BUNGALOW BLITZ

Bungalow Blitz: The House that Jack Built

in Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture, Banff (The Walter Phillips Gallery, 2006, forthcoming)

by Aoife Mac Namara

So I took off for a year. And do you know what I did? I went back to my home in Ireland and laid new sewers there, helped by a book called Bungalow Bliss that tells you how to do it. Nobody should be without it.? – Peter O’Toole, interviewed in the Sunday Express

Whether we like it of not, Jack Fitzsimon’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 left its mark on Ireland even more clearly than they. Clearly something has gone wrong somewhere.�? – Maurice James Craig, The Irish Times

Much of what is often crucial in explaining local phenomena is extra-local in origin. —James Walton¹

We will use the term ‘Bungalow’ here for convenience, to refer to unsuitably designed houses, insensitively sited. —John Gormley²

Buildings and monuments constitute a system of signs which we read and construe into a system of attachments and relationships. What we used to say about the lessons in infant school reading books can be said equally about the buildings and monuments, streets and squares, churches and factories which constitute our horizon of vision: we read them into ourselves. —Seamus Heaney, Maecenas to Mac Apline, 1986³

Since the late 1980s and the publication of a series of three provocative articles in which Frank Mc Donald coined the term “bungalow blitz”,� the debates about housing and rural Ireland have gained rapid and turgid stream with the matter debated in the Dáil, the Séanad the national press, television and electronic media, as well as appearing in the work of cultural practitioners in both the popular and more specialized arts and entertainment industries⁴.

This essay — like the photographic, installation and curatorial work that underscores it — looks to these debates, and particularly those conducted through the articles and letters pages of The Irish Times. It seeks to explore what the architecture and spatial cultures of the west of Ireland, and particularly the so-called traditional cottage, have come to stand for in the cultural imaginations of the post-independence cultural élites active in the campaign against those transformations in the built environment of the west of Ireland precipitated by the building of these one-off houses⁵.

Why do these communities — the urban and suburban professionals of our heritage, media, architecture and planning industries — care so much about the preferred style and situation of houses in rural communities? In a tiny country such as Ireland, how is it that what for one community represents prosperity and success, for another embodies national shame? How and in what ways are these debates unique to Ireland, and where do they cross into more global or international concerns?

From this initial premise, the work opens out to explore the buildings and sites developed in response to these plans and considers what, if anything, has been said about them in existing historical and theoretical studies. The archive out of which this project developed was, from the outset, scattered and incomplete. Jack Fitzsimons, the architect responsible for the plans around which the original bungalows were designed and built, was not a licensed or affiliated architect. So, when the Royal Institute of Irish Architects 150 Year of Irish Architecture: Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland 1839-1989, not a word was mentioned on the topic of what has been, even for its detractors, the most influential book to shape the built environment of post-1970s Ireland: Bungalow Bliss⁶. A search of library catalogues and journal indexes revealed a similar absence. While the lack of traditional archival resources out of which the curatorial research could draw first presented itself as a setback, it ultimately proved highly productive, forcing as it did the decision to commission new work from which a new archive could surface.

Broadly speaking, the bungalow debate can be summarized thus: the post 1970s proliferation of new, one-off houses along the roads and byways of rural Ireland is rapidly obliterating that for which Ireland is best known and valued: its unspoilt, wild and sparsely populated countryside⁷. As the architect Denis Anderson, quoted by Frank McDonald, said of a visit to Connemara:

I was almost physically sick … the whole place has been destroyed. No matter which road you go down there are monstrosities here, there and everywhere, and what’s just as depressing, is that you see all these signs advertising sites for sale to build more of the same. It’s really bad as it is, but I shudder to think what it will be like in a few years’ time. From what I saw in just one afternoon of driving around I wouldn’t want to set foot in Connemara again — ever⁸.

An apparent indivisibility of ideas of national self-image with patterns and practices of settlement is articulated in much of what has been written, by McDonald and others, about Bungalow Bliss. This makes understanding the nature of the conflict over the uses of land in rural Ireland difficult to access. If the idea of Ireland — of an unspoilt, wild west of Ireland — that is being threatened by the building of Jack Fitzsimons’s bungalows can be understood not as an ageless reality but as the product of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish imagination, why then do so many of us involved in contemporary Irish architectural, spatial and visual culture continue to hold this idea dear? What is it about this legacy that continues to bind us to it? In Kitsch as Authenticity: Irish Cinema and the Challenge to Romanticism, Ruth Barton, in her exploration of iconoclasm in Irish filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s, draws a parallel between the break with romanticism initiated by films such as Eat the Peach (Ireland, Peter Ormrod, 1986), and rise of “architectural kitsch”� in the same period.

