Conor Lawless, What is There, Under Your Wallpaper? The Quotidien in Irish Civic Architecture

Conor Lawless

What is There, Under Your Wallpaper?

The Quotidian in Irish Civic Architecture

AAD Dissertation Studio 1 2020–21

Extracts from Conor Lawless, What is There, Under Your Wallpaper? The Quotidian in Irish Civic Architecture

Dissertation Studio 1 Another Place Tutor: Ektoras Arkomanis

School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2021

Act I On a corner site at the top of a hill in Galway sits a stone building, set back from the street.

A lamppost. A bollard. A tree. Another lamppost. A stream of cars. A handful of taxis. A bus. A one-way system: cars in the left lane continue straight ahead, perhaps to Dublin or Athlone; the others must swing around and repeat the route, unless they decide to go left at the bottom of the hill (taxis often complete the circle several times if they cannot find a parking space at the rank).

Across the street is a row of former terraced houses with a roofline that steps up and down in an inconsistent manner. There is a shop, a public house, a laundrette, a hostel, an off-licence. Above are apartments, mostly for students (this is the main walking route to the university). They stroll by in groups of two or three. A jogger slows and comes to a halt behind one such group; they turn right, and he restarts his journey at his original pace.

Beyond the street, deep green hedges loom over lowly stone walls. Baskets of lively flowers hang from rusty metal poles: purples, yellows, greens, dangling over the edges.

It can only be summer – the urban landscape is a high priority when tourists arrive for the festivals.

The approach to the building bisects the corner, diverging from the street in a diagonal manner. A ramp runs alongside a group of steps that lead to a recessed entrance: a void cut from the solid mass. The entrance is like an open mouth, with windows for eyes above. An unusual sculpture stands outside. It resembles a totem pole, vertical in stature and composed of four equally sized white blocks, each slightly overlapping the one below. Turned on its side it looks like a sawtooth roof.

I do not know what it represents but it has always been there.

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Civic is Ordinary In a struggle to adequately articulate his theories on Shakespeare, the nervous protagonist in James Joyce’s Ulysses seeks assistance from his Jesuit faith by invoking the guidance of its founder: ‘Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!’.1 Originating in a book called the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the ‘composition of place’ was created as a method for believers in the faith to achieve a more effective moment of spiritual enlightenment. In order to pray effectively, the book asserts, one should imagine a concrete physical setting in the first instance, like a stage set of the mind; a ‘material place’ where the specific object one wishes to contemplate is located.2 Among the examples offered are a temple and a mountain, the locations where Jesus Christ can be found. The aim is to place oneself within this composition and to experience it as a concrete reality. It is a way of conjuring an alternative world in which the noise of the outside ceases.

At the Place Saint-Sulpice, a busy square in Paris, the French writer Georges Perec concocts an experiment in observation and perception. He decides to spend three days monitoring the square from cafés on its perimeter. Perec is fascinated by the mundane, what he terms the ‘infra-ordinary’.3 He laments the state of a society that cares only about the dramatic, the bombastic, the extraordinary. He wants to know about the miners’ conditions of work as much as about the pit explosion that makes the news: ‘The daily papers talk of everything except the daily.’4 The belief that wonder and delight also lie within the apparently insignificant drives Perec’s curiosity for the unfamiliar in the commonplace. The presence of the civic foyer as habitual background is explored in this chapter through a consideration of the space from the perspective of a city dweller.

The project begins with an acknowledgement of various established elements – the travel agency, the church, the hotel, the funeral parlour – that are dismissed as they have already been recorded elsewhere.

Perec creates a parallel dimension where the banal is assigned greater prominence, or even celebrated.

Once he considers himself present in this world, he seeks patterns in the activities he observes, often in the movement of people, animals or machines in his field of vision. By translating these movements into recurring sequences and codes, he can take notice of any anomalies – the lure of the singularity is rejected 1 2

James Joyce and Stuart Gilbert, Ulysses (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2010), p. 168.

Michael Ivens, The Spiritual Exercises Of Saint Ignatius Of Loyola (Leominster: Gracewing, 2004), cited in Nicolas Standaert, “The Composition of Place Creating Space for an Encounter”, The Way, 46.1 (2007), pp. 7-8

3

Georges Perec and John Sturrock, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 176.

4

Ibid. p. 177.

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Fig 2. Place Saint-Sulpice, photographed by Edouard Boubat in 1948

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as part of this process of highlighting the infra-ordinary. Perec manages to reveal the habitual – that which we do not question, precisely because of our inherent belief that it carries no useful information.

Again the pigeons go round the square. What triggers off this unified movement? It doesn’t seem linked to any exterior stimulus (explosion, detonation, change in light, rain, etc.) nor to any particular motivation; it seems completely gratuitous: the birds suddenly take flight, go round the square and return to settle on the district council building’s gutter.

It is two twenty.5 Throughout the experiment, Perec is limited in his observations from his static position in the square.

His field of vision is framed by a set of firm boundaries – all observations take place within this region.

In this regard Perec is both observer and participant – he inserts himself into the project in a kind of experimental fieldwork. All recordings of the place are contingent on the decisions he makes before, during and after the process, as well as his level of fatigue throughout. As noted by Paul Virilio, a former colleague at the magazine Cause Commune, Perec never observes the city front on, but always from the side: ‘Like an impressionist painter in front of his subject’, he is simultaneously observing and composing the place.6 This dynamic field of vision allows him to retain the ability to drift from object to subject; he rejects the fixed view and preserves a capacity to shift from the exotic to the endotic. The frame established by Perec from each of his outposts around the square is one which can be entered or exited by participants, each contributing to the project but never completing it.

