospital: Medicine, Morality, Disease and Sin

Anecdotal evidence has it that when Dublin’s venereal disease hospital closed its doors for the last time in the 1950s, its administrative staff began to burn its records, starting with the most recent. This attempt to conceal the results of sexual profligacy is perhaps understandable in the rarefied climate of mid-century Catholic Ireland. However, the sense of shame attached to this institution has been pervasive. For example, of all Dublin’s major hospitals, the lock hospital remains the only one without a dedicated history. And, throughout its two centuries of existence, the ‘lock’ had often been a site of controversy and approbation.

The institution began in the eighteenth century as the most peripatetic, poor relation of the city’s voluntary hospitals, wandering indiscriminately through a series of temporary premises before finally achieving a permanent home and official recognition as a military-sponsored medical hospital in 1792. It also gained architectural extensions by both Richard and Francis Johnston and in the following decades. This new-found status and a growing re-conceptualisation of venereal disease as a legitimate medical problem rather than a matter of morality was, however, somewhat compromised by the choice of site at Townsend Street. The institution occupied a hidden part of city, appropriating the vacated home of the Hospital for Incurables, another marginalised group whose presence in the city had been viewed through the lens of superstition and fear. For the rest of its existence, the lock hospital would share this experience occupying a nebulous position between medicine and morality; disease and sin.

Using what’s left of the hospital’s records and a series of original architectural drawings, this paper discusses the presence and role of the lock hospital in the city in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, tracking how changes in its administration and architectural form reflected wider attitudes towards disease, sexuality and gender in Georgian Dublin.

Protestantism, Spectacle, Motherhood and Vice: Dublin's New Pleasure Gardens

In 1748, Bartholomew Mosse, a curious combination of surgeon, obstetrician and entertainment impresario, established a pleasure garden on the northern fringes of Dublin. Ostensibly designed to fund the construction of a maternity hospital to be located adjacently, Mosse’s New Pleasure Gardens became one of the premier leisure resorts in Dublin. This was to have a profound effect on the city’s urban form. Within a few years the gardens became an epicentre of speculative development as the upper classes jostled to build their houses in the vicinity. Meanwhile, the creation nearby of Sackville Mall, a wide and generous strolling ground, established a whole section of the city dedicated to haute spectacle, display and leisure. Like other pleasure gardens in the British Isles, Mosse’s venture introduced new, commodified forms of entertainment. In the colonial context of eighteenth-century Ireland, however, ‘a land only recently won and insecurely held’ (Foster, 1988) by the Protestant Anglo-Irish settler class, the production of culture and spectacle was perhaps more significant than elsewhere. Indeed, the form of Mosse’s gardens echoed the private city gardens of a key figure in the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, while the hospital itself was constructed in a style of a Palladian country house, symbol of colonial presence in the countryside. However, like other pleasure gardens, the mix of music and alcohol, the heterogeneous crowd culled from across social and gender boundaries, and a landscape punctuated with secluded corners, meant that it also acquired a dubious reputation as a haunt of louche and illicit behaviours. The curious juxtaposition between a maternity hospital and pleasure garden, therefore, begins to assume other, hitherto hidden complexities. These are borne out by a closer examination of the architecture of the hospital, the shape of its landscape and the records of its patrons and patients.

Designing Bare Essentials: Aldi, Lidle and the architectures of cheapness

They’re cheap. They’re in every settlement of significance in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere. We all use them but perhaps do not always admit to it. Especially, if we are architects.
Over the past decades Aldi/Lidl low cost supermarkets have escaped from middle Europe to take over large tracts of the English speaking world remaking them according to a formula of mass-produced sheds, buff-coloured cobble-lock car parks, logos in primary colours, bare-shelves and eclectic special offers. Response within architectural discourse to this phenomenon has been largely one of indifference and such places remain, perhaps reiterating Pevsner’s controversial insights into the bicycle shed, on the peripheries of what we might term architecture. This paper seeks to explore the spatial complexities of the discount supermarket and in doing so open up a discussion on the architecture of cheapness. As a road-map, it takes former managing director Dieter Brandes’ treatise on the Aldi formula, Bare Essentials: the Aldi Way to Retailing, and investigates the strategies through which economic exigencies manifest themselves in a series of spatial tactics which involve building. Central to this is the idea of architecture as system rather than form and, in Aldi/Lidl’s case, the result of a spatial network of flows. To understand the architecture of the supermarket, then, it is necessary to measure the times and spaces of supply across the scales of intersection between global and local.
Evaluating the energy, economy and precision of such systems challenges the liminal position of the commercial, the placeless and especially the cheap within architectural discourse. As is well known, architectures of mass-production and prefabrication and their origins exercised modernist thinkers such as Sigfried Giedion and Walter Gropius in the early twentieth century and has undergone a resurgence in recent times. Meanwhile, the mapping of the hitherto overlooked forms and iconography of commerce in Learning from Las Vegas (1971) was extended by Rem Koolhaas et al into an investigation of the technologies, systems and precedents of retail in the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, thirty years later in 2001. While obviously always a criteria for building, to find writings on architecture which explicitly celebrate cheapness as a design virtue or, indeed, even iterate the word cheap is more difficult. Walter Gropius’ essay ‘How can we build cheaper, better, more attractive houses?’ (1927), however, situates the cheap within the discussions – articulated, amongst others, by Karl Teige and Bruno Taut – surrounding the minimal dwelling and the moral benefits of absence of the 1920s and 30s.
In our contemporary age of heightened consumption, it is perhaps fitting that an architecture of bare essentials is defined in retail rather than in housing, a commercial existenzminimum where the Miesian paradox of ‘less is more’ is resold as a paradigm of ‘more for less’ in the ubiquitous yet overlooked architectures of the discount supermarket.