The rapid modernization of Irish life from the 1960s onwards offered the opportunity to throw off the shackles of the rural aesthetic foisted on them by a combination of government rhetoric and impecuniosity. The quintessential signifier of the demise of rural folk culture has become the bungalow with its crazy paving Spanish arches and soap-opera name, and it is Jack Fitzsimons’s book of standard designs, Bungalow Bliss, which epitomises the aesthetic impoverishment of such architecture⁹.

While the dismissal of the bungalow as the product of aesthetic impoverishment might be a little hasty, Barton’s observation of the unsettled or contested nature of these houses and their attendant aesthetic within Irish society is well observed: “If for the local rural dweller�? she writes, “the abandonment of the traditional cottage in favour of the modern bungalow was a signifier of increased wealth, for the largely urban-based intelligentsia this has become nothing less that the defacement of the country’s natural beauty�[10].” Thinking about the significance of rural Ireland for this intelligentsia, Catherine Nash has suggested that one of the enduring attractions of rural Ireland in general, but of the west of Ireland in particular (for its colonial and post-colonial élites), is its ability to act as both “agent and arena.�” She writes, “In counterposing an Irish national identity, based on rural life and spirituality to that of an English urban, industrial materialism, the landscape of the West could be invested with symbolism based on the physical geography of the region and its social significance.�” And, because of its barren soil, lack of modern development and sparse population it stood out from other potential Irish landscapes, many of which did not “provide the degree of difference from the image of English ‘south country,’ to enable them to stand as national landscapes�[11].”

If, as Barton has suggested, Bungalow Bliss can be understood as kitsch writ-large on the Irish landscape, then David Lloyd’s argument about kitsch forms is certainly applicable. He asserts that kitsch forms have the ability to, “preserve in its congealed and privatized mostly portable forms, the memories of a community that cannot quite be a people”� while contemporaneously representing a “repertoire that can, in given political circumstances, be redeployed for collective ends¹².” The question is how, in the context of wholesale dismissal by the intellectual and cultural élites, this redeployment might be orchestrated. In her work on the cultural and political history of Ireland’s Gaeltacht (Irish language) regions, Nuala Johnson, like Barton and Nash, argues that the very idea of the west of Ireland was “invented, primarily by an intelligentsia, as a spatial metaphor for Irish nationhood¹³.” My argument here — and the argument that informs the exhibition projects out of which it has developed — borrows heavily from Johnson’s work, and on earlier studies by Catherine Nash and Declan Kiberd. They suggest that the controversies elicited by the popularity of these suburban-style bungalows, and particularly those in the west of Ireland, have — contrary to much of what is said and written — little to do with general questions of taste and architectural merit. Instead, such controversies have everything to do with the spatial and political pleasures of housing in the context of a landscape the social history of which has often been overlooked (and overwritten) by those for whom it was, first and foremost, always more of an idea of a place than an evolving “habitus[14�].”

In other words, this study explores what the idea of the west of Ireland in general, and its architectural and spatial cultures in particular, stand for in the cultural imagination of those post-independence cultural élites who, through their many and varied cultural practices, have been responsible for highlighting how, and in what ways, the proliferation of these bungalow-style houses compromises the special status of the region in the context of Irish and international identity¹⁵.

While most of us involved in the battle of the bungalows are Irish, like Frank MacDonald, our arguments are often buttressed by claims that the design and situation of these houses are, in their refusal to adopt the pre-modern tropes of the iconic thatched and whitewashed cottage, compromising Ireland’s ability to deliver to its foreign visitors the experiences and environments that they have come to expect¹⁶. While Ireland’s tourism and heritage industries have promised different kinds of experiences to different groups of visitors, they have, since the early days of the republic, helped package Ireland as the embodiment of a “lackadaisical pre-modern culture, inhabited mainly by old men and (rusting) bicycles¹⁷.” And, whether by good fortune or accurate forecasting, it appears that, in so doing, these early policy-makers have anticipated — and packaged — the perfect antidote for the fast-paced world of the “young professionals who make up the knowledge-generating elite of the new economy¹⁸” Together, the tourism and heritage industries have, through their work in film, promotional brochures, photography, television and print advertisements, produced an idea of a place apparently cut-off from the instability and loss of cultural authenticity that has become associated with life in an increasingly globalized, or homogenous, world¹⁹. And, in so doing, the tourism and heritage industries have produced a product as desirable to the indigenous professionals of the new economy as it is to the displaced tourist of the diaspora, or the lower-middle class English visitor drawn to the idea of a country life that, in her own county, she would never be able to access. This almost accidental new market has, I would argue, rendered the terms of the debate more acute than they could otherwise possibly have been. However, for all its charms, pleasures and possibilities, it would seem that from the anxieties expressed by those of us horrified by the idea of its loss, the pre-modern idyll is, in the context of today’s newly prosperous and internationally experienced west of Ireland, both fragile and unstable²⁰. If we take away that for which we are best recognized, what will we be left with? This question, and the threat of loss of national image that goes with it, seems to be at the heart of the debate, and this essay is concerned with understanding something of the anxieties that underwrite it.

In Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition, philosopher Alexander García Düttmann considers our need for recognition thus:

Someone wants to be recognized as this or that because he or she claims to be this or that. In other words, someone wants to be recognized on the grounds of having accomplished this or that, of belonging to this or that tradition, to this or that linguistic community. For it is not the pure fact of being, not the contingent isolation of an individual existence that justifies the demand for recognition, but rather the cultural mediation of a belonging, the cultural testimony which consists in having a result²¹.

Here, García Düttmann argues that the practice of recognition is always (and of necessity) caught in a dual action where recognition describes a process by which identity is both established and confirmed by the action of an “I�? who — in recognizing herself as part of an already established and deeply rooted “We�? — is both producing and witnessing herself²². If you believe, as I do, that the terms of the bungalow debate are less about house design and planning and more about national self-image (or lack thereof), then García Düttmann’s suggestion that the struggle for recognition “reveals itself to be a struggle for the possibility of revealing oneself-as-something,�? is important. Accordingly, we need to think about what the bungalow-builders of the west of Ireland are revealing to their detractors and why it is that these revelations, these acts of recognition, are so threatening to those who are immersed in them.

A review of newspaper editorials, articles, letter pages, Oireachtas (Irish parliamentary) debates, planning applications and other documents produced since the publication of Fitzsimons’s book Bungalow Bliss in 1971 reveals that, for its detractors, the problem with the west of Ireland bungalow appears to be that, in its architectural form, siting and landscaping, it pays little attention to the landscape in which it is situated²³. What is missing from many of these debates is a serious consideration of what this landscape means, to whom and for what reasons. To address this problem means thinking about two related, but slightly divergent questions. First, where has the idea of the west of Ireland as a landscape in need of preservation and protection come from? Second, how and in what ways might this idea of the west of Ireland be caught up in extra-local discourses about how land becomes apportioned between town and city when the traditional relationships between dwelling forms and forms of tenure becomes challenged by the “creation of a global commercial network, the spread of industrialization and the technological revolutions in transport and transferability?�? A process which many believe has led to cities everywhere becoming more like one another²⁴. I will first address the second question.

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Notes:

¹ J. Walton, “Political Economy of World Urban Systems,�” in _The City in Comparative Perspective_, eds. Walton and Massotti (New York: Wiley, 1976), 309.

² John Gorman quoted in Jack Fitzsimons, Bungalow Bashing (Kells: Kells Publishing Company, 1990), 133.

³ Seamus Heaney, “From Maecenas to MacAlpine” in 50 Years of Irish Architecture, ed. John Graby (Dublin: RIAI and Eblana Editions, 1989), 69.

⁴ The articles are: Frank McDonald, “Bungalow bliss” in ‘Weekend’, The Irish Times, (Saturday, September 12th, 1987) 1-3; “Bungalow blitz: blight and the palazzi gombeeni effect” in, The Irish Times, (Monday, September 14th, 1987), 8; “The ribbon that’s strangling Ireland” in, The Irish Times, (Tuesday, September 15th, 1987) 13. See also W. O’Keeffe and Seamus Grimes, “Bungalow Blitz” in ‘Letters to the Editor’, _The Irish Times_, (Saturday, September 19th, 1987), 11; Valeria Collins “Bungalow Blitz” in ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Irish Times, (Tuesday, September 22nd, 1987), 9, Frank McDonald “Writing off the Irish countryside” in ‘News Section’, The Irish Times, (Thursday, January 26th, 1997) and Paul Melia “Bungalow blitz is causing traffic problems” in _The Irish Independent_, (Tuesday, May 13th, 2004), 17. The Irish legislative assembly, or Oirecthas, is divided into two houses, the Dáil and the Séanad, or Senate. In 1998 the Irish artist John Gerrard exhibited his photographic series Great Irish Landscapes, at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin. Writing about the work on his website Gerard states “The series 18 Great Irish Landscapes used as a template the window designs found in the design book – Bungalow Bliss. In these works the photographic images are cut to the pane shapes of these original windows, then sealed onto aluminium sheets and rear mounted in shadow box frames.” See www.johngerrard.net (accessed November 7th, 2003) for more details of this work.

