Little Republics E-Book

Adrian Duncan

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 157

Beschreibung

Bungalow Bliss, first published in 1971, was a book of house designs that buyers could use to build a home for themselves affordably. It first appeared two years before Ireland was to join the EEC as a self-published catalogue by Jack Fitzsimons from his Kells Art Studios in County Meath. He and his wife designed and collated it and printed it locally. Fitzsimons sold these books out of his car to newsagents, petrol garages and bookshops.Over the course of thirty years, Fitzsimons sold over a quarter of a million copies of his catalogue. The first edition contained twenty designs – the final edition contained two hundred and sixty.This guidebook of how to build your own home radically transformed housing in Ireland. Now, for the first time, author and structural engineer Adrian Duncan looks at the cultural impact that Bungalow Bliss and the accessible bungalow design had on the housing market, the Irish landscape, and on the individual families who made these bungalows their homes.

Leseprobe

Little Republics

To my sister Jeannie

Little Republics

The Story of Bungalow Bliss

Adrian Duncan

The Lilliput Press

Also by Adrian Duncan:

The Geometer Lobachevsky

Midfield Dynamo

A Sabbatical in Leipzig

Love Notes from a German Building Site

Contents

My father’s drawing board

The lie of the land

1971–1980

Alternative catalogues

1981–1988

‘Palazzi Gombeeni’

1989–2001

The return to Bungalow Bliss

Reference note

Other books by Jack Fitzsimons

Image credits

Bibliography

Appendix

Acknowledgments

‘CLEARLY PERPLEXED!

Whether we like it or not, Jack Fitzsimons’s Bungalow Bliss will be studied a century hence with the attention we now give to the pattern books of Batty Langley and William Halfpenny, because it will have clearly left its mark on Ireland even more clearly than they. Clearly something has gone wrong somewhere.’

Dr Maurice James Craig, The Irish Times, quoted on page one of Bungalow Bliss, edition 7, 1981

‘A book which is worth its weight in gold.’

Tipperary Star, quoted on the back cover of Bungalow Bliss, edition 7, 1981

‘The American cousins who had made it in the States sent back pictures and reports of the good life. Rural Ireland got used to looking to America for status symbols. Since the end of the sixties, the decade dominated in Ireland by the influx of American money and industry, Country and Western has become a staple music of rural Ireland. The new bungalows are the embodiment of the spirit of Irish Country and Western … The new generation in the countryside would rather own an American homestead in Ireland than pine for an Irish homestead in America.’

Fintan O’Toole, The Sunday Tribune, 22 April 1984

‘John Moriarty, a Connemara-born [sic] writer, believes that the brashness and vulgarity of so many of these houses built in rural Ireland suggests that their owners “are taking revenge on the land” for all of the years of foreign over-lordship, poverty, dispossession, and famine.’

Frank McDonald, The Irish Times, 26 June 1997

A second-hand Ford Capri pulls up onto the side of a hedge- lined road, about a mile outside of town. It’s a bright, breezy day in early autumn; the trees are rattling. The hedge is lush and dense. A painted sign stands in the middle of the field: ‘Sites for Sale’. Cows graze quietly around.

A young man and woman get out of the car. She has black hair and is wearing a white blouse and sky-blue skirt. He wears brown, bell-bottomed corduroys, a tight check shirt and a loosened tie. Together they cross the road and try to peer through gaps in the hedge. They walk back to the car. The woman takes off her shoes and they both climb gingerly from the doorframes onto the bonnet and then the roof. They turn, look back over the hedge and into the open field.

They imagine what it would be like to build a house and have a family there.

Then they try to picture what this house might look like.

1 My father’s drawing board

When I was eleven or so my father left his job in the Longford County Council to set up his own engineering consultancy. He converted one of the bedrooms in our home into a drawing office where he drafted house plans and planning permissions for local people. I was in primary school and enjoyed watching him ‘inking up’ a design, his hand zipping a horizontal line across the tracing paper, then dropping a variety of careful verticals and diagonals until all of this wet ink began to magically take the form of a single-storey house. These houses he drew were quite similar to, and in one way or another originated from, a set of house designs that had by then been around for almost two decades – the Bungalow Bliss book.

I went through secondary school taking mostly technical subjects and then left to study structural engineering in Scotland. During the summer breaks I came home to help out with my father’s growing consultancy. The office was now in what was once our turf shed. It consisted of a spacious and bright drafting room, with two drawing tables, a print room and a small archive. My father’s business was not only producing many house designs but also some larger housing schemes, and I helped with the mapping of these layouts, the drafting of the associated drawings and their printing too. Here I saw, now under my own hand, these bungalows begin to take shape once more. After I graduated from university, I went off and worked for a number of structural engineering firms in the UK and Ireland, designing multistorey commercial buildings, and I forgot about the bungalows.

