Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Edited by Rolf Loeber, Hugh Campbell, Livia Hurley, John Montague, and Ellen Rowley, Architecture 1600–2000: Art and Architecture of Ireland (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2014), 600 pages, ISBN: 978-0300179224, $150.

Art and Architecture of Ireland is an authoritative and fully illustrated survey that encompasses the period from the early Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. The five volumes explore all aspects of Irish art—from high crosses to installation art, from illuminated manuscripts to Georgian houses and Modernist churches, from tapestries and sculptures to oil paintings, photographs and video art. This monumental project provides new insights into every facet of the strength, depth and variety of Ireland’s artistic and architectural heritage.

Architecture, 1600–2000 is the most complete survey of architecture in Ireland ever published. The essays in this volume cover all aspects of Ireland’s built environment, not only buildings but infrastructure, landscape development, public and private construction and much else. The volume challenges and expands the traditional understanding of Irish ‘architecture’, giving novel and exciting interpretations of the field and, by means of many striking illustrations, encourages us to think anew about the environment that surrounds us.

Rolf Loeber holds professorships at the University of Pittsburgh, where he oversees research on the causes of crime as well as mental health problems in young people. He has published extensively on Irish architecture, the history of fiction, and social, economic and plantation history. Hugh Campbell is professor of architecture at University College, Dublin, where he is currently head of the School of Architecture. He has published extensively on subjects from Irish architecture and urbanism to photography and urban space. Livia Hurley is an architect and architectural historian working in private practice in Dublin. Her research interests include urban history and the study of industrial sites and monuments. John Montague is assistant professor in the College of Architecture, Art and Design at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. His research interests include medieval and early modern architecture, and urban mapping. He is co-author, with Colm Lennon, of John Rocque’s Dublin: A Guide to the Georgian City (Dublin, 2010). Ellen Rowley is an architectural historian, researching 20th-century architecture in Ireland and beyond. She has written extensively on architectural modernism and edited a collection of Irish architectural writing: Patterns of Thought (2012). She is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

Published by Four Court Press and available from Artbooks.com  (the book launch takes place in Dublin on Thursday, 12 February 2015 at the Royal Irish Academy) . . .

Anthony Malcomson, Nathaniel Clements (1705–77): Politics, Fashion, and Architecture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015), 290 pages, ISBN: 978-1851829149, €55 / $75.

This book argues that Nathaniel Clements was an enlightened patron of architecture, not a practising architect, and that he influenced upper-class residential development in Dublin and popularised a particular form of Palladian ‘villa-farm’ (or modest country house) partly because of who he was—a high-ranking and well-connected government official and an arbiter of fashion and taste. The two places where his architectural influence is still strongly felt today are the high-fashion enclave of Henrietta Street, Dublin, of which he created about one-third in the period 1733 c.1740, and the Phoenix Park, of which he was Ranger, where he made important improvements to the landscape and where he built in 1752–57 a new Ranger’s Lodge which forms the nucleus of today’s Áras an Uachtaráin. The book provides a detailed analysis of these aesthetic achievements and (following Clements’ death) of the re casting of the Ranger’s Lodge as a British viceregal residence during the period 1782–c.1800. It concludes with a broader discussion of the ‘amateur’ tradition in British and Irish architecture and of Clements’ place among the ‘amateurs’ who dominated the art form in the decades before the coming-of-age of a fully-fledged architectural profession.

Anthony Malcomson was director of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland from 1988 until 1998, and during a career in archives which began in 1967 has sorted and listed the papers from c.75 Irish country houses. His publications, mainly based on the evidence of this material, include Nathaniel Clements: Government and the Governing Elite in Ireland, 1725–75 (2005), Virtues of a Wicked Earl: The Life and Legend of William Sydney Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim, 1806–78 (2009), and John Foster (1740–1828): The Politics of Improvement and Prosperity (2011).