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

[cont’d]

Bungaloid Imagination

Different aesthetics sometimes fasten themselves with particular tenacity to specific historical moments and groups. — Joe Cleary²⁵

The question of why certain types of housing prevail in particular societies is one of those addressed by Anthony D. King in his seminal work, The Bungalow. Drawing on work from economics and economic history, architectural history and cultural theory, King argues that a global culture of architectural form has now developed and that the bungalow “was one of the first, common house types of this culture²⁶.” Here, King’s observations on the ubiquitous spread of the bungalow form appear to borrow from Clement Greenberg’s observations that kitsch — and bungalows around the world have been dismissed as kitsch — shows no regard for geographical or national borders. Rather, the bungalow is: “another mass product of Western industrialism, it has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld²⁷.” In this way, the focus of the book is not so much on the spread of the bungalow form — or bungalow phenomena — from one continent to another, but on the more prospective suggestion that the spread of the bungalow is tied to the emergence of an ever-expanding capitalist world economy and the attendant emergence “of a ‘global urban culture’ which has led to cities everywhere becoming more like one another²⁸.” It is here that King’s work informs my project. By investigating the origin of the bungalow in India and its subsequent development in selected countries of the developed and developing world, and by situating these investigations in the wider context of social and economic history, King’s work points to the historical forces, which, in producing the bungalow, have also shaped our contemporary world: colonialism, industrialisation, capitalism, socialism, urbanization and suburbanization. That Ireland is absent from the case studies presented detracts little from the value of the study in the context of this project. This project is more concerned with understanding what the bungalows of the west of Ireland stand for in the cultural imagination of their urban and suburban critics than it is with the production of a history of their design²⁹.

Where has this antipathy come from? While the post 1970s Bungalow Bliss houses of the west of Ireland have made fans and detractors of local people, urbanites and international visitors, this study is concerned with the constituency that has been most vocal in its renunciation of their presence along the region’s scenic routes, isolated coastlines and lonely hills. I am speaking of the writers, journalists and correspondents who have found, in The Irish Times, a forum that is both sympathetic and influential³⁰. By focusing almost — but not quite — exclusively on the debate as it has panned out in this forum, the researchers working on this project have directed their work at understanding the strength of feeling that has fuelled the arguments of these campaigners. In so doing, they have attempted to understand how such polarized attitudes could have developed in such a small place, and in a relatively short period of time³¹.

As The Irish Times is often represented as a bastion of revisionist thinking in contemporary Ireland, it is perhaps no accident that this debate found quarter on its pages³². While the theory and practice of revisionist thinking in Irish historiographic and cultural studies is, itself, a rich and diverse subject for research and too big a topic to address with any seriousness in this context, the term “revisionism�? is used here in its broadest sense to represent the work of those with a “less nationalist and more pro-British practice and policy in and around the west of Ireland today³³.

In the opening to his 1912 pamphlet on education reform, The Murder Machine, the committed Republican leader and pedagogue Padraic Pearce alerts his reader to the trials facing those taking over what Louis Althusser would have called the ideological state apparatuses of the colonial regime, if, and when independence was finally achieved³⁴. While Pearce’s work as an ideologue, campaigner and pedagogue reached across the remit of the republican movement, in this essay his concerns are directed at the curriculum and methods used by the (indigenous) clergy, from primary schools right through to university education³⁵. For Pearce, the lack of importance given to Irish history and culture — let alone language — was tantamount to collusion. “The very organizations which exist in Ireland to champion freedom show no disposition themselves to accord freedom; they challenge a great tyranny but they erect their own little tyrannies³⁶.” As I write, Ireland’s art, architectural and planning education continues to be organized according to institutions and practices inherited from the colonial period. Pearce, like many anti-colonial activists to follow, clearly understands the test education would be for the newly independent state. Many years later, the Brazilian activist and scholar Paulo Freire used the concept of “banking education�” to explain something of how colonial systems of education — often the basis for post-colonial models — work to limit rather than unleash the intellectual, creative and critical faculties of its students. In such a framework, curriculum delivery is undertaken on the assumption that knowledge resides solely with the educator. The purpose of education is, therefore to pour or “bank�” that knowledge into the – otherwise blank minds of the students³⁷. In his 1970 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argues that this “banking system�? of education necessarily involves subordinating the students and propagating the current oppressive political structure. Why Pearce (and after Pearce’s execution in 1916) the state’s first Minister for Education, Eoin Mac Néill, placed such store on educational reform has everything to do with just how well they — like Freire — understood education’s ability to subjugate³⁸.”

