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Ireland: Plan

Robin Walker (1924-91)

1958

Ink on paper

IAA 90/1.8

National Planning

Ireland: Plan

Robin Walker (1924-91)

1958

Ink on paper

IAA 90/1.8

Robin Walker graduated with a B. Arch from UCD in 1947. Between various stints in Michael Scott’s architectural practice in Dublin, he worked briefly with Le Corbusier while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and spent several years in what is now Zimbabwe. In 1956, supported by a US State Department grant, he undertook a MSc in City and Regional Planning in the Graduate School of the Illinois Institute of Technology where Ludwig Hilberseimer, who had preceded Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in transferring from the Bauhaus to Chicago, was his advisor. His thesis, from which this transportation plan for Ireland comes, was titled Ireland: A Regional Study. Acknowledging that Ireland was essentially an agricultural country, Walker proposed a pattern of village units across the island. These villages would surround market towns at the centre of natural geographical divisions. Four of the market towns were to be designated as centres for regions corresponding to the existing four provinces. Such a decentralised pattern of settlement, Walker suggested, would require a simple system of connectivity. As delineated in this transport map, a railway and a highway, each forming an independent figure of eight, together with a route following the River Shannon, would be sufficient to link the local roads leading to the rural divisions.

A complete rearrangement of the infrastructure of the island as Walker set out in his study was clearly not feasible or realistic. But this was not really the point. Walker was stressing a new approach to thinking about planning. This would eschew the practice which he identified as having proliferated in the previous forty years whereby planning policy was derived almost exclusively from political considerations and pressures. Instead, planning would be based purely on objective analysis of the physical characteristics, needs, and potentials of the various different regions of the country.

An Alternative Modernisation – Robin Walker’s ‘Ireland: Plan’ (1958)

Brian Ward

 

In 1958, some 60,000 people emigrated from Ireland.(1) In June of that year, the thirty-four-year-old Robin Walker completed his Master of Science in City and Regional Planning in the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Entitled Ireland: A Regional Study, his thesis aimed to ‘demonstrate how the country can arrest emigration and develop a higher degree of self-sufficiency’.(2) Walker proposed that the retention of Ireland’s rural way of life, so important to a national identity seemingly bound up with a cultural exceptionalism based on tradition, was dependent upon the government adopting modern planning. While Irish governments of the period promoted some major programmes of modernisation, activities such as planning that were associated with modernity, were often regarded with an official and post-colonial suspicion (23.1). Up to the late 1950s, any such activities that were adopted took their place, erratically, within a ‘series of ideas, work practices and attitudes’ that the historian, Tom Garvin, suggests were more ‘resonant … of the eighteenth century than … of post-war Europe’; they were preserved, partially and poorly, as a governmental act of resistance to the capitalist world.(3)  However, starting in the late 1950s, Irish policy was increasingly devoted to convergence with ‘other Western societies’. ‘This kind of volte face, from the aspiration for a revived national culture … to [an] aspiration to be normal and unexceptional’ is, Joe Cleary points out, a common ‘feature of national post-independence narratives everywhere’ – narratives in which architectural history plays a part.(4)

After graduating from the School of Architecture in UCD in 1947, Walker worked for Le Corbusier in Paris, and Michael Scott in Dublin, before attaining a scholarship to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s IIT in 1956.(5) Connecting Irish architecture to modernist trajectories elsewhere, Walker has become canonical as a skilled exponent of situated modernism, a regionally inflected strand of the universal idiom.(6) His thesis appears to reinforce this narrative of Ireland’s absorption of international influences. Projecting planning as a practice capable of objectively synthesising socio-economic, cultural and environmental forces, it is a typical output of Mies’s master/apprentice model of education in that it clearly demonstrates the imprint of an IIT teacher – in this case the German architect and urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885-1967), the Bauhaus émigré who supervised and approved Ireland: A Regional Study.(7)

Illustration from Ludwig Hilberseimer, ‘A New Settlement Unit’, The New City; Principles of Planning, publiahed in Chicago in1944.
23.1 Ludwig Hilberseimer, ‘A New Settlement Unit’, The New City; Principles of Planning (Chicago,1944), 106
Black and white photograph takne by Chris Bruton, showing the transformer at Ardnacrusha, Co. Clare, during construction in 1929.
23.2 Chris Bruton, Transformer at Ardnacrusha, Co. Clare, during construction, 1929 (IAA Chris Bruton Collection 2006/138.12)

Soon after publishing Großstadtbauten (1925), a seminal Neue Sachlichkeit study of the modern metropolis, Hilberseimer began exploring planned decentralisation as an antithesis to the disorder of the capitalist city and its suburbs.(8) After he settled amidst the expansive plains of the American mid-West in 1938, a prior interest in land redistribution and economic self-sufficiency intersected with Jeffersonian politics. In texts such as The New Regional Pattern: Industries and Gardens, Workshops and Farms (1949) Hilberseimer promoted a landscape-based approach to planning designed to ground the pauperised itinerant labour force constructed by capitalism.(9) Indicating the apolitical appeal of decentralisation in the opening decades of the twentieth century, he drew upon Russian geographer Peter Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898) and Henry Ford’s My Life and Work (1922) to argue that a future ruralisation of cities, and industrialisation of the countryside, would create stable and satisfying employment (fig. 23.2). The New Regional Pattern quoted Ford, the son of an Irish emigrant, asserting that the mid-twentieth century concentration of production was but ‘a stage in industrial development’.(10)

 

Adhering to Hilberseimer’s precepts, Ireland: A Regional Study proposed a through-line from survey to plan. When describing Ireland’s geographical, historical and social ‘structure’, it highlighted a pre-colonial tradition of dispersed rather than nucleated human settlement. Walker cast modern initiatives such as the Congested Districts Board, the cooperative movement, and the government’s approach of decentralising industry, as attempts to alleviate Ireland’s economic woes while operating within a heritage of centrifugal spatial thinking. Explaining that a planner was obliged to ‘make positive, objective proposals’, based on an understanding of history and current strategy, his scheme was proposed as an extension of this tradition in service of the Irish government’s ‘overall policy of decentralisation’.(11)

In Ireland: A Regional Study, large holdings in the eastern midlands were shared amongst farmers relocated from the ‘congested’ areas of the west.(12) Industry related to the processing of raw materials – produced through market gardening and a general intensification of agriculture – was dispersed across the countryside in ‘village units’. The resulting landscape was ‘a pattern of interrelated rural divisions, each one equal to and relatively independent of the others’.(13) As he associated it primarily with British settler colonialists, Walker was ambivalent about Ireland’s urban tradition but he nonetheless noted the ‘vital’ social role of market towns in the country’s ‘rural structure’.(14) Each of his divisions thus had such a town (population: 10,000 – 15,000), positioned no more than an hour’s distance from the ‘village units’ (population: 1800) that it served. Four market towns, designated as provincial centres (population: approx. 75,000), were ‘deliberately placed inland’ to ‘serve the internal economy of the country’.(15) Industry was introduced strategically to prevent rather than cause rural depopulation (as had occurred during the Industrial Revolution). Each village unit was provided with at least one factory to enable workers oscillate seasonally between agricultural and industrial labour; while industry in the market towns was limited to prevent migration from the surrounding countryside.

In ‘Ireland: Plan’ – one of the typically lucid drawings of his thesis – the rural divisions, towns and regional centres of Walker’s landscape of self-sufficiency were organised across the Irish landmass. Their relationship to the existing geography of national and county borders, and towns and cities, was not articulated, but it was clear that ‘Ireland: Plan’ proposed a radical reorganisation of Ireland’s terrain and population.(16) ‘The cause of Ireland’s sickness’, according to Walker, lay in its ‘historical pattern of settlement’.(17) Benefitting from their ideal locations within an ‘economy of exploitation’ created to ‘feed industrialised England’ at Ireland’s expense, the ports of Dublin and Belfast had, in Walker’s view, ‘attracted an undue share of industry’.(18) Consequently, in his plan they were demoted to market town status – entailing, presumably, a reduction in inhabitants. The existing infrastructure converging on these cities was replaced by rail and road systems connecting the nodes in Walker’s new urban network. Each forming ‘an independent figure of eight’, these systems were augmented by an additional ‘trunk route following the River Shannon’ and, where necessary, ‘link routes’ to market towns. Walker suggested that his transport network’s diagrammatic clarity was justified because ‘a decentralised pattern of settlement required a considerably less complex system of communications than the existing centralised pattern’.(19) In the absence of a coherent road policy in 1950s Ireland, expenditure on road infrastructure was dominated by a localist politics focused on providing employment rather than constructing a modern transport system.(20) Within this context, ‘Ireland: Plan’ notably posited the roads network and speed of connection as a critical post-colonial instrument of spatial management and national development.