A decade later, I left my job as an engineer and enrolled in the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) for an MA degree called Art in the Contemporary World. I took a course titled Other Modernisms, and each week our lecturers presented us with a variety of works of art and architecture from around the world. It was in this class, gazing at colourful slides of curved and pointed edifices – the work of Oscar Niemeyer in Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Niterói – and being told how these designs were a blend of high-modern and local architectural styles, that I first wondered: What might the Irish ‘other modernism’ be? The Bungalow Bliss catalogues that once lay around my father’s office rushed back to my mind. I realized these books had influenced not just his drawings but also the drawings of countless engineers and draughtspeople throughout the country. I resolved to explore the origin of these influential books.

One morning, over half a century ago, in early July of 1971, a man called Jack Fitzsimons left his house in Kells, County Meath, with a car boot full of small self-published books. He drove through the twisting trunk roads of rural Ireland to large towns in the midlands, south and west, selling these books to any newsagents, petrol stations or bookshops that would take them.

Declared across the front cover were the words BUNGALOW BLISS. Inside were twenty designs that could be used to build affordable homes. These designs were ordered from Fitzsimons either over the phone or by post. The drawings (usually a set of three, showing plans, elevations and cross-sections) were sent out for a small fee. The buyer put them through the planning process and then the houses these drawings described could be built. Before this book appeared, the options for housing in rural Ireland were: inheritance, getting on the housing list, or emigration. The cost of employing an architect was prohibitively high, and the idea of doing so was beyond the horizons of most. Bungalow Bliss unlocked a need in many thousands of Irish people at the time and it became an instant bestseller. Within a year edition 2 appeared, and the year after edition 3, and then edition 4 … The book was rewritten, expanded on and republished throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties. A twelfth edition was released in 1998 and reprinted up to 2001. During these thirty years, over a quarter of a million copies were sold, roughly one for every second household in the countryside.

Fig. 1

By the late seventies, around the time I was born, over ten thousand of these one-off bungalows were being built each year in rural Ireland. The cost of land was low, so too the cost of construction. The plan area of each design in the book fell under 116 square metres. This deliberate feature qualified a homeowner for state aid of up to £300, about ten per cent of the cost of the whole build. It was a plan size that would accommodate a lower-middle-income earner. It was of far less interest to the wealthier homebuilder – a bracket of higher earners that comprised less than five percent of the population.

On the outskirts of small and larger towns space was less expensive, which gave the homeowner extra room to expand the home should they, in the future, have more children. Cars and motorbikes were now more affordable, and had become the dominant form of transport in the countryside. This led to ribbons of these houses, most of which were on roadside plots of land measuring between one-half and three-quarters of an acre – a dimension that came from a tax break of which farmers could avail.

During these years it wasn’t only ideas about homebuilding that were undergoing a seismic shift; beliefs on accessible education and fostering wealth through foreign investment were also making themselves physically apparent. The most prominent of these new buildings were the Regional Technical Colleges (RTCs), and the Industrial Development Agency (IDA) buildings, all modular structures hosting a technical kind of education and labour. These low-slung buildings had façades of brick and cladding, with large windows and broad doors, and were constructed using materials associated with light industry – aluminium, concrete, mild steel, Perspex. They were surrounded by networks of roadways, car parks edged with landscaped grass. Newly planted leylandii shrubs and poplars graced the roadways in front of the RTCs and IDA buildings, something that also began to happen around the new bungalows.

While I was in NCAD exploring these types of buildings, I decided to take another look at the old drawings in my father’s office. I re-examined the planning permission documents required for a one-off house. I was struck by the stark pragmatism of the demands: a soil test, a series of site maps of increasing scale and six copies of the plans proposed. The Ordnance Survey land maps used in this planning pack had no contours on them, so the only sense of three-dimensional interplay for any proposed site were two numerical spot levels indicating the difference in height between the main road and the floor of the new house. How the building looked on the site was never visualized. It became clear to me that the schematic nature of this planning pack not only suited the technical skill set of the applicants, but also the decision makers in the county councils, where no architects were employed. This form of mapping flattened the country. When the landscape merely undulated, this document functioned well, but when the land began to roll and lift, especially in the ‘untouched’ West, this system broke down disastrously. Some cultural commentators called the results a ‘desecration’. By the late eighties this issue – often exacerbated by local politicians overturning planning decisions – sparked outrage from the architectural establishment and the broadsheet press. But this wasn’t the only problem identified by the cultural gatekeepers. They complained that not only were these new homes harmful to the environment, but that they were ‘inauthentic’ too. The ‘vernacular cottage’ was held up often – in a kind of Gaelic-Revivalist manner – as an exemplar of how one-off housing in the Irish countryside should appear.