In front of the civic offices in Galway, the framed view is one in which the façade and civic foyer engage in a figure-ground perception, where the viewer must instinctively distinguish building from landscape.

The tension of space and artifact results in an emphasis on the scale of the physical matter over the empty foyer in front. Perceptions of Ireland have traditionally been shaped through disproportionate representations of cottages in the countryside – anthropologists and ethnographers typically focused on romantic visions of the country, where the rural west became emblematic of the whole.7 The civic foyer, along with urban areas generally, tends to be ignored. Joyce recognised this and rejected it, preferring

5

Georges Perec and Marc Lowenthal, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Cambridge, Mass. ; New York: Wakefield Press, 2010), p. 16.

6

Paul Virilio and Clare Barrett, “A Walking Man”, AA Files, 2001.45/46 (2001), p. 136.

7

Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Irish Ethnologies (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), p. 23.

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instead to portray inner Dublin through the eyes of ordinary city dwellers. Along with Perec, he elevated the mundane parts of the city to the status of the extraordinary.

The role of the civic foyer in contemporary Irish architecture is typically perceived as a passive one which offers a space to rest before entering the building. But this is not its primary function. Its role here is one of subservience to an authority greater than itself. The lack of physical presence is precisely its identity. It provides a clearing, affording the façade a grand void through which visitors can visually absorb its scale.

The building’s dominant presence in the street is a direct result of the space in front of it. The distance between the building and the street is deliberate, it allows the entire elevation to be consumed with a single glance. The architecture is not a spectacle, because ultimately the observer is disengaged; rather it recedes to form a symbolic backdrop which still influences the power dynamics in the street. Civic identity is manifest as authoritative control rather than participation in municipal functions. It can be read as a missed opportunity, because through their frontality, the buildings insert themselves into the timeline of institutions established by the British state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Historically related to ideas of power, the term ‘frontality’ has been present in art since at least the eleventh century, when the Bayeux Tapestry was created. It is typically used as a method of depicting an object or figure in parallel plane to that of the picture surface. For example, most figures in the tapestry are shown in profile, following the direction of the narrative. These are often warriors who appear as two-dimensional profiles that move in the direction of history. In contrast, King Harold assumes the full measure of kingly power by looking directly back at the viewer. The king is all-seeing and stands outside of history and time – he is independent of the ongoing battle in the background of the scene. His role is to see as well as to be seen.8 What is notable, however, is the relationship between the frontality of the elevation and the apparent lack of depth on it. In addition to the above example, the façade at of Cork Civic Offices can be neatly organised into a series of rectilinear planes which contribute to a larger whole. The perception of these walls as flat surfaces rather than the outcome of construction with a liveable ‘thickness’ lies in this absence of depth. In order to adequately contrast with the ‘void’ provided by the civic foyer, the façade is considered as a uniform planar entity, which emerges from the landscape in an abrupt fashion.

Windows are regarded as frames through which to view, rather than punched openings that break free 8

R. Howard Bloch, “Frontality: The Imperial Look from Christ the Pantocrator to Napoleon Bonaparte”, MLN, 126.4S (2011), S44–59 (p. S47)

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Fig 3. The civic foyer as architectural journey. Pálás cinema, Galway

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from the façade – they are treated as part of the same planar surface. Indeed, the glazing sits slightly in front of the stone finish in an effort to maintain this uniformity. The depth of the walls is never revealed.

Elevations are composed as grids, expansive planes which can be divided into smaller geometric shapes. It simultaneously eschews both the romantic symbolism of medieval Ireland and the neoclassical imperialist architecture established by the British state.

Embedded within the fabric of the medieval city, Pálás is an arthouse cinema that engages in a dialogue with its ancestors. The complex nature of the fragmented urban mosaic is reflected in a piece of architecture – a grey monolith that pokes its head above the city – that appears to be constantly shifting, adapting to its neighbours depending on the position of the viewer. The smooth concrete façade unfolds along a series of planes that twist and turn as it is followed it along the street – a building that cannot be absorbed in a fleeting moment. To fully experience the place, one must place trust in it, and by extension in its architect, Tom de Paor. Time, patience, and vulnerability are key requirements; the visitor is expected to meet the architecture halfway by committing to a dramatic spatial adventure that begins on the street and tracks through a series of enclosures that reveal themselves slowly – architecture as cinematic narrative, equally confusing and enthralling.

Ascending a small stair from the footpath, the civic foyer emerges as a space that has been absorbed within the building. Still open to the elements (visitors have complained that the roof on its own offers little protection from the near-horizontal rain from the Atlantic) the conditions of this civic foyer are drastically different to those outlined earlier. It is a moment on a journey, an intimate room that thrives on ambiguity and presents few orthogonal junctions. Perceived as a carved void, like a sculpted cave in a mountain, it allows light to penetrate from several directions; the stepped underside of a stair crosses above, a cast memory that evokes the work of Rachel Whiteread. Moving through the space, natural light levels decrease as the tempered auditorium moves closer. The visitor participates in all manner of spatial events that unravel in a confusing choreography of labyrinthine moments. It is an exploration, a temporal revealing of a story not yet told – the civic foyer as drama. The façade as backdrop is eliminated and the elevation is fragmented so that any sense of monumentality is suppressed. Interior and exterior are considered a unified entity, as if the building is formed of the very earth from which it emerges.

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