Building for Health

Vincent Kelly was a native of Trim, Co. Meath. He studied under William Alphonsus Scott at the newly established School of Architecture at University College, Dublin, from which, in 1917, he was the first student to graduate. By 1922 he had set up in independent practice in Lower Abbey Street, Dublin. In 1931 he was appointed one of the three members of the Committee of Reference set up under the terms of the Public Charitable Hospitals (Amendment) Act to advise on the allocation of funds from the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake, the newly established lottery scheme raising the money needed for a hospital building programme.

In 1933 Kelly went on a study-tour of new European hospitals, visiting some fifty-two in Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Holland, and Czechoslovakia in just six weeks. Many of his findings were distilled into his designs for the Kildare County Fever Hospital, Naas, Co. Kildare. As shown in this sophisticated isometric drawing, still in its original chrome frame, this was to be a modest but confidently modernist building. Its exterior would be simple, with curved ends to the main block and expansive glazing, its interiors brightly coloured and antiseptic, perfectly planned for the treatment of highly infectious diseases including typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet fever and measles. Tenders for the construction of the hospital were issued in 1935 and the building opened on 20 July 1938. Now serving as St Mary’s Primary, Community and Continuing Care Centre, and administrative offices, its distinctive and dignified architecture forms an interesting contrast to A. & D. Wejcherts’ postmodern Naas General Hospital building, the first phase of which was begun in 1985.

Hospital Fever

Emma Gilleece

Fever hospital seems like an archaic concept. It conjures up overcrowded, Victorian living conditions harbouring deadly contagions, a bygone era, many generations ago. That is until I remember my uncle Dermot recalling the three weeks he spent in the Cork Street Fever Hospital in 1948 as a child stricken with scarlet fever,(1) along with his eighteen-month-old brother, my father.(2) The twenty kilometres or so between Rathcoole and the Liberties must have seemed all the greater considering the lack of communications and transport options available.

Dermot writes,

At a time when phones were few and far between, the numbers of affected families were so great, however, that it was deemed necessary to report each patient’s well-being by a sort of code in the national papers. Each patient was given a number and at any given time, their condition could be found in the newspaper with the designated number beside their general status as ‘no improvement’, ‘improving’ or ‘convalescing’, gleaned from a hospital bulletin.

I try to imagine how my grandmother must have felt entrusting her precious sons to an institution. As handsome as the row of brick buildings erected between 1801 and 1808 by Henry, Mullins and McMahon is, with its distinctive domed cupola, it nevertheless has the look of a barracks. Some people, such as my uncle, seemed to have enjoyed their time there. Still, I glance up from my laptop at my eight-month-old baby to monitor his puppy-like fascination with the radiator cover and shudder at the thought of such a separation.

I begin to decipher the drawing that shows isometric floor plans of the Kildare County Fever Hospital in Naas. My unprofessional eyes are grateful for these architectural renderings prepared for clients, which make the building easy to understand and allow me to peer into the ground and first floors like a giant. I find the name of the architect – Vincent Kelly –  a name I know from the history of the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake. I am aware of Kelly’s hospitals in Nenagh (1936) and Cashel (1940) (16.1), but I am not familiar with Kildare County Fever Hospital (1938).

Examining the floor plans for the Naas hospital, the design of each of the two floors consists of a chain of square rooms gathered along a  central corridor which meets a pill-shaped component. The legend on the drawing lists the diseases the hospital treated, scarlet fever being one of them, and each ailment has its own designated ward. There are also several isolation rooms. All the wards and day rooms face south to increase exposure to sunlight. Single-storey canted pavilions boldly project and add variation to the elevation while providing a terrace space for patients on the upper storey. With its flat roof and brick and reinforced concrete construction, the hospital emphasises function and economy. But it is also a symbol of progress. The building embodies in its technology and aesthetics its function to promote the well-being and recuperation of the patients.(16.4)

Kildare County Fever Hospital represents a unique period of our architectural heritage, with investment in health infrastructure on a previously unachievable scale. But I come back again to the word fever and cannot help but make the connection to the Covid-19 pandemic. I am still processing those years of collective segregation and quarantine, when all of our homes were potential fever wards. I am hopeful that this time of isolation will just be one of the stories I pass onto my son.

Footnotes:

1  Fever Hospital and House of Recovery (today Brú Chaoimhín nursing home), Cork Street, Dublin. Opened in 1804 and operated until 1953.

2  Dermot Gilleece , ‘My Brother’s Clatter’, A Farewell to the Fairways (Dublin, 2024), 3

3  Ruth Barrington, Health medicine & politics in Ireland, 1900-1970 (Dublin, 1987), 109.

4  The Hospitals Trust Fund was established under the Public Charitable Hospitals (Temporary Provisions) Act, 1930. Hugh Campbell, ‘Irish identity and the Architecture of the New State’, Annette Becker, John Olley and Wilfred Wang eds, 20th Century Architecture Ireland (Munich, 1997), 86.

5  J. O’Sheehan and E. de Barra, Ireland’s Hospitals 1930-1955 (Dublin, 1956), 24.

6  Paul Larmour, Free State Architecture: Modern Movement Architecture in Ireland, 1922-1949 (Kinsale, 2009), 34.

7  ‘Kildare’s New Hospital’, Irish Press, 21 July 1938; ‘New Kildare Hospital: Formal opening by Minister’, Irish Times, 22 July 1938 (IAA, Vincent Kelly Press Cuttings Album, 2009/100).

Emma Gilleece has an MA in architectural history from the University of Limerick and an MSc in Urban and Building Conservation from University College Dublin. She is a freelance architectural historian.