Map by Robin Walker, entitled 'Ireland: Village Units; showing proposed redevelopment of Killeigh and Gorteen Bridge, Co. Offaly, 1958.
23.3 Robin Walker, Ireland: Village Units, 1958 (IAA 90/1.11). Detail showing proposed redevelopment of Killeigh and Gorteen Bridge, Co. Offaly

At smaller scales, Walker’s Ireland: A Regional Study translated Hilberseimer’s ideas to Ireland– the village units he proposed for Killeigh and Gorteen Bridge in Offaly were localised versions of the gridded landscapes his teacher drew across American plains (fig 23.3). But at the national scale his report adhered more closely to the arguments, methods and forms of The New Regional Pattern. Walker’s attempt to address Ireland’s dire emigration through modified settlement patterns reflected Hilberseimer’s confidence in planning’s capacity to reduce migration; his account of Irish history echoed Hilberseimer’s historical narrative of dispossession and centralisation; his maps replicated Hilberseimer’s survey methodology; his foregrounding of the road network followed Hilberseimer’s accordance of importance to the automobile in spatial planning; his system of regional centres, towns and village units repeated Hilberseimer’s preferred settlement interrelationships; his distinctive symbols for towns appropriated Hilberseimer’s mode of representing ‘settlement units’; and his plan for Tullamore as the regional centre of a peat-rich rural division depicted a fan shaped arrangement Hilberseimer deployed when protecting housing from wind-borne pollution (fig 23.4).

Map by Robin Walker entitled 'Ireland: Rural Division' and showing proposed redevelopment of Tullamore, Co. Offaly, 1958.
23.4 Robin Walker, Ireland: Rural Division, 1958 (IAA 90/1.10). Detail showing proposed redevelopment of Tullamore, Co. Offaly

Notwithstanding a general adherence to The New Regional Pattern, Walker’s Ireland: A Regional Study hinted at a sceptical attitude towards Hilberseimer’s ideology of self-sufficiency and decentralisation. From Arthur Griffith’s 1905 speech on Sinn Féin policy, to Pádraig Pearse’s 1916 ‘The Heart’s Desire’ article, to Éamon de Valera’s 1943 bucolic broadcast, protectionism and a ruralism of light industry had been central to Irish nation-building – even as such an ideology became anachronistic in post-war Europe. Walker noted the ‘paradox’ that, although apparently devoted to ‘stemming the “flight from the land”’, decentralising policies since independence had produced rates of emigration to match those of the nineteenth century.(21) During the late 1950s, Walker’s generation impatiently sought to reverse the economic decline Ireland had suffered under the governance of the revolutionary generation (which was generally of a similar age to Hilberseimer).(22) Upon publication, also in 1958, T. K. Whitaker’s First Programme for Economic Expansion was quickly instrumentalised within a governmental culture already beginning to liberalise.

The political landscape to which Walker’s thesis responded receded therefore as he returned to Seán Lemass’s Ireland, not long after graduating from IIT.(23) In a paper delivered to the Town Planning Institute in 1967, he revised his thesis to reflect a new national ‘awareness that Ireland cannot survive in isolation but must integrate, economically, with Europe’.(24) A shift from ‘introversion’ to extroversion and ‘from a rural to an urban’ economy was registered in Walker’s new plan in which three routes for European trade ‘via’ (rather than to) Britain were channelled through Belfast, Dublin and Wexford (fig. 23.5).(25) A ‘super transportation route’ linking Derry through these ports to Cork formed the spine of a ‘new metropolitan region – the East Coast City’.(26) While Walker suggested that his new plan reacted to Ireland’s abandonment of a policy of decentralisation, during the 1960s the Industrial Development Authority continued its efforts to disperse factories across the country.(27) If it betrayed a lack of understanding of government policy, Walker’s paper suggested familiarity with a turn towards centralisation in international planning discourse over this period.(28)

Although superseded by this later work, Walker’s 1958 thesis instantiated Hilberseimer’s promotion of spatial planning as ‘statesmanship’ and, in this respect, was timely.(29) His subject formation in IIT as a disciple of planning helped prepare him for his role as a partner in Scott Tallon Walker (a firm which secured major government contracts). Opening Ireland to the vagaries of the market required a faith in economic planning that, in select individuals of Walker’s generation, overlapped with an interest in spatial planning that was new in Irish governance.(30)

In 1962, referencing planning schemes in the United States and Canada, the Minister for Local Government, Neil T. Blaney, argued for a close association between economic development and the planning of the physical environment. However, this association was only sporadically tested across the 1960s. While of interest to the country’s new technocrats, comprehensive planning schemes often ran aground when confronted with the localist structure of Ireland’s politics. For instance, the 1969 Buchanan report that recommended the centralisation of industry and employment in designated sites, was shelved.(31) At the same time, the decentralising logics of Irish politics seldom created investment in the road, electric and telecommunication infrastructures necessary to bring industry to rural locations, and Ireland’s politicians had to come to terms with their limited power to dictate where foreign investors should locate factories and headquarters.(32)