Both Pearce’s educational reform campaigning and Friere’s critical pedagogy are, I would argue, important to understanding the production of aesthetic animosity in Ireland. Could the clash in ideas about what is — or is not — an appropriate architecture and planning aesthetic for the west of Ireland have something to do with our status as a post-colonial state? David Harvey, in The Condition of Postmodernity, claims that “ideological and political hegemony in any society depend on the ability to control the material context of personal and social experience: its spaces and places³⁹.” Yet, as a longstanding British colony, so complete has been the reorganization of — to use Bourdieu’s term — the “lived place�? of the people of Ireland into the political, economic and cultural institutions of colonial space, that (without the input of radical pedagogic practices) the concept and experience of space in post-colonial Ireland may well be, as Pearce feared, one of the discourses most resistant to transformation. Kiberd’s work on the impact of colonialism on Ireland’s imaginative as well as physical spaces gives further historical context to the palpable sense of cultural dependency written through much of the debate in and around the bungalow. “As far as the Irish were concerned�? he wrote, “colonialism took various forms: political rule from London through the medium of Dublin Castle; economic expropriation by planters who came in various waves of settlement; and an accompanying psychology of self-doubt and dependency among the Irish, linked to the loss of economic and political power but also the decline of its native language and culture⁴⁰.”

The idea of representation as always harnessed in service of one authority or another returns the argument to the debates about the suitability — or not — of the bungalow as a form of architecture for Ireland’s places of outstanding natural beauty. Trawling through the many references to bungalow blitz, blizzard and blight in the Irish media, it is hard to avoid noticing how often the writers are drawn to compare, most unfavourably, the uses made of the landscape as a site for housing in the west of Ireland with its organization in Britain and the architectural styles favoured in the respective countrysides. Why is it that those of us working in Ireland’s heritage, architecture, media and planning industries are unable to “see our surroundings as they are, in and of themselves⁴¹.” In the Dáil debate on second stage of the Irish Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2003, Marion Harkin, T. D. for the Sligo-Leitrim constituency argues that it is this cultural dependency on extra-local housing and planning models that is at the root of the bungalow debates, not the actual houses themselves. “In many areas, models of development and planning are being imported from other countries. These models are seen as superior to our indigenous patterns of settlement and are, by and large, imposed on people⁴².”

Does our need to relentlessly mimic the architectural and planning aesthetics of the colonial period or those of the “mother country�? to the extent that we are blind to those produced out of extra-colonial coordinates, say something about our fear of what Bill Ashcroft calls the “cultural and moral disapproval and exclusion�? from the discourse of the once colonial authority⁴³” As Daniel Corkery wrote of the Irish child caught in the confines of a colonial education system (whether it be before or after independence), “his education, instead of buttressing and refining his emotional nature, teaches him rather to despise it, inasmuch as it teaches him not to see the surroundings out of which he is sprung, as they are in themselves, but as compared with alien surroundings: his education sets up a dispute between his intellect and his emotions⁴⁴.”

It is worth revisiting the links between those British, and more specifically, English ideas about what constitutes appropriate architecture for the “countryside�” and much of how current thought in Ireland depends upon the historical formation of the countryside as a site of leisure and pleasure⁴⁵. Returning to Raymond Williams’s work on the discursive distinctions between town and country in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British culture, and Peter Hall’s later work on the formations of town and country in British Planning Law, King argues that the “fundamental distinction between ‘town’ and ‘country’ which, with the rare exception, is the most inherent assumption of British planning, is essentially a cultural distinction sustained by particular economic and class interests⁴⁶.” These class interests were, in the case of Britain, the aristocracy and, increasingly, the middle and upper-middle classes. “For centuries the countryside had been the preserve of the aristocracy, for income, residency and mainly for leisure … the situation was to change markedly over the next thirty years. Taking the aristocracy as their model, the urban upper and middle class were to start searching for a ‘country pad⁴⁷’.” In other words, the axiomatic organization of space between country and town in Britain was the result of historically specific circumstances that were, in no small measure, governed by the social relations that emerged there in the nineteenth century. As a British colony, Ireland witnessed rather than participated in these changes. That is to say, for the landless labourers and tenant smallholders who made up the overwhelming majority of the indigenous population, access to the new middle class or the waged labour of the new working class, was possible only in conjunction with immigration⁴⁸. Perhaps it was in part these conditions that gave birth to what Frank MacDonald has called the rabid individualism behind the success of the one-off bungalow:

Rugged individualism has long been a cult in the United States; it was, after all, the spirit that tamed the Wild West. In Connemara, as elsewhere in rural Ireland, the individualism is more rabid than rugged. It’s the kind of attitude which has produced what might be called the ‘screw you’ style of architecture, reflected in bungalows built on the ridge-line to capture a piece of the scenery without any thought for their damaging effect on that same scenery, when viewed by passersby. But then, the whole purpose of the exercise is to cut a dash on the landscape, which is why so many modern bungalows are built with their picture windows facing the road. They are there to be seen. ‘We have made it, and to hell with the rest of you,’ they seem to say⁴⁹.