⁵ See Catherine Nash, “Embodying the Nation: The West of Ireland Landscape and Irish Identity” in Tourism in Ireland: A Critical Analysis, eds. O’Connor and Cronin (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), 86–115. See also Declan Sheehan’s review of the exhibition at the Letterkenny Art Centre published in CIRCA, (No.101, Autumn 2002) 90-91. In this review, Sheehan notes that remarks written in the gallery comment book by visitors to the Letterkenny exhibition indicated that _Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture_ was understood not as a criticism of the anti-bungalow arguments developed in response to Frank McDonald, but as an extension of them.

⁶ J. Graby, ed., 150 Years of Irish Architecture: RIAI 1839-1989 (Dublin: RIBI and Eblana, 1989), 108 Between 1971 and 1989, Jack Fitzsimons’s self-published _Bungalow Bliss_ in eleven editions. The book was on the Irish bestseller list and each of the bungalows in this exhibition were either directly or indirectly designed with consultation and reference to these books.

⁷ McDonald, 1987a, 1

⁸ McDonald, 14.

⁹ Ruth Barton, “Kitsch as Authenticity: Irish Cinema and the Challenge to Romanticism” in Irish Studies Review (Vol. 9, No.2, 2001), 193.

¹⁰ Barton, 195.

¹¹ Nash, 102.

¹² Lloyd, 90.

¹³ Nuala Johnson, “Making Space: Gaeltacht policy and the politics of identity” in Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography, ed. Brian Graham (London: Routledge, 1997), 188.

fn14 Here, borrowing from Bordieu, I am using the term habitus to mean the way in which individual lives are lived out through a series of repetitive actions — habits — which are nevertheless governed by specific parameters. See Bordieu, Pierre, _Outline of a Theory of Practice_, 78.

¹⁵ For a detailed consideration of kitsch in the context of post-independence, or postcolonial Irish culture, see Ruth Barton’s essay “Kitsch as Authenticity: Irish Cinema and the Challenge to Romanticism,” (2001) and David Lloyd’s essay “The Recovery Of Kitsch” in Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999) 87-92

¹⁶ See Stephanie Rains, “Home from Home: Diasporic Images of Ireland in Film and Tourism” in Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity, eds. Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor (Clevedon & Buffalo: Channel View Publications, 2003), 197. Stephanie Rains argues that the representation of Ireland as “home” in both feature film and promotional films produced with an eye on the Irish-American market is a great deal more complicated than the production of simple nostalgic views of Ireland as a traditional place, removed from the modern world. Instead, she uses a detailed reading of John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) to reconsider these representation of Ireland as part of a broader process whereby a diasporic cultural identity is constructed within dual dislocations: the spatial dislocation created by emigration itself and the temporal dislocation experienced by the freezing of memory at the time of displacement.

¹⁷ Cronin and O’Connor, “Introduction” in Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity, 3.

¹⁸ Cronin and O’Connor, 2–7. For more detailed explorations of Irish tourisms’ relationship to the “new knowledge based economy” see Brian Cronin, “Next to Being There: Ireland of the Welcomes and Tourism of the Word” in _Irish Tourism: Images, Culture and Identity_, 179–195.

¹⁹ Rains, 206.

²⁰ See Justin Carville, “Photography, Tourism and Natural History: Cultural Identity and the Visualisation of the Natural World” in Cronin and O’Connor, 179–196. Justin Carville’s work on the role of “natural history” and its attendant photographic forms in the development of middle-class tourism in Ireland has been a valuable resource in the development of this chapter.

²¹ Alexander García Düttmann, “Between Cultures: Culture Clash” in _Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition_, trans. Kenneth Woodgate (London: Verso, 2000), 3.

²² Düttmann, 113–121. Alexander García Düttmann provides an analysis of the nature of national identity as the struggle for the possibility of revealing oneself-as-something.

²³ See Building Sensitively in Ireland’s Landscapes, (Dublin: Bord Fáilte and An Taisce, 1986).

²⁴ Anthony, D. King, The Bungalow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 260.

© Aoife Mac Namara 2005