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Things in Their Places
Things in Their Places
To cite this Article Brett, David(2009) 'Things in Their Places', Visual Culture in Britain, 10: 2, 125 138
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14714780902924765
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714780902924765
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David Brett
as our life is becoming international, a certain uniformity of architectural forms will spread
across the globe. We have this uniformity already in our dress. From pole to pole people wear
the same jacket and the same blouse. Associations for the conservation of folk dress will not
alter this tendency, nor will movements to conserve folk-art stand in the way of the
internationalisation of forms.11
within it. There are, in fact, some common principles at work on both sides
of the Atlantic; one of which is the relative absence of common land as it is
understood in British law. In consequence, there is an absence of rights of
way and old footpaths; there is no right-to-roam. It can be difficult to take a
country walk.14 The places of Northern Ireland are defined on different
principles from the places of the rest of the United Kingdom.
Planning legislation is still minimal and, during the period of Direct
Rule (1972-2002), was reduced mainly to ministerial fiat exercised by civil
servants; these were subsequently considered democratic discrepancies,
but they enabled ministers to dismantle the Unionist hold on planning
decisions and housing. A Town and Planning Service was established in
1973, on the English model, with regional development plans and the like.
This generally worked according to English norms of village settlement, to
which the townland was unknown.
The planning powers invested in ministers were amongst the first to be
rescinded by the new post-settlement Assembly, returning the control of
land use to its earlier model of extreme individualism. From this, with the
relaxation of planning regulations, has followed a sharp increase in com-
mercial house-building, resulting in large, widely scattered, privately built
housing estates in unlikely and impractical locations, built quickly and
with little sense of a communal aesthetic responsibility;15 and a parallel
growth in private villas. This was a market response to a real demand, and
a cultural response to a need for freshly defined spaces that carried no
obvious sectarian entailments.16
There is a real question as to the long-term viability of some of these
rural developments. This is not, of course, a problem unique to Northern
Ireland, but what is striking is the speed of its spread within our borders. It
is a sort of slash-and-burn attempt to grow a once and once only cash-crop
132 things in their places
The brief was . . . to design a building available to all and to resolve the non-neutral
perception of the address. A neutral axis is created by striking a pedestrian link to the more
neutrally perceived Lisburn Road/Bradbury Place corner.19
Obel Tower is now rising beside Donegal Quay. Sectarian dread is being
openly replaced by class dread. They are an index of civic failure. At the
same time, inner-city peace walls have extended notably during the years
since 1994 and, by some measures (school recruitment, for example), the
population is now more physically divided than it has ever been. This is
called a peace process.20
(and a sustainable community) has to take this into account, and it may be
that the past fifteen years of construction has actually been the building of
tomorrows slums.
This problematic has been seen by architectural historians in terms of a
critical regionalism,21 in which we are to strive for a critical mediation
between universal technology and consumption, and the local culture of
regional resources and loyalties. It demands a highly developed critical
self-consciousness to avoid what Kenneth Frampton calls simple minded
attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.22
Two cases of recent house-building exemplify approaches to this chal-
lenge: both have attracted a good deal of comment in the architectural press
and reporting, because both touch on the very marrow of meaning - how to
be both local and contemporary at the same time. That they are located on
opposite sides of the border follows from our previous observations about
political and architectural spaces: that their borders do not have to coincide.
way as to give a wide view out, but very little view in. The lower part of the
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divisions.
The dominant planning concept was, in effect, that of defensible space.
Harveys dialectic of political space and architectural space, in which one
creates the other, is clearly and permanently on view.
***
The material culture of Northern Ireland - considered in this way,
through the prism of architecture - consists of a process of externaliza-
tion, in which its contradictions and fissures are objectified and made
manifest. Considered as consumption, it begins to appear as a means
whereby real problems are magicked away in a haze of retail therapy, as
if buying the same things in the same places made us all good neigh-
bours. But in either case, difficult questions are raised that are primarily
philosophical rather than sociological and political, and they have to
find a philosophical answer. What is most at issue is the concept of a
place.
In the course of his essay, Marc Auge makes a distinction: between the
place studied by the ethnologist, and the place inhabited by the indigenous
people. But both are prey to what he calls the indigenous fantasy the
closed world founded once and for all and long ago, . . . anchored since
time immemorial in the permanence of an intact soil.28 But it is precisely
this fantasy that is contested within Northern Ireland; for a large part of the
population, Northern Ireland is a kind of non-place, and to be in a non-
place is to be, perhaps, a kind of non-person. It is a temporary or provi-
sional structure, just as IKEA is housed in provisional architecture. For
another, rather larger part, that is the reality not a lie but a myth . . . whose
singularity it founds, subject (as frontiers are) to possible readjustment and
for this reason doomed always to regard the most recent migration as the
first foundation.29
David Brett 137
Notes
1 Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
2 Ibid., 5.
3 Marc Auge, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. J. Howe (London:
Verso, 1995).