If, as Bill Ashcroft has suggested, different aesthetics sometimes fasten themselves with particular tenacity to specific historical moments or social groups, then it is probably fair to argue that our current penchant for the bungalow — threatened thatched cottage of the west of Ireland, probably owes itself to our rather wholesale adoption of those romantic images of the west of Ireland and its architecture developed by these people at this time⁵⁰. There is, of course, a problem with this argument, for in light of the work of Frantz Fanon and others, it would be a mistake to assume either that the relationship between all Irish people and their colonial pasts is similar or that, even if it were, that our relationship to these points of identification can ever be anything other than ambivalent⁵¹.

[Page 1 / 3 / 4 / Illustrations ]

Notes [cont’d]

²⁵ Joe Cleary, “Modernization and Aesthetic Ideology in Contemporary Irish Culture” in Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics, 1949–1999, ed. Ray Ryan (London: MacMillan, 2000), 126.

²⁶ King, 2.

²⁷ Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (New York: Beacon Press, 1961), 10.

²⁸ Greenberg, 260.

²⁹ The case studies include India, Britain, United States, Canada, Australia and Africa.

³⁰ It is worth noting that while much of what has been commissioned by The Irish Times on the subject of the bungalows has been, broadly speaking, clearly critical of the phenomena. They have regularly used the “Letters” pages to publish opinions from detractors and supporters of the practice of bungalow-building in its many forms. For a discussion of the position of The Irish Times in the context of contemporary politics in Ireland see Tony Canavan, “The Profession of History: The Public and the Past” in Ryan, 226–229.

³¹ Prior to political independence in 1921, shared concerns for nationalist aspirations for Home Rule and/or independence often served to dampen other cultural and political differences, particularly those of class and ethnicity. Brian Graham’s essay “The Imagining of Place: Representation and Identity in Contemporary Ireland” addresses some of the consequences of the nationalist hegemony in the cultural and political life of the “Free State.” See Graham, In Search of Ireland, 1.

³² While arguments and disagreement on building in the West of Ireland (and other areas of outstanding natural beauty in Ireland) have a much longer history, for the purpose of this study, the debate is dated to 1987 and Frank McDonald’s coining of the term “bungalow blitz.”

³³ Stephen Howe argues that the roots of revisionist historiography lie in Dublin: “Dublin — both the traditionally Protestant Trinity College and more particularly the newer, initially Catholic University College of Dublin (UCD) — was the main seedbed of the new history.” See Stephen Howe, “Chroniclers and Revisionists” in _Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 83.

³⁴ Padraic Pearce, The Murder Machine and Other Essays (Dublin: Mercer Press, 1976), 3.

³⁵ Pearce’s objections to the design, delivery and content of his degree course at Maynouth College, University of Ireland led him to drop out of formal education.

³⁶ Pearce, quoted in Kiberd, 551.

³⁷ Paula Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1970).

³⁸ Given the power already asserted on the Home Rule and Republican movements by the indigenous bourgeoisie on the one hand and the clergy on the other, Pearce had no reason to believe that, if left unchecked, the education system that followed independence would be any more radical than the one it replaced. See Pearce, op cit, 551

³⁹ David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 227.

⁴⁰ Kiberd, 6.

⁴¹ Daniel Corkery quoted in Kiberd, 6.

⁴² Marion Harkin quoted in Dáil Éireann Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2003: Second Stage. (Volume 569, June 2003).

⁴³ Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001), 142.

⁴⁴ Kiberd, 555.

⁴⁵ David Brett’s study of heritage in Ireland looks directly at the ways in which nineteenth-century English ideas of the sublime and picturesque have been productive in the generation of Ireland’s physical and imaginative landscapes. See David Brett, “The Picturesque and the Sublime: Toward the Aestheticisation of History” in _The Construction of Heritage_ (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 38–60.

⁴⁶ King, 255.

⁴⁷ King, 93.

⁴⁸ Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1985), 22–47.

⁴⁹ Frank McDonald, “Bungalow Blitz”, in The Irish Times, (September 1987). Reprinted in Jack Fitzsimons Bungalow Bashing (Kells: Kells Publishing Company, 1990), 8.

⁵⁰ See Ann Bermingham, “Middle Grounds and Middle Ways: The Victorian Suburban Experience of Landscape” in Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 157–197.

⁵¹ Frantz Fanon, “The So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized Peoples” in _Black Skin, White Masks_, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1985), 83–109.

© Aoife Mac Namara 2005