In The New Regional Pattern, Hilberseimer identified market forces as the ‘roots of restlessness’.(33) Responding to Ireland’s patchily planned economic liberalisation, Walker’s 1967 paper acknowledged the accelerated ‘drift of population from rural areas’ to the country’s burgeoning urban centres – where many found employment in service industries.(34) It largely captured the trajectory of settlement on the island. Blaney’s promotion of the Planning and Development Act (1963) as a protection against the ‘threat of damage to […] our scenic areas’ registered an increasing tendency, during this drift, to view the countryside as a site of recreation and respite.(35) As this view materialised in projects such as Walker’s acclaimed holiday homes (Weekend House (fig. 23.6) and Bothar Buí), the industrialised rurality of decentralisation, envisioned by the previous generation of nation-builders, was fading into history. It was, however, memorialised in ‘Ireland: Plan’. A typical document of high modernism, Walker’s drawing can also be read as an ambivalent and late record of what Cleary describes as the ‘deficient modernisation’ of Ireland in the first five decades of the last century. Without discounting its gendered social conservatism, but seeking to highlight its resistance to capitalism, Kate Soper reframes this, less pejoratively, as an ‘alternative modernisation’.(36) ‘Ireland: Plan’ captures Walker attempting, within Hilberseimer’s IIT idiom, to spatially resolve select particularities, such as a focus on rural employment, within the nation’s early twentieth century alternative modernisation.

 

Dr Brian Ward is a lecturer in the School of Architecture, Building and Environment, TU Dublin. He teaches history, theory and criticism, architectural design studio, and research methods.

 

Map by Robin Walker entitled ‘Linear Planning for Ireland’, 1967.
23.5 Robin Walker, ‘Linear Planning for Ireland’ (Robin Walker, ‘A regional plan for Ireland’, Frederick Rogerson and Pádraig Ó hUiginn eds, Planning in Ireland: The Town Planning Institute Conference Dublin 1967 (Dublin, 1967), 63)
Black and white photograph showing the supporting columns of the Weekend House (O'Flaherty House) Summer Cove, Kinsale, Co. Cork, circa 1975.
23.6 Weekend House (O'Flaherty House) Summer Cove, Kinsale, Co. Cork, c. 1975 (IAA Photo Collection 47/43 X1)

Footnotes:

1  Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 (London, 2004), 463.

2  Robin Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study (MSc thesis, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1958), iv.

3  Tom Garvin, News from a New Republic: Ireland in the 1950s (Gilll & Macmillan, Dublin: 2010), 154.

4  Joe Cleary, ‘Ireland and modernity’ in J. Cleary and C. Connolly C. (eds.) Cambridge companion to modern Irish culture. (Cambridge University Press, 2005) p 14.

5  Donna J. Junkroski, ‘IIT Architecture Faculty and Students, 1938-1958’, Rolf Achille, Kevin Harrington, and Charlotte Myhrum eds, Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator (Chicago, 1986).

6  For sophisticated readings of the way in which Walker grounded modernist thinking in a shifting local context see: Simon Walker, ‘Emanations of the Spirit’, Patrick Lynch and Simon Walker eds, Change is the Reality: The Work of Robin Walker Architect (London, 2021), pp. 39-80; Ellen Rowley, ‘From Dublin to Chicago and back again: an exploration of the influence of Americanised modernism on the culture of Dublin’s architecture, 1945-1975’, Linda King and Elaine Sisson eds., Ireland, Design and Visual Culture (Cork, 2011), pp. 211-234.

7  See Reyner Banham, ‘The Master of Human Architecture’, Rolf Achilles, Kevin Harrington, and Charlotte Myhrum eds,. Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator (Chicago, 1986). Caroline Constant draws attention to the strong influence of Hilberseimer on the thesis which the landscape architect Alfred Caldwell completed under his tutelage. Caroline Constant, ‘Hilberseimer and Caldwell: Merging Ideologies in the Lafayette Park Landscape’, Charles Waldheim ed., Hilberseimer/Mies van der Rohe: Lafayette Park Detroit (New York, 2004). For reminiscences of Hilberseimer’s teaching see George E. Danforth, ‘Hilberseimer Remembered’, Richard Pommer, David A. Spaeth, and Kevin Harrington eds, In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner (Chicago, 1988), 8-15. For an understanding of Hilberseimer’s intellectual formation see Scott Colman, Ludwig Hilberseimer: Reanimating Architecture and the City (London, 2023). For a criticism of the closed nature of Hilberseimer’s rhetoric about city planning see Kevin Harrington, ‘Ideas in Action: Hilberseimer and the Redevelopment of the South Side of Chicago’, Richard Pommer, David A. Spaeth, and Kevin Harrington eds, In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner (Chicago, 1988), 69-88.

