175th anniversary of the office of public works || a glittering legacy
TRANSCRIPT
Irish Arts Review
A Glittering LegacyAuthor(s): Alan MurdochSource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 23, 175th Anniversary of the Office of Public Works(2006), pp. 26-29Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25503514 .
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Sparkling like an upturned chandelier in spring sunshine, the resur
rected Great Palm House at Glasnevin to be awarded a Europa
Nostra Award this June once more resembles the lavish centrepiece
of Ireland's National Botanic Gardens it was always meant to be (Figs
16k5). The 72-foot colossus is a throwback to the heyday of the great Victorian
explorers. David Livingstone sent newly discovered plant seeds here, while
Charles Darwin took a close personal interest.
The 1884 original structure cost just under ?800 (excluding the large
wings) and itself had replaced a rotten, storm-damaged and ungainly 1860
glass-house derided by locals as 'like an ould gable end.' The meticulous
reconstruction costing 13m involved an unlikely marriage of Victorian and
modern technologies. Original wrought iron and teak dating from the 1880s
has been renewed using traditional skills; lasers were
used to set the restored columns back into their pre
cise positions. Minute air gaps help limit condensa
tion, while computer-controlled window motors now
do the work of the unwieldy manual winding gears in
regulating humidity.
The overhead walkways on the outside now act as
lateral beams, cleverly shifting the load on to the rear
wall. It too has been completely rebuilt, stone by num
bered stone, after an alarmed engineer inspected it
and declared flatly 'that wall shouldn't be standing.' It
turned out that it was only being kept in place by the
glasshouse.
The first crisis encountered by Ciar?n O'Connor,
the OPWs assistant principal architect leading the
restoration with colleague Gerry Harvey, was discover
ing that the original columns of wrought iron encasing
a teak spine had suffered an unusual electro-chemical
attack. Ferrous oxide had reacted over decades with the
teak's tannic acid causing a battery-like corrosion.
The solution was to use a narrow, flexible mastic
barrier between them. The oil in teak means it does not
accept paint easily, so a special 'breathing' paint had also to be developed by
OPW suppliers. Iron surfaces were carefully roughened so paint would adhere.
Clear glass has replaced frosted sheets among almost 10,000 panes (Fig 2).
Much of the uniquely uneven Victorian glass has been retained to avoid a dead
flat 'office block' effect. The OPW built up its specialist knowledge while work
ing on the adjacent Curvilinear Range of hot houses. This supremely elegant
family of hot houses, each with its own distinctive climate and planting, was
built in stages between 1843 and 1869, and is widely considered to be among
the top five of its kind in Europe. The 1995 restoration costing 4.6m also
won a Europa Nostra Award for faithful reconstruction of a historic building
(Figs 3<Sl4). The OPW's expertise is now in demand internationally. The colour
on both structures is the original, more cream than white, discovered by spec
trophotometer analysis after microscopically stripping away the old layers.
Ciar?n O'Connor regards the resurrection of the hot houses as a tribute
to Richard Turner, the ebullient Dubliner who turned greenhouses into goth
ic glass cathedrals (Fig 7). Brunei and Armstrong may hold top billing among
Victorian engineers, but within glasshouses the enterprising ironmaster
Turner was undisputed top dog. Turner (1798-1881) was inspired by John
'?8 A
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OPW The Office of Public Works Oifig na nOibreacha Poibl?
4
1 The restored Great
Palm House is the
lavish centrepiece of
Ireland's National
Botanic Gardens
2 Almost 10,000
panes of glass have
been replaced in the
Palm House
3 The 1995
restoration of the
Curvilinear Range of
hot houses won a
Europa Nostra
Award for faithful
reconstruction of a
historic building
4 The Curvilinear
Range of hot houses
before restoration
OPW 175TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION 27
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The idea was that curves would allow the sun to enter from different
angles for maximum light 5 The Great Palm
House
6 The Curvilinear
range of hot houses
is considered to be
among the top five
of its kind in Europe
7 Interior of the
Great Palm House
Claudius Loudon's London glasshouse experiments,
leading the Dubliner and his collaborator, architect
Decimus Burton, towards gothic and filigree touches
reflecting mid-Victorian taste for the picturesque over
the formal. 'The functional became decorative,' says
O'Connor. 'The idea was that curves would allow the
sun to enter from different angles for maximum light.
