The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
I remember standing, awed, in front of the sprawling Lucombe oak (Quercus x hispanica ‘Lucombeana’) at Kew gardens and reading the plaque about how Victorian landscape designer, William Nesfield, had a vision for two long vistas – one leading down to the Thames (Syon Vista), and the other anchored by the Great Pagoda (Pagoda Vista) – that would draw people out into the landscape; a role they still provide today. In the middle of the proposed Syon Vista was a large and well-established oak specimen – the Lucombe oak. It is a natural cross-breed between a turkey oak and a cork oak. Nesfield decided to move it 20m to one side of the vista. So, planted about 70 years prior, it was duly uprooted and transplanted (in 1846) to its present site. There’s something about the Lucombe having been asked to ‘kindly step aside, for you’re blocking the view’ that rather undermines its grandeur. As if, having been ushered into line, it now stands blushing slightly at the indignation.
Regardless of what character visitors might observe in this great old tree, it’s fantastically ludicrous that a 70 year old specimen was carefully moved, on a cart pulled by four horses, in order to manipulate a vista into a perfectly orchestrated garden. A physical landscape that is – despite it’s reality – a deeply unreal place.
Across the Irish sea, in equally constructed landscape, Irish architect Noreile Breen is working in the gardens of the great 1,500 acre Tullynally Castle estate in County Westmeath. The Pakenhams (later Earls of Longford) settled here in the 17th century and three generations still call it home today. The layout of the gardens and parkland date mainly from the early 1800s, but the present owners, Thomas and Valerie Pakenham, have gardened here for over 50 years and added many new features. There are walled gardens, extensive woodland gardens, two ornamental lakes and Thomas Pakenham’s five-acre arboretum.
Breen started studying horticulture at the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland in 2021, an unusual journey she has embarked upon that, to her mind, is ‘teamed with my architecture work and skills’. The decision came out of work over the last two years on three key projects. The first, which she is currently committing the lion’s share of her time to, is the mapping of 30 acres of garden at Tullynally. A constructed landscape that bears the marks of ‘significant human influence’, as she calls it.
Thomas Pakenham is an arboriculturalist and has vast knowledge of trees (on which he has written several books). He’s a plant hunter and has collected seed from around the world and reared it in Tullynally. While Breen loves working in the garden, her preoccupation is learning about where plants are coming from and how they move around the globe, ‘and it’s done at Tullynally in a really tangible way. Thomas has kept incredible records of his expeditions and then how the plants have grown and/or died in the arboretum at Tullynally.’
The second project is the mapping of ancient oak woodland in the Beara peninsula, a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) in coastal southwest Ireland, accessed through Irish architect Robin Walker’s Bothár Buí.
Robin Walker (1924-1991) – a partner in the RIBA Gold Medal winning Dublin practice of Scott Tallon Walker – worked for both Le Corbusier in Paris and for Mies van der Rohe in Chicago before returning to Ireland and designed Bothár Buí in the 1960s, a unique modernist assemblage of historic farm buildings and contemporary structures.
Source:Noreile Breen
The oak tree at Bothár Buí. This image was exhibited in the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition, 2021, and also published in Canalside Press' Change is the Reality: The Work of Robin Walker
In the words of architect Patrick Lynch: ‘Bothár Buí played a key role in the artistic and cultural life of Ireland throughout the 1970s and '80s, and many painters and poets stayed and made work in and for the house. Dorothy Walker's role at the Irish Arts Council placed her at the centre of modern Irish cultural life, and her and Robin's friends and collaborators were entertained at Bothár Buí, making the house a place for serious cultural exchange and play, a salon as much as a retreat.’
The wood beyond Bothár Buí grows in extremely rocky terrain that drops from 70m above sea level down to the Atlantic Ocean, over a distance of about 250m. It is only inaccessible by foot. Essentially a temperate rainforest, which, Breen tells me, is the natural biome or landscape that would exist here without human activity or intervention. It’s ‘the purest landscape I’ve experienced, which has the least human influence’, Breen says. There is no management. There are some deer. The wood is mainly oak and very old. For woodland to be termed ancient in Ireland, the wood must have existed continuously since 1560 or earlier. In contrast to Tullynally, the Beara wood is a truly natural landscape, with the very least human influence at play.
The third plate that Breen is spinning, while still very much concerned with the mapping of landscape and the buildings therein, is more international. We jump to Mexico City, where Breen spent April this year, and she tells me cautiously about the mapping of an early undocumented house and garden by 20th century Mexican architect Luis Barragán.
