Building Homes II: Rural

The architect and planner Frank Gibney is probably now best known for the distinctive housing schemes he designed from the late 1940s for Bord na Móna. In a prolific career addressing the issue of rural housing, he was also responsible for over seventy-five local authority housing schemes across at least fifteen counties from Waterford to Donegal, and from Dublin to Mayo, as well as dozens of one-off cottages.

With the virtual cessation of building activity during the Second World War ‘Emergency’, Gibney’s interest in planning found expression in his Framework for an Irish National Plan (1943) in which he suggested relocating the capital to a new site ‘near the geographical centre of the Country’ (on eastern shore of Lough Ree). He also became an advocate for the construction of clay houses as a solution to rural housing shortages compounded by war-time constraints on the availability of building materials. He published a detailed memorandum on the topic in December 1942, and in March 1943 produced this design for a clay cottage for Capt. Richard Henry Prior-Wandesforde of Castelcomer Collieries. By June 1944, Prior-Wandesforde had financed the construction of one version of the clay cottage at Cloneen, near Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny. This was followed by a second built variant in which the thatched roof was replaced by tiles. With a floor area almost double the size of a contemporary local authority cottage, hot and cold running water, and a flushing toilet located in what is a fuel store on the drawing, these houses set a high standard for rural dwellings.

In a review of one of the constructed clay cottages, the Irish Builder noted that Gibney believed that clay construction could be used not only for housing, but also for ‘farm buildings, workshops, community halls and even small churches’ (Irish Builder, 17 June 1944). However, by the time the review was published the D-Day landings had already taken place. With the end of the Second World War in sight the prospect of the increased availability of bricks, blocks and concrete rendered unnecessary Gibney’s drive for clay construction.

A House of Clay

Eimear Arthur

In the context of material shortages caused by the ‘Emergency’, prolific urban planner and housing architect Frank Gibney published designs, including detailed construction and siting instructions, for a three-bedroomed, single-storey clay cottage, its simple plan centred on a hearth-warmed living room. With Gibney’s – and the era’s – characteristic patriotism, the proposal championed the use of ‘native’ materials and a return to traditional construction methods.(1) Gibney’s 1943 proposal was the latest, but not the last, in a string of solutions put forward by architects, designers, landlords, and policymakers from the eighteenth century onwards, to the enduring challenge of housing ordinary people in rural Ireland.

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ireland’s economy was largely agricultural, structured around the supply of food to Britain and the Empire, and relied on a system whereby several million tenant ‘cottiers’ laboured on farmland in return for access to a small patch of ground on which to grow their own crops, and the right to reside in ‘cabins’ occupying inferior, peripheral sites. These single-room huts were often self-built of wattle and daub or of mud, though a minority, mainly in the West, were of stone (20.1). Philosopher and revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels criticised Irish cabins as ‘most wretched […] scarcely good enough for cattlepens’,(2) while other contemporary commentators derided the structures’ smoky atmospheres (owing to an absence of windows and chimneys); ineffective roofs; groundwater-saturated floors; and interiors shared with farm animals.(3) By the time of the 1841 Census, these ‘fourth-class’ abodes constituted 37% of Irish housing stock.(4)

While some tenant farmers – who had more means and more security than cottiers – also lived in cabins, most lived in farmhouses built according to regional traditions, topography, and climatic conditions. Smaller cottage farmhouses were generally single-storey and one-room-deep but, unlike cabins, had multiple windows and more than one room. A minority of farmhouses were two- or even three-storey.

Beginning in the mid eighteenth century and continuing until the 1870s, spurred by government grants and by publications such as Reverend William Hickey’s An Address to the Landlords of Ireland (Dublin, 1835), which implored its audience to ameliorate ‘the miseries of the Irish peasantry’,(5) some enlightened – and/or chastened – landlords began to sponsor purpose-designed workers’ housing to replace cabins and cottages increasingly recognised as substandard. As sponsors strove to quickly provide housing at scale and at minimal cost, several architectural pattern books for tenant housing were published, including C. J. Trench’s Plans of Cottages for Agricultural Labourers in Ireland (Dublin, 1868) (20.2). Though this movement did have some positive effect on housing standards by the late nineteenth century, of far greater impact in the reduction of fourth-class dwellings was the Famine’s near-obliteration of the cottier class. Nonetheless, persistent rural poverty meant the intermittent use of one-roomed cabins lingered into the twentieth century.(6)

After the War of Independence, the new Free State government sought to stimulate housebuilding through municipal aid – the ‘Million Pound Scheme’ – subsidies to private builders, and tax relief on new homes. Local authorities generally adhered to a suite of approved rural house designs, mostly one-storey structures of three to five rooms, though two-storey versions existed, as did those in pairs or terraces (20.5). Between 1923 and 1959, the Land Commission delivered approximately 20,000 rural homes to a standard design.

By the 1970s, State provision of housing had slowed in favour of a marketised system, and the bungalow had supplanted the cottage as the rural housing typology du jour, a key distinction being that the former incorporated modern conveniences such as electricity and water storage tanks. Aiming to stem depopulation caused by reduced labour requirements at increasingly industrialised and consolidated farms, the government introduced a grant system for the building of individual rural houses. With the expense of employing an architect prohibitive to many, several competing pattern books for bungalows emerged, the most popular by far being Bungalow Bliss by Jack Fitzsimons, first published in 1971. Its original edition contained twenty designs with – crucially – estimates of associated building costs. Construction drawings were available for a low additional fee. The Bungalow Bliss designs maintained the centrality of the hearth, consistent both to vernacular cottages and cabins and to later standardised State designs (20.6). Originally intended for self-building using off-the-shelf elements, the publication’s early designs are simple in plan and expression. Over ten thousand one-off bungalows were erected annually at the end of the 1970s, a phenomenon which would later be described by Frank McDonald in The Irish Times as ‘Bungalow Blight’. Meanwhile, Denis Anderson had proposed, at Castlepark in Kinsale, Co. Cork (20.7), a perhaps more architecturally sensitive typology that merged modern materiality with traditional forms, though in a development for holidaymakers, not locals. Revised editions of Bungalow Bliss, featuring increasingly globalised and elaborate designs, were released until 1998, with the final, twelfth, edition being reprinted up to 2001.(9)