journeys end

Shane O'Tool

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Three years ago, in the last few words of a lengthy letter from India to Jennifer Coyle, a Trinity art history student, Andy Devane described Journey's End in the following telegraphic style : 'Freedom ! The only bit of building I've ever had my own way ; still (and forever) unfinished ! Material, form, space, peace and, above all, setting. One of the world's great views southwards over Dublin Bay ! With (possible !) sun from dawn to dusk.' Devane, who had been a prominent part of the Taliesin Fellowship in 1946 and 1947, bought Journey's End Lodge a small cottage on a glorious, wilderness site in Baily for �3600 in 1948. A boathouse went with the cottage. Literally forming the side of a small mountain, falling 300 feet to the sea at Doldrum Bay, it is a site that even the former apprentice's master, Frank Lloyd Wright, would have coveted.

During his time in the Arizona desert and in Wisconsin, near the Great Lakes, Devane's eyes had been finely attuned to the potential of ocean's edge sites such as Journey's End. Close your eyes and this could be the California we recognise from Wright's projects such as 'The Wave' (Stuart Haldorn, 1945), 'Sea Cliff' (V C Morris, 1945 and 1954) or the various 'Eaglefeather' projects for the Hollywood writer and producer, Arch Oboler. In fact, Devane kept copies of some of the Oboler drawings in his Dublin office throughout his career.

Although built much later, Journey's End is a project of this era. You only have to see Wright's 1948 perspective of the unbuilt Benjamin Adelman house at Fox Point, Wisconsin, on the bluffs above Lake Michigan to know they were breathing the same air.

In an act reminiscent of Wright's famous claim of his preference for first visualizing a building in its entirety before beginning to sketch it out, Devane did not even survey his site until August 1953, although he had been living in the cottage since the late 1940s.

The eighth-inch, pencil-and-red-ink site survey drawings, now faded and torn, have 'acquired an exotic fragility', to borrow the term Arthur Drexler used three years after Wright's death to describe the quality of some of the master's drawings. Devane's survey drawings are neither romantic nor beautiful, in the conventional sense. The view of the landscape is unsentimental, although the shadow of a human figure and a few traces of domesticity : a dog's kennel, a kitchen stove and oven, a bed, are present in the site section.

These are functional drawings, for the most part made quickly, that, for example, describe the sight lines of passers by, whether from pavement level or from the top of a double-decker bus, and the landscape measures required to ensure privacy from overlooking. The datum, 281 feet, the floor level of the cottage, is drawn right across the section and the elevation above sea level is ticked off, in one-foot intervals, from 230 to 292 feet. This vertical ruler a controlling device used by Wright in drawings for projects where changing site, floor or roof levels demanded particular attention is something that appears on many of the design drawings for Journey's End. In addition to the one-foot vertical intervals of the sections and elevations, the plans are all overlaid with a three-foot-square grid, drawn in red ink so that it would barely appear on traditional dye-line prints.

In Devane's own drawings, mostly drawn at home, there is usually to be found in the title a square Wrightian device. This does not appear on the RKD office drawings, all of which were inked by Devane's assistant and, subsequently, partner, Roderick P. McCaffrey. On the survey is an elaborate North-point, with mid-winter and mid-summer sun-path diagrams and the note : 'House is 25.5� east of magnetic north.'

The initial sketch is entitled 'The End', a name Devane sometimes used for Journey's End (and one he would finally give in the 1980s to a second house he built on the site, west of the original). The cottage becomes a bedroom block, with the lowered main entrance between it and a new, parallel block of similar dimensions, housing the kitchen, family eating and children's play areas, as well as a double garage with a full-length workbench overlooking Dublin Bay. Below this protective, rectilinear screen blossom a series of terraces, some cantilevered out over the hill, accessed from a loggia leading to a curving living room with a desk at its end point. Books, a built-in, curved bench seat, a piano. Small pools of water, inside and out. A roof-top observatory, with sun dial, over the stone drum of the dining recess. And below it, like at 'The Wave', a swimming pool. A salt-water pool. Devane's son says he hated fresh-water swimming pools. Some of the geometry is pure Guggenheim, a project that Devane assisted on while in Taliesin.

The second sketch rotates the new block to follow the contours and form the wedge-shaped entrance hall, while simplifying the kitchen design. A pergola roofs the west terrace in front of the bedrooms. The most pronounced, most worked part of the plan is the circular hearth, the symbolic heart of the house, shown in section as a battered totem rising from earth, through the house, to sky.The swimming pool is gone, although the fountain pools remain yet. One of Devane's sketches shows the characteristic 'double chin' swirls on the underside of the balcony cantilever. The window seat canopy is not yet circular. The dining area is lit by clerestory windows and mirrors. The low pitch of the roof is close to Wright's favourite 4 in 12, or 18.

By October 1954, the design had crystallised. And the slump of the 1950s was already biting hard. But Devane's growing family needed more space. The terraces went away, as did the garage. Construction of the living room with its dramatic, cantilevered balconies was postponed. The rest was built in 1956.

In the Summer of 1961, plans to build 'the new room', as the family called it, were revived. Work was completed during the following year. Seamus Murphy Ltd, who also built Devane's church at Sutton, was the builder. His brother, Sean, who was in charge of the joinery for the house recalls the set of drawings for Journey's End as 'absolutely incredible, from a builder's point of view.' Devane, ever practical, was also prepared to change details on site. He checked the levels of the cantilevers by squatting down and sighting them along the horizon between sea and sky.

According to his family, Devane believed Journey's End was 'a house for all time'. He considered it was the best thing he ever did, even designing the wire, cone-shaped chairs in the living room. The family say he was shocked by how expensive (even unsustainable, perhaps ?) it became to run after the oil crisis.

Journey's End has been significantly altered by three different owners since it was sold in 1990. In the end, Devane couldn't bear to go back. The house is now called 'Big Bamboo'. Shane O'Toole is company architect with Tegral and writes for The Sunday Times. All drawing copyright RKD Architects. All photographs copyright Davison & Associates. The photographs were taken by David Davison in 1976, they are published here for the first time.