Science has since shown the amount of (penetrating)
sun is not so different.' The result was however
uniquely graceful.
The Turner family had long earned a crust produc
ing mundane items: nuts, bolts, water tanks, bed posts,
and Trinity College Dublin's 18th-century railings,
along with one-off jobs such as the gates of Dublin
Castle. The OPW architect believes Richard Turner
was something of a perfectionist: 'He wasn't a feller
who said: "let's just keep hacking out the same stuff."
Here was a guy who was pushing his material to the
limit'. He also had a practical manner. 'If asked "Can
you do that?" he'd say "Oh yes" and draw it there and
then. He had a very good rapport with clients.'
His first breakthrough had been to convince the
RDS in 1843 that wooden greenhouses and humidity
loving tropical plants did not mix. Iron, he explained,
would far outlast the timber structures that had rotted
one after another at Glasnevin since 1800. Turner,
described as 'an ingenious, tasty, clever fellow,' had
been successfully building wrought iron glasshouses
since the early 1830s. These progressed in style and
engineering from early Fermanagh and Tipperary con
tracts (1833-37) to later creations at the Lord
Lieutenant's Dublin home and at Belfast's Botanic
Gardens, before his Glasnevin and Kew triumphs.
Today visitors stroll in off the streets, but 160 years
ago the Gardens offered the public much the same wel
come as Marie Antoinette's dinner table. In the mid
19th century this was a bastion of unyielding privilege
where the gentry and their hangers-on fought a dogged
rearguard action in defence of garden snobbery. The
gardens were the offspring of the patrician Royal Dublin
Society, which first emerged as a semi-academic body to
promote innovation in agriculture, science, industry
and art. One of the Irish Parliament's final acts in 1800,
before Union ended self-government, was to pump
extra funds into the fledgling project, which opened on
a 16-acre site (now 48) in May 1800. With arrogance
verging on absolutism, controlling powers now turned
the public away from an amenity they had paid for
through tax. For half a century the gardens were a pri
vate gentlemens' club which visitors needed a special
pass to enter. In 1852 public access was permitted from
Monday to Friday. Whether Glasnevin should open to
the public on Sunday, the labouring masses' one day of
rest, became a battle royal. The toffs rallied 6,000 sig
natures for what amounted to a 'keep the plebs out'
petition. This was countered by 16,000 names favour
ing free access. The gentry and emerging middle class
es, the so-called 'quality' feared the arrival of Dublin's
tenement-dwelling masses would lead to the gardens'
desecration. 'They believed "ignorant"people would not
know how to behave,' says O'Connor. Hostilities
reached boiling point in the summer of 1861 when the
Government delivered the RDS an ultimatum: allow
the public in or lose your grants. The Exchequer, with
William Gladstone in the role of the wrought iron
Chancellor, held all the cards. Dockers and chamber
maids could now marvel at the glass Versailles, no
28 OPW 175TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
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A GLITTERING LEGACY II
longer the exclusive preserve of any Roi Soleil of the
RDS. As up to 15,000 now poured in on Sundays, a
local magistrate reported drunkenness in decline, while
fears of wholesale plant theft proved unfounded.
Once the Glasnevin access row was over and with
architects at the helm, the evolving Curvilinear Range
was completed in 1869 after Turner and his son
William extended the wings, doubling the size to
accommodate swelling weekend crowds, and added the
distinctive high turrets. The new Palm House was com
pleted in 1884 from components cast in Paisley,
Glasgow, from where decorative wrought iron was
exported to customers from Australia to Bermuda. It
was no Turner replica, but its turrets and curvilinear
dome echo his earlier work's central pavilion.