4 Ciaran Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (London:
Routledge, 2001).
5 Miller, Material Culture, 99.
6 Ibid.
7 For a similar argument in connection to decoration, fashion and architectural detail, see also D. Brett,
Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure and Ideology in the Visual Arts (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge
University Press, 2005), ch.3.
8 Ibid.
9 P. Bourdieu, Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1984). Also see Millers critical treatment of the same (Miller, ibid., 155156).
10 It might be useful to develop the distinction between space as measured and space as experienced.
Auges non-places are spaces without values, but places are infused with valuations and experience,
and can belong to some rather than others, and thus be hostile.
11 As cited by J. Posener, From Schinkel to the Bauhaus. Arch. Ass. Paper No. 5 (London: Lund
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Humphries, 1972).
12 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
13 I owe this observation largely to papers and other work I have done with Alan Jones (see below).
14 For a general discussion, see A. Jones and D. Brett, Toward an Architecture: Ulster. Building our own
Authenticity; an Enquiry (Belfast: Black Square Books, 2007), 20-22.
15 The consequences of this can be severe; the reader is invited to visit the aptly named Four Winds,
a hill-top suburb of Belfast where houses built to the standards of Chelmsford confront three
times the average wind speed and twice the average rainfall. See Jones and Brett, Toward an
Architecture, 38.
16 I do not know if any sociological work has been done on this tricky question: it might well be resisted by
residents. An important paper appears to be C. Paris, P. Gray and J. Muir, Devolving Housing Policy
and Practice in Northern Ireland 1998-2002, Housing Studies 18, no. 2 (2003): 159-175.
17 This paper is being written in the week when the Irish government has been compelled to guarantee all
savings deposited in Irish banks, and British banks, staggering under the weight of unfulfilled
mortgages, have been appealing to their government to nationalize them. Also see Jones and Brett,
Toward an Architecture, 48.
18 For an exploration of this phenomenon, see S. OToole, eds., with essays by F. McDonald and
C. Gurdgiev, and contributions by 11 others, SubUrban to SuperRural: Ireland at the Venice Biennale
10th Annual Architecture Exhibition (Dublin: Gandon Editions, for Irish Architectural Foundation,
2007), and further comment by Jones and Brett, Toward an Architecture. The Dublin area has been
compared to Los Angeles without the free-ways!
19 Publicity leaflet and advertisement for The Carvill Group, Belfast.
20 See Jones and Brett, Toward an Architecture, 44-48.
21 The key text in this discourse is K. Frampton, Toward a Critical Regionalism; Six Points for an
Architecture of Resistance, in Post-Modern Culture, ed. H. Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 16-30;
first published as The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, Wash: Bay Press, 1983).
22 Frampton, Toward a Critical Regionalism, 2.
23 Illustrations of the house can be found in the architectural press, but notably in Irish Architecture Awards
2008 (Dublin: RIAI, 2008).
24 The present writer (who is given to sudden sideways leaps) links this aesthetic with that of another man
from Donegal, John Toland (1670-1721), who came from Inishowen on the farther shore of Lough
Swilly. Toland, who first used the term pantheism to denote a belief in the undivided and absolute
unity of everything, thus annihilating the distinction between God and His Creation, seems to me a true
progenitor of modern romanticism, and thus of contemporary sensibility and morals. Toland was born
to a devout and Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholic family. He studied at the University of Glasgow and
converted to Presbyterianism before becoming a wandering scribe, and atheist and pamphleteer. He
developed a very individual brand of republicanism and anti-clerical polemic; his Christianity Not
Mysterious (1696) and the later Letters to Serena (1704) were heavily condemned by authorities, but have
138 things in their places
had a long after-life, contributing to the general theory of republicanism. Toland was described by
Bishop Berkeley as a free-thinker - the very first occasion this term was used.
25 See D. Brett, The Plain Style (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2004).
26 For a description of the house, see P. Lynch, with photographs by Alan Jones, The Graveyard Shift,
Blueprint: Architecture, Design, Culture 242, May (2006): 5259.
27 These include completed buildings by the MacGabhann practice and by Jones, in Letterkenny and
Strabane, respectively.
28 Auge, Non-places, 44.
29 Ibid., 47.
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