Breen was invited by Grafton Architects' Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara (when they curated the 16th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2018) to contribute to an exhibition reimagining important 20th century works. Breen exhibited a large-scale spatial model – a study of light, colour and texture of the hallway at Barragán’s Casa Ortega. Ambient and direct light was filtered, reflected and coloured within a series of interconnecting spaces that recreate the interior planes of the hallway. Pink light falls on rough white plaster, warm imitation sunlight projects on a fuchsia surface creating a spectrum of oranges and reds. It remains an impressive rendering of the Casa Ortega experience, emulating the tropical Mexican glare.
Source:Courtesy of Noreile Breen
'SPACE: LIGHT + SURFACE' by Noreile Breen for the 16th architecture biennale in Venice in 2018, curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara
Having visited Mexico twice in preparation for the Biennale, she stumbled on the undocumented building during the course of her research. That’s all she’s willing to divulge at this point because, understandably, there will be lots of interest in an undocumented Barragán project. She showed me a couple of her own breath-taking photographs which suggest she is in the process of unearthing a masterpiece and, I excitedly encourage her, will surely cause quite a stir when published. Breen concedes it is a pretty big deal, but she is earnest in her desire to ‘document it in a way I would want another architect to: hard drawings, well described spaces. Not just a documentary record, but as a real tangible record of the place. Carefully photographed’.
If her artful, precise photographs from Beara Peninsula are anything to go by, the work will be sublime. She’s most excited though, to describe to me that after two years learning and working in Ireland ‘it was shocking to travel to Mexico and see the plants there. Explosively different. Nothing was relatable to any of the species in Ireland. They didn’t appear to be any part of any family I knew of; cactus, pepper trees…’ Her voice trails off as she tries to convey the experience of the unknown Mexican vegetation.
‘Trees are comparable to buildings in that they have the potential to exist over multiple generations’
It's clear that, as she says, she is currently ‘most interested in understanding plants and trees’ and has a real fascination and hunger to learn more. She sees the current chapter as one that fits holistically into her work an identity as an architect; ‘I am an architect and I have these spatial skills but at the moment I’m taking a couple of years to understand the building materials of external space. I’m interested in making spaces – interior and external spaces – and I think having a plant knowledge in order to make those exterior spaces is ultimately the goal’. It’s a fascinating approach to practice but it makes sense; ‘Trees are comparable to buildings in that they have the potential to exist over multiple generations’, she says.
Breen exhibits not only a concern regarding design decisions that will have consequences for future decades – if not centuries (true of both buildings and trees) – but also an exploration and understanding of what context means. She explains how in Tullynally there are 250-350 year old trees and the estate is in a sheltered eastern part of the country different to Bothár Buí on the Atlantic. The specimen are less influenced by the climate so their shape and form is under least influence. Beara Peninsula trees, meanwhile, are fighting the elements. Tullynally arboretum has conditions as close to perfect that you’ll find in Ireland. Where Beara is self-seeding and trees grow and fall and are not removed or managed, existing as it’s own ecosystem, Tullynally’s best seedlings are carefully selected to be the most upright, tall and healthy specimen in a very controlled environment.
‘The landscape is becoming more of itself as a result of us not being involved, and that’s why its magical’
‘In Beara the landscape is becoming more of itself, as a result of us not being involved, and that’s why its magical. At Tullynally, there is an active dairy farm and just understanding the scale and the resources needed to manage such a large estate is in stark contrast to the untouched ancient woods of Beara’, Breen tells me.
We move from mapping, trees and terrain to conversation about manipulating landscape more generally, and even species. We discuss eugenics and breeding (of plants) and how comfortable or otherwise that makes us feel. About the design decisions involved in the creation of the trees we plant and grow and live alongside. In ‘architecture we tend to build things that are vertical and straight, so it’s fascinating to me that trees tend to not be that and yet we’ve cultivated them to be more like that [to fit with our buildings].’ It’s fertile, thoughtful ground and Breen is clear that she is ‘studying it to increase my plant knowledge to understand how we cultivate species and maintain them, but what I’m most interested in the tension between the natural capacity for trees to exist without our involvement and how, if we involve ourselves in some way, there are design decisions that happen in the middle.’
Source:Noreile Breen
Oak, holly, birch and hazel in the Beara wood
Inspiration for pursuing this line of research is rooted in Breen being from rural countryside and ‘this constant concern as to how we embed architecture in landscape and trying not to make objects and trying to [have buildings] become part of something bigger.’ It’s a careful considered view, taking the natural landscape as a starting point (and wanting to learn and know about it) before making any design decisions regarding built contributions to that environment. But I do wonder at how she has become so preoccupied with it that these three mapping projects and her horticultural studies now make up the sum of her ‘professional architecture career’.
There is a generalisation that for young Irish architects the only work available is that of the ubiquitous house extension, and there is not much opportunity for projects on a larger or more civic scale. Many Irish architects find broader project opportunities in London and in the US, but for those who want to stay and work in the place where they’re from – what for them?
This, really, is how Breen has come to do what she is currently doing. Precarious, at points, as it may have been for her to decide she could not join the house-extenders (having previously worked on endless amounts of extensions herself that, for a multitude of frustrating reasons, haven’t been built), she is finding her way to her own practice. When the Barragán project is published it may be that more varied and substantial opportunities arise.
‘The constant concern with how we embed architecture in landscape: trying not to make objects and trying to have buildings become part of something bigger’
‘In terms of my own ambition, I would like to make bigger things than houses, and landscape is potentially a way to do that. If there were the genuine opportunities for me to practice within making buildings in Ireland I think I would probably be doing that. This current route forward is me being resourceful and trying to gain traction in other ways. When actually, the reality is I have very little agency within the current situation and climate [of the profession and opportunities in Ireland]. There’s lots of things that make me uncomfortable about building and there’s different kinds of client and priority. I don’t know if landscape is different.’ As Breen’s work continues, it seems like that hunch may be being positively proven.
‘At the very least I’m learning a lot and sustaining myself. What I’m doing feels risky. I’m not doing what is expected – and, to some degree, building extensions is more what is expected. Obviously my peers are working on some extraordinary world-class extensions and I respect them greatly (and feel strongly they should have access to bigger work). The most I can do, for my own practice at the moment, is mapping these gardens, buildings and landscapes in order to understand them. Making something tangible. A tangible document of something that is currently undocumented.’
‘If there is a canon in Irish architecture, it seems to be one of refined cross-pollinations, of great thought in small things’
As Andrew Clacy wrote in the keynote essay of The Architectural Review’s June 2019 issue, ‘if there is a canon in Irish architecture, it seems to be one of ambiguity, of refined cross-pollinations, of great thought in small things’. And as far as that goes, it serves as an accurate description of Breen’s work, although I might add also of great thought in great things (like landscape).
Noreile had confessed we wouldn’t be able to speak in the middle of a working afternoon as I had originally suggested. She is out working in the garden, Monday to Friday, and so physically exhausted at the end of the day she can barely speak. So we talk on Saturday morning and I ask what the weekend holds. Will she be back in the gardens of Tullynally? She says yes, but it is a completely different experience when not working. Out of work clothes, with your eyes raised above the immediate square of ground you are working on, as you stroll leisurely between the different spaces, take in the vistas, you see it – she tells me – in a totally new way.
I see her in my mind’s eye, walking out into a landscape that she knows, that she has laboured in, that she has learned from, in a land that she comes from, that is simultaneously a place of nature and creativity, knowledge and growth but also somewhere that I imagine, as she gazes on some upright grade A specimen in the arboretum, prompts her to dream of the salty wind-blown and wizened oaks of Beara Peninsula and continue to ponder the Irish biome and our responsibility to it, in how it is managed (if at all), what one might build in it, and mapping a route – and her own path – through and into the landscapes all around us
A version of this story appeared in the AJ 14.07.2022. Discover the rest of the issue here
Source:© Richard Long. Wikiart.org fair use
A Square of Ground, 1966, Richard Long b.1945
The title of this piece refers to an early work by land artist Richard Long. Long made A Square of Ground when he was a student at Central St Martin’s College of Art, London (1966-8). It is a roughly square-shaped three-dimensional section of landscape resembling the kind of geographic or geological model that may be found in a museum for the purpose of explaining topographies. The plaster surface has been carefully textured and realistically painted. It depicts a lake and a river surrounded by rocks and set in undulating green terrain. An Irish Harbour is a similar work made at the same time, depicting a harbour with rocks and sand. Long has explained his artistic trajectory: ‘In the mid-sixties the language and ambition of art was due for renewal. I felt art had barely recognized the natural landscapes which cover this planet, or had used the experiences those places could offer. Starting on my own doorstep and later spreading, part of my work since has been to try and engage this potential.’ (Quoted in Richard R. Brettell, Dana Friis-Hansen, Richard Long: Circles Cycles Mud Stones, exhibition catalogue, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston 1996, p.9.)
Leave a comment
or a new account to join the discussion.