History has now come full circle, with wrought iron
components from the original Turner Palm House at
Kew, rebuilt in steel in the 1980s, incorporated into its
restored Dublin counterpart. Amid the building noise,
O'Connor picks out period details: 'It's the resolution
of lovely junctions that make it Turneresque. There are
finials that mask the join of metal supports. No one
detail is there just for its own sake.' Turning towards
the Curvilinear, he points to metal roses on iron and
glass door columns. They are not purely decorative
either: 'The rose is part of the main bolt which goes
right through and makes the connection. Everything
has a purpose with Turner.'
The need for restoration struck the architects almost
literally in 1993 when a huge pane of glass fell while
O'Connor's team were inside. 'We heard it fall and
went looking for it, but couldn't find it at first.
Thankfully it was impaled in a palm tree and not in
someone's head,' he recalls.
The restored Palm House and Turner's adjacent
Curvilinear Range now form a classic Victorian set.
O'Connor sees the 'timeless' Curvilinear as a master
piece (Fig 6). Its European cousins he feels are clumsy
by comparison. 'There's nothing I would change about
it,' he declares. 'It's one of those things someone got
absolutely right.'
Turner's achievement was all the greater because as
a tradesman-manufacturer he came from outside the
privileged elite: 'He didn't have any of the aspects of
class advantage supporting him, so there was a drive,
a real will to succeed,' says O'Connor. He also had
backbone. Faced with imperious scientific, academic
and landowning gentry 'he had to be able to hold his
own.' His own conservatory catalogue reflected the
rigid Victorian sense of class distinctions: his brochure
Matthew Jebb Matthew Jebb has been Ainmneoir Planda? and Keeper of the
Herbarium at the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin since
1997. He graduated in Botany from Oxford University, and complet
ed his DPhil there in 1985. Before coming to Ireland he was Director
of the Christensen Research Institute in Papua, New Guinea. He
likes to use his Irish title, Ainmneoir Planda?, as he explains: It
means a lot to people [who have] some Irish:
Namer of Plants, if I say 'taxonomisf, people
think I stuff animals or something, but
Ainmneoir Planda? is a nice straightforward
title.' He says of his work at Glasnevin: 'I have
such a nice job, in that I do so many different
things because of its relatively small size.'
Matthew Jebb's responsibilities include
curating the National Herbarium of Ireland,
which comprises about 600,000 specimens.
He has also reorganised the cataloguing of the
living collection at the gardens, and its entire catalogue is now avail
able on the website (www.botanicgardens.ie). He says: 'The website
is a very satisfying achievement. As far as I know, it's the only botan
ic gardens in the world where you can actually see exactly where
something is planted. We have maps of every border and bed.'
There is currently a pause in building activity at the gardens for
the first time since Matthew Jebb arrived: 'We have been in our
offices, in the herbarium and library building, for eight years now.
This is the first purpose-built herbarium in Ireland and the restored
Palm House complex is magnificent. We are missing the builders
already, and preparing for their return in the autumn by taking every
thing out of the succulent houses in readiness for their renovation.'
Matthew Jebb is greatly in demand as a speaker to university
departments, learned societies, and gardening clubs. He recently
raised the international profile of Irish botany by being nominated
the representative for Europe on the COP Bureau, which is responsi
ble for overseeing the Convention on Biological Diversity, part of the
UN's environmental programme.
proposed grandiose designs (and budgets) for the
'landed' gentleman and humbler imitations for gar
deners of 'modest means.'
For O'Connor the restorations have been a person
al pilgrimage. He first studied Turner's designs for a
student thesis. Later, as an OPW architect, he was
asked to rebuild them, and later the Great Palm House.
Surveying the work from its overhead walkways, he
looks round admiringly at the graceful Curvilinear: T
have this simplistic idea, that as Turner's last building
from his own home town in his original materials, it
behoved us to get it right'
Alan Murdoch is a freelance journalist.
1 Peter Pearson Decorative Dublin O'Brien
Press Dublin 2002.
2 E Graeme Robinson & Joan Robertson
Wrought Iron Decoration - A World Survey
Thames & Hudson, London 1977 and
1994
OPW 175TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION |
2 9
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