175th anniversary of the office of public works || a glittering legacy

5
Irish Arts Review A Glittering Legacy Author(s): Alan Murdoch Source: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 23, 175th Anniversary of the Office of Public Works (2006), pp. 26-29 Published by: Irish Arts Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25503514 . Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:02 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Irish Arts Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Irish Arts Review (2002-). http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:02:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Upload: alan-murdoch

Post on 18-Jan-2017

223 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: 175th Anniversary of the Office of Public Works || A Glittering Legacy

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 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:02

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Irish Arts Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Irish Arts Review(2002-).

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:02:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: 175th Anniversary of the Office of Public Works || A Glittering Legacy

" *-?!!?i|av^i| f

WH

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:02:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: 175th Anniversary of the Office of Public Works || A Glittering Legacy

^^^^H^'i Sip ^^

I

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

Ml

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

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:02:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 4: 175th Anniversary of the Office of Public Works || A Glittering Legacy

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

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:02:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 5: 175th Anniversary of the Office of Public Works || A Glittering Legacy

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

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.31 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:02:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions