dundanion

Neil Hegarty

I was a member of the first class of The School of Architecture, founded in Cork in 1956 and based in the Crawford Art Gallery, Emmett Place. It was very interesting to be part of that class because, as students, we were encouraged to take an active part in the attempt to create a school from scratch. Everyone was very enthusiastic, teachers, pupils and administrators. We were pioneers and therefore setting our own standards. When, after 3rd Year, we went to schools in England to complete our studies, all of us were in the top half of the classes there. I returned to the school in Cork and taught there myself from 1965 to 1968.

In College we studied work of Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Gropius, Breuer and some of Frank Lloyd Wright. Our work was based on the philosophy handed down by these masters including that they had received from Louis Sullivan, Peter Berhens and Augustine Perret. Our work owed everything to the architecture of these men.

The house at Glounthaune, Co. Cork was designed when I was a student in 1961. Advantage was taken of the slope of the land to enter to the living accommodation at first floor. This space commanded the view over the road to the Lee estuary. The fireplace is the core of the house. It opens to both living and dining rooms. The master bedroom on the ground floor opened to the garden.

In 1963 I travelled to America to study the architecture of the East Coast and Chicago. This experience was very important to me. Anyone who has first seen a location in a picture and then visited it knows how different reality can be. One senses the atmosphere and is no longer dependent on the angle from which the picture was taken. The most interesting housing I saw there was a scheme by Mies van der Rohe at Lafayette Park in Detroit and by I. M. Pei near I.I.T. in Chicago.I saw the Chicago housing again during the RIAI Chicago Conference when visiting the church by Barry Byrne which is nearby.

Dundanion Court was designed in 1964 and completed in 1968. It consists of 36 identical four bedroomed housing units of 120 sq. metres each, built at a density of twenty houses per acre. The structure consists of yellow concrete brick cross walls infilled with glass and cedar sheeting. The housing squares were considerate of the location of existing trees and take advantage of site features such as old stone walls.

Road access to each house is to the rear and the cul-de-sacs are shared surfaces with right-angled bends and no sight lines. This has been very successful in slowing traffic and there have evidently been no accidents. Pedestrian exists from the courtyards are narrow so that one person has to give way and in doing so may start a conversation. There is a hierarchy of open spaces ; the private garden for sunbathing, drying clothes and family use ; the courtyards for small children, old people and less boisterous activities ; the roadways and parking areas for football, riding bicycles and more noisy activities. While the buildings have been influenced by Mies in Detroit and Pei in Chicago they also owe something to traditional Irish Urban Squares.

Neil Hegarty is the Cork City Architect.