tracings: volume one

Marcus Donaghy

As a flagstaff or masthead for UCD School of Architecture one might expect the first volume of Tracings to hoist a flag and make a reading of the prevailing winds of Irish architecture. If that were the case one might conclude from this issue that we are becalmed or certainly in flukey winds. The professed theme of this journal is however, 'the sense of belonging in place'.

As time and space do not allow, it is not my place to dwell in detail on the issues contained in this volume. I will therefore try to be discreet and focus on the place that Tracings might make for itself in the discourse on architecture in an Irish context.

Judging a book first by its cover, Tracings appears an opulent but sombre tome. Lifting it confirms this weight but its ungainly size betrays some of the unwieldiness contained within. Perusing the contents the sense of serious intent and aspiration for a quality production is apparent but utterly negated by the profusion of typefaces, page layouts, photographic formats and typographic errors. This cacography has an effect greater than to thwart a sense of visual unity, it distracts from the cohesion of individual contributions, requiring the reader to undergo such focal contortions as to lose interest in the content. The degree of this visual and typographic incoherence tends to parallel that of the texts with perhaps the exception of Hugh Campbell's 'The Museum and the Garbage Can', which to its credit looks and reads like it might have fallen off the back of an issue of Daidalos. Sacred Places: Contested Relics, by Ana Dolan and loughlin Kealy, which barring the rubrics of ( was this pun intended ? ) terracotta tiles from Duiske Abbey, is also legible at considerable length and in detail.

A significant proportion of the discussion of the professed theme of this volume revolves around the issue of ownership. Declan Kiberd, in his erudite but sometimes cliched introduction, beats his post-colonial breast about dispossession and displacement and its role in engendering a culture of 'not noticing' in the Irish psyche. A century after the land Acts it might be reasonable for our erstwhile oppressors and dispossessors to ask us to wise up. Rhyming in some ways with this, Dolan and Kealy's essay elucidates the influence of forms of tenure, appropriate and inappropriate tithes etc. on the physical survival of parish churches. What we perceive to be a degraded sense of belonging, manifested in twentieth.century patterns of settlement, may be products of the same post-colonial coinage of near universal land ownership wed to its obverse of a sundered, uprooted and dislocated Irish psyche. What lodges in my mind from Kiberd's introduction is his quote of Whitman's aphorism, that 'architecture is what you do when you look at it.'

Maureen Gilbert deals most overtly with belonging in the irksomely titled 'Publi/City'. I'm sceptical of what I consider her breezy imputation of exclusivity to certain of Dublin's newer spaces, and when she gets prescriptive one could be forgiven for thinking that we were dealing with underwear, not space. Perhaps that wouldn't be a bad place to start, in the words of Edward Soja: 'it all starts with the body, which the poet Adrienne Rich once called "the geography closest in".' Speaking of those most physically displaced and living the legacy with which Declan Kiberd would enshroud us all, Gilbert uses the well-adorned traveller's caravan as an exemplar of empowering design. This flies in the face of the architect's dilettantish fixation with place. Gilbert's assertion that 'creating something out of nothing is the living crucible of real design - the making of real lives according to an aesthetic that is lived and felt rather than taught or intellectualised' is a challenge which resonates with the alchemical etymology of projection -the stock in trade of the architect.

Landscape architect Michael Cregan's essay, 'Urban Expectations Vs. Spatial Forms' is obscured by the typographic errors which blight this book. Stepping over these, his essay touches on the danger of the desiccating gaze of the tourist as part of the landscaping culture, and he warns of the impending necropolis, should we fail to lift our eyes. The landscape art or 'sky gardening' of James Turrell is powerful rebuke to this consumption of place. His work draws the viewer into its frame to evert his perceptions as alluded to in the title of Ray Ryan's essay, 'The World Inside Out'.

Returning to the geography closest in, O'Donnell and Tuomey's Hudson House, challenges perceptions of domesticity. Domestic Occupation' discusses commissioning and living in the house with the Hudsons, and while it testifies to the resilience of client and bUilding inhabiting and accomodating one another, I sense that the photographs avert their gaze from anything that would contradict this view. 'Tracing Places' is a visual and textual log that might be called a laboratory for the analysis of place. Compiled by Emmett Scanlon, Ian Moloney, Ruth O'Herlihy and Aine Ryan, the visual material is studied and evocative. The text, reflecting on the vagaries of pursuing the quarry of place, seems to fall prey to the belief that every place will give of its secrets charmed by the attentions of a sensitive architect. Sverre Fehn is quoted thus -'every site holds a key that guarantees the preservation of its meaning even when the transformations caused by human kind tend to erase the traces and memories.' Fehn and the inscrutable go together. Might he not mean that places endure by keeping their keys well hidden ? Reference is made to feeling the essence of place -touching is probably safe enough, but in eliciting its essence, we can by definition eviscerate a place.

The thrust of this review may be somewhat tangential to much of the content of Tracings but that is partially a reflection of the elliptical approach taken to its subject by its contributors who are largely interchangeable with its editors. I do not subscribe to the charge of Tracings being the organ of an ivory tower and would defend its right to be just that. Assessed however on its own pretensions, one is entitled to question the import of this first volume and wonder if it is overreaching its brief. The question of propriety is closely allied to belonging ( see 'The Museum and The Garbage Can' ) and I would suggest that the editors concentrate on how best to husband their resources in order to eke out their place in architectural discourse.

Marcus Donaghy is an architect in solo practice and Studio Tutor at UCD School of Architecture.