BUNGALOW BLITZ

Paul Antick, School of Art, Design and the Performing Arts at Middlesex University

‘Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture’ (Paper 1 of 4)

The paper will draw on the experience of working as a photographer on this project, to consider how particular photographic practices work to represent aspects of the relationship between the interior designs and decoration of six bungalows in the parish of Kilcar, Co. Donegal and the people who inhabit them.

Specifically, the paper will address the ways in which design strategies, issues of taste and the uses of objects and spaces within the home constitute and reflect significant aspects of the inhabitants everyday lives. In order to draw attention to the performative features of cultural appropriation and self presentation in these homes, the paper will include images which simultaneously draw on the codes of documentary as well as more theatrical modes of representation.

Also considered will be some of the issues that arise when asked to represent aspects of the lives of a set of “perfectly ordinary strangers” in another country, particularly Ireland.

What kinds of assumptions does one make about the expectations one’s subjects have of the process of representation ? To what extent should one be prepared to negotiate the types of images one imagines producing with the subjects themselves ? Alternatively, how far should the kinds of rhetorical strategies one employs be governed by one’s knowledge of the audience for whom such images are primarily intended rather than the subjects of the images ? In addressing these questions I will be referring to my own experiences as one of the photographers involved in this project as well as an established set of arguments and discourses which set out to define what is often imagined to be an “ideologically appropriate” way for a British photographer to represent Ireland and Irish people.

Joanne Lacey, School of Historical & Critical Studies, University of Brighton

‘Representing the Domestic Interior: Text, Image and Oral History’ (Paper 2 of 4)

Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture explores the phenomenon of rural self build bungalows in the West coast of Ireland from the 1970s. Widely considered to be “blots on the rural landscape”, “out of place” “not Irish enough” the self build bungalow becomes a difficult object to place within narratives of taste and appropriateness. Using newly commissioned photographs of interiors and exteriors of houses, existing photographs of bungalows in DIY manuals and family albums, architects drawings, social history and oral history, the project explores the ways in which these houses might be read within the contexts of home, place and post colonial narratives of settlement and location.

My paper will describe and locate my input into the project. It will examine the rationale for collecting oral histories around particular families coming to build their houses, what houses they came from, what was desirable about the self build bungalow, what lifestyle it signified. The oral histories describe how the inhabitants made the bungalows into a home, how they decorated or altered the interior, changes made over the years etc. I am using oral histories to explore how the interiors of the houses have come together, and how people live with and within interior spaces. How can the changing interiors of the bungalows be understood in relation to questions of proper/authentic Irish rural identity? How do the interiors of the bungalows relate to the lifestyle of the self build bungalow? How do the interiors relate to the exteriors? How are the interiors used to construct a sense of home, place, identity?

The paper will present a material culture approach to the interiors of the self build bungalows, that uses a particular mode of qualitative interviewing to explore how people live with and make use of interior spaces. The paper will conextualise the qualitative research within the wider aims and objectives of the project, relating it to other visual components of the collective work.

Aoife Mac Namara, School of Art, Design and Performing Arts, Middlesex Univeresity

‘Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture’ (Paper 3 of 4)

The paper will address the research and production of an interdisciplinary exhibition, conference and publication project which explors the impact of a single (self published) housepattern book, Bungalow Bliss (1972-89) on the built environment of contemporary rural Ireland.

Informed by the debates in and around post-colonial theory, the paper will draw on documentary photography, oral history, archival research and domestic photography to consider how six suburban-style ‘dream homes’ got built in the north west of Ireland at a particular moment in history.

Building on this material, the paper will consider the relationship between the ideas of suburbia implicit in the design and construction these particular houses, and the lifestyles enjoyed by their actual inhabitants. The paper also considers the reception of these bungalows – their occupants and designers – by the Irish establishment, with particular attention to the architectural and planning professions.

In this way the relationship between the boom in bungalow-building during this period gets considered in relation to patterns of immigration, migration and employment in Ireland and the Irish Diaspora as well as in the context of Ireland as a post-colonial country struggling to negotiate its way through a well established – and highly bureaucratic – colonial infrastructure.

Martin Denyer, History & Theory of Visual Culture, Middlesex University and Goldsmiths College, London.

‘Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture’ (Paper 4 of 4)

This paper will discuss Aoife Mac Namara’s exhibition project as part of a wider critical examination by artists of the practices of post-war suburban architecture. In focussing on the work of Dan Graham, Gorden Matta-Clarke and Hans Haccke I will discuss the role of visual art in revealing the – often hidden – discourses which constitute the forms of vernacular and everyday architecture so familiar in the spaces of suburbia.

In doing so this, paper will place the work of Andrew Kearney and Paul Antick, which is included in the ‘Bungalow Blitz’ project, in the wider context of art practices that perform the institutional critique of architecture, and, suggest how such practices may be a form of cognitive mapping advocated by Frederick Jameson in the book Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

In this way this paper will discuss Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping as a practice critical of visual and spatial representation in contemporary culture.