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

The form and aspect of a thatched cottage stemmed from the materials available to build it: stone, timber, straw. The roof covering of straw, for example, was close to hand and in good abundance, so too stone and timber. The basic building blocks of a Bungalow Bliss-era home were also close to hand and in good abundance. These blocks were all precast concrete and 440 mm in length and could be bought ‘off the shelf’ at any of the concrete works that then dotted the country, usually near limestone quarries. For the bungalows, this 440 mm measurement affected more than the length of the walls: it dictated the size of the windows too. Formed with precast lintels and sills, they were all a multiple of this 440 mm-long block.

One of the new planning rules for house design at this time was that the window openings to each room had to be no less than one-tenth of the floor area they served. This prescription is like a grammatical rule, and it influences how the building will look. When a central government lays down rules for its national institutions, it also does this for building regulations. This standardization helps to shape the modern style of any building stemming from these rules.

If you combine the height of the previous cottage windowsill, the need for a larger window opening, the precast lintels available, and the type of to-hand building skills in place, you end up with the typical wide window of the Bungalow Bliss house. This blend of precedent, accessible materials and available technique extends to every other aspect of these houses – the plinth, the walls, the roof, the chimney – and it produced a new and valid style of housing that reflected the administrative and cultural forces being exerted on the people. To return to the correct architectural term: these houses had become ‘the vernacular’.

Figs. 4–7

One afternoon last year while I was home visiting my parents, I found a hard drive from a decade ago and in it I came across some of the countless photographs I’d taken of our house back when I was studying in NCAD. I took a walk around our home, looking at the many extensions added to it over the decades. I tried to recall the people who helped to build them. Later that evening I asked my father which of his friends were involved in the original bungalow. He listed some names that I vaguely remembered, then he told me, with a rueful laugh, about the time he and these friends missed the second half of the 1976 FA Cup Final because the cement supplier (a ‘GAA man’ apparently) turned up at the site just before half-time. My father received a call in the pub and hastened back to begin the pour. While he recounted this, I thought of him and his friends, as young men, laying the foundations of our house, then building up the walls, erecting the prefabricated roof trusses, fitting the tiles, the chimney pots and capping stones, then sealing it all with standard windows, doors and swathes of plaster and paint. I wondered why they worked in this way and from where they had learned their skills.

You are standing in a field waiting for a friend to arrive. The opened blueprint of your future house is in your hands. It crimps and flaps in the breeze. You peer at the drawing, then drop your measuring tape to the ground, and put your ruler and pencil back into the breast pocket of your shirt.

Your friend pulls up at the entrance to the field, a long break in the hedge, and he walks up to you. For a while you discuss where to start. He returns to his car and takes from the boot some builders’ twine, several timber pegs, and the wheelbarrow contraption that the local GAA club use to mark out the lines of the football field.

Following the layout and dimensions on the blueprint, you mark out the lines of the plan of the building and paint this pattern onto the grass, delineating the external and internal walls.

2 The lie of the land

If you stopped and looked at the land from a country roadside in the 1960s, you’d often see huddles or clachans of white-washed cottages in the distance. These houses were of rubble-wall construction, usually uncut stones of uneven size erected with great skill, one stone fitted upon another and covered over in a lime mortar. These buildings had small windows, squat, direct-entry doors and thatched roofs. They had one or sometimes two communal rooms, and an outhouse toilet. The windows in these houses were quite small because glass was expensive and the technology for creating the window openings (lintels) consisted of a stone of unusual length. These clachans sat into the landscape in valleys, near rivers, and in a place of natural shelter. Jack Fitzsimons himself spent his early childhood in a house of this kind in County Meath. From a distance, the whitewash on the walls made these houses appear clean and the colour of the thatch helped them blend in with the landscape. This view was a romantic one, something Paul Henry might have painted. However, if you ventured down from the road – winding through the valley along a pathway, one maybe wide enough for a horse and cart – and approached these clachans and their unheated and unplumbed innards, you would soon realize how poor the living conditions were. These two points of view – the perspective of a person outside gazing from a distance, and that of the inhabitant looking out from within – are both important, if wholly different, positions from which to consider a house.

The placement of cottages within these clachans was influenced by such things as the position of a nearby fairy pad, or even just who your neighbour might be. Groups of neighbours helped each other to plan, build, harvest and celebrate. These meitheals contained people with a variety of skills, from wall-building or weaving, to joinery, pottery, or thatching. Sharing these skills made the whole greater than the sum of its parts. When I was young, I remember asking my mother about some of the strange straw roofs still in use around our parish. It was then I first learned about the tradesperson called the thatcher. Each meitheal would certainly have had one in their midst, and this man or woman would cover any new roofs being built. The thatcher was also employed to maintain these roofs, something required about every four years. This craft was handed down through the family for generations.