When he first made Northern Ireland his home, more than 20 years ago, the English design historian David Brett chanced to remark that he considered himself an atheist. “I was then asked, with what seemed to be a straight face, whether I was a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist,” he says.
“The question, which anywhere else in the United Kingdom might seem bizarre, struck me at once as very interesting, because I recognised myself as belonging to the first category. I positively and firmly disbelieved in what I intuited was a very Protestant style.”
The aesthetic Brett has in mind is a form of puritan minimalism with its origins in the 17th century. Introduced by British and Dutch settlers to North America, and meeting with no alternative, it quickly became the characteristic aesthetic. This transatlantic plainness, often referred to as the “colonial style”, reached its height in the architecture and design of Shaker communities.
But Ireland, too, has been shaped by the same impulse. The squares of Georgian Dublin are among the best surviving examples of this “plain style”: austere brick surfaces with the roofline hidden from the street by the flat plane of the facade. The general Calvinist influence over the modern movement — the dominant aesthetic form of the 20th century — has also been widely assimilated.
Can we still speak in some useful way of a “Protestant aesthetic” that has its own continuing autonomy, albeit in some contemporary inflection? Or has it been dispersed or dissolved into modern culture as a whole, so that it can no longer be taken out and looked at as a separate element? If any contemporary building can shed some light on such delicate questions of identity in post-religious Ireland, it may be the ambiguous black house recently completed by the Belfast architect Alan Jones for his young family in Randalstown, Co Antrim, which Brett is an admirer of.
Jones has lived in Randalstown since 1998, when he returned to Northern Ireland after a decade spent in London working for Michael Hopkins & Partners and as an associate at David Morley Architects, where he oversaw the construction of the award-winning MCC shop at Lord’s for the Marylebone Cricket Club.
“We’re living between God and Ulster,” Jones jokes, referring to his new neighbours on Portglenone Road. On one side is the Orange Hall; the family’s driveway skirts the side of the British Legion memorial garden. Their other neighbour is the Grade A-listed Presbyterian Church, whose foundation stone was laid on July 12, 1790, the centenary of the battle of the Boyne. Next to it is the Presbyterian church hall and after that, the Masonic Hall. Behind, on rising ground, beyond the Presbyterian graveyard, is the Church of Ireland, with its steep octagonal spire.
“It’s a very laden site,” says Brett. Jones also acknowledges that this is the reason why few buyers were interested in the location in 2001, when he and his dentist wife, Laura, bought it for £55,000 (€79,000). In addition, the accompanying field had been derelict for a generation, a main sewer ran through the property and there were also disputes over access rights.
But Jones says their main motivation to buy was one of “architectural conscience. I could just imagine what somebody might do here, building a large Northern Irish house with PVC windows”, he says.
Cheap double glazing would not have fitted in with next door: Randalstown’s Presbyterian Church, built of brown basalt rubble with a slated roof, is one of only two surviving oval churches in Ireland. The other, Belfast’s First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street, designed by Roger Mulholland in 1783, is the oldest remaining place of worship in the city. (Dublin’s “round” church, St Andrews, designed by William Dodson in 1674, burnt down in 1860.) In keeping with the traditional Presbyterian T-plan, the Randalstown church is aligned along its shorter axis, with the central pulpit on the south wall. Although a vernacular church, it is significant for the ingenuity of its design and the manner in which the familiar elements of a meeting house have been touched by inventiveness.
When Jones studied the character, scale, massing and form of the surrounding buildings, he was struck by the “body language” of the barn-like halls, by “how they defined themselves against each other, like individuals each taking possession of the land they are standing on”. Scattered in a loose crescent, they are all what he calls “doll houses with bits added: simple, two-storey gable-fronted forms with additions on one or more sides”. That’s what he would also do.
“The urban brief was not to design a house, but something that would fit the context,” says Jones. “What was required was another ‘public building’. That allowed us to go large, to be ambiguous, to strip away the level of detail that a house would have.” The roof and walls are clad all over in dark fibre-cement sheets, the windows are tall and hooded, the gutters and rainwater pipes are suppressed, and the house is recessive, subservient to the jewel-like church.
“It starts a conversation between individual buildings,” he says. “If you are looking for inspiration on how to site buildings in a Northern Irish context, it’s about objects being placed on the landscape. The relationships are informal and always related to the road. There is a settler quality about them.
“Whereas in France, Italy, Spain or Mexico, it’s all about terraces and squares. It’s an idea about the public realm. That’s why I take my students to Switzerland and Germany. Swiss and Austrian villages are like villages in Northern Ireland, comprising individual buildings with space around and between them. It’s deeper than a matter of population density. It is an issue of individualism; a culture of individualism that works at both the individual level and at the collective level.”
Jones’s house is individual, but doesn’t show off. It goes back to plainness, yet feels like the beginning of something “new and northern”. Like a Swiss home, it has a concrete cellar; the neat top of the cellar wall is exposed at the base of the house’s taut skin, as in Shaker buildings. But this is not some retro-minimalism. There can be a difference between how you appear in the world and how you are at home, and there is real pleasure in this plainness.
The fibre-cement cladding, laid out in a basket-weave pattern that seems to change as you look from side to side, is full of character: a character that comes out of the way it is hooked together. So too are the inside walls, all cast concrete. The surfaces almost seem fetishised, with concrete of a greenish hue that has a rare shaggy texture as rich as velour wallpaper or a tapestry hanging. It’s sensual, not decorative or applied, imprinted with the pattern of the oriented strand board against which it was cast. The floors are made of the same material, polished.
The ground floor is a single space, 70ft long and 10ft high and flooded with light. Full-height pivoting doors can divide up the space when needed. There is a tree in one corner, but the stairs are secreted away, lending a scenographic quality to the interior, suggestive of a theatre in a barn.
“When I was a student I asked myself: ‘Is there such a thing as an architecture for Ulster? What’s the difference? I think now that maybe Dublin is more like a sketch and Ulster is a diagram,” says Jones.” When he came back from London, he told clients he wanted to explore a regional architecture. “One laughed at me and I felt a bit foolish,” he says.
Not any more. His next project, already on site, is a theatre and arts centre for Strabane, on which he is collaborating with the architect Glenn Howells, who designed the acclaimed Market Place theatre in Armagh.
Alan Jones Architects www.jonesarchitects.com. David Brett’s The Plain Style is published by the Lutterworth Press