8  Ludwig Hilberseimer, Metropolisarchitecture and Selected Essays, Richard Anderson ed. (New York, 2012).

9  See Charles Waldheim, ‘Introduction: Landscape, Urban Order, and Structural Change’, Charles Waldheim ed., Hilberseimer/Mies van der Rohe: Lafayette Park Detroit (New York, 2004) on the importance of The New Regional Pattern within Hilberseimer’s work.

10  Ludwig Hilberseimer, The New Regional Pattern: Industries and Gardens, Workshops and Farms (Chicago, 1949), 132.

11  Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study, 2 and 39.

12  Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study, 32. Until food security concerns arose in the lead-up to the Second World War, Fianna Fáil were actively exploring breaking up the great ‘ranches’ of Leinster and Munster. Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so poor for so long? (Dublin, 2004), 3.

13  Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study, 38.

14  Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study, 28. Walker quotes US anthropologist Conrad Arensberg’s suggestion that they were ‘an extension townwards of the countryman’s own social order’ (25). The importance of such towns in retaining Ireland’s rural population was a recurring theme across the 1950s. See C. Lucey and James F. Meenan, Report of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems (Dublin, 1954); and Jeremiah Newman, ‘The Future of Rural Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 47, no. 188 (1958), 308-499.

15  Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study, 38.

16  Walker’s more detailed drawings of Offaly suggest that sacred architecture and landscapes were to be retained while existing domestic buildings were to be demolished.

17  Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study, 4.

18  Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study, 19 and 28.

19  Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study, 38.

20  Mary E. Daly, The Buffer State, The Historical Roots of the Department of the Environment (Dublin, 1997); Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland; Garvin, Preventing the Future; Denis Linehan, ‘Roads: “We must have motorways” – Ireland, the Highway and Modernity’, Gary A. Boyd and John McLaughlin eds, Infra Éireann: Infrastructure and the Architectures of Modernity in Ireland 1916–2016 (London, 2015).

21  Robin Walker, Ireland: A Regional Study, 4.

22  They were generally born in the 1880s and 1890s. Garvin, Preventing the Future, 251.

23  By 1961 emigration had fallen to 27,000 and the economy expanded at 4 per cent per annum until 1967. J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989); Garvin, Preventing the Future.

24  Robin Walker, ‘A regional plan for Ireland’, Frederick Rogerson and Pádraig Ó hUiginn eds, Planning in Ireland: The Town Planning Institute Conference (Dublin, 1967), 64.

25  Walker, ‘A regional plan for Ireland’, 64.

26  Walker, ‘A regional plan for Ireland’, 66.

27  Mary E. Daly, Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957-1973 (Cambridge, 2016).

28  Prionnsias Breathnach, ‘The Buchanan report and its aftermath: Implications for Irish regional planning’, Administration, 67, no. 3 (2019), 41-63.

29  Hilberseimer, The New Regional Pattern, xiv.

30  Garret Fitzgerald perceived in First Programme a seizing of the initiative in planning. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society, 343; Michael J. Bannon, ‘Introduction’, Michael J. Bannon ed., Planning: The Irish Experience: 1920-1988 (Dublin, 1989); Michael J. Bannon, ‘Development Planning and the Neglect of the Critical Regional Dimension’, Michael J. Bannon ed., Planning: The Irish Experience: 1920-1988 (Dublin, 1989); Kevin I. Nowlan, ‘The Evolution of Irish Planning: 1934-1964’, Michael J. Bannon ed., Planning: The Irish Experience: 1920-1988 (Dublin, 1989); Sean O’Leary, Sense of Place, A History of Irish Planning (Dublin, 2014).

31  Local Government (Planning and Development) Bill 1962 – Second Stage https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1962-11-22/113 (accessed October 10, 2025).

32  Daly, Sixties Ireland; Garvin, Preventing the Future.

33  Hilberseimer, The New Regional Pattern, xiv.

34  Walker, ‘A regional plan for Ireland’, 65.

35  Local Government (Planning and Development) Bill 1962 – Second Stage; Eric G. E. Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War (New York, 2009).

36  Kate Soper, “The dialectics of progress: Irish ‘belatedness’ and the politics of prosperity,” ephemera 13, no. 2 (2013): 249-267 (255).

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