Abstract
Arthur Gibney was a past president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland and of the Royal Hibernian Academy and also partner in the multi-award winning practice of Stephenson, Gibney & Associates, which dominated the architectural scene in Ireland for many years. His name will be known to anybody acquainted with, or interested in, the architecture of Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Building Site in Eighteenth-Century Ireland is based on Arthur Gibney’s doctoral thesis, which he submitted as Studies in Eighteenth-Century Building History. It has been posthumously edited for publication by his friends Livia Hurley and Edward McParland and still retains the structure of chapters submitted to his examiners. Each of the twelve studies deals with a different aspect of the provision and procurement of buildings from the second half of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. It examines organisation, management and contracts, and separately each of the principal trades which were controlled by guilds. Each chapter also deals extensively with the technical aspects of each of the trades, and, although the book has a glossary of architectural terms, a reader not familiar with architectural and building history may need the assistance of a good architectural dictionary or encyclopaedia for those sections of the narrative.
The author accessed extensive manuscript material as well as contemporary published literature, all of which is fully referenced. The manuscript material relates mainly to large government contracts, such as the Royal Hospital, the Parliament House, the eighteenth-century barrack building programme and to Trinity College, but also to some of the houses of the aristocracy, as well as the very large speculative housing developments such as on Merrion Square. There is, however, only a brief reference to the houses of the general public.
Forms of contract and their organisation are very well fleshed out in a section dealing mainly with monetary aspects. The payment of the master tradesmen is also well covered; that many of them progressed into property owning indicates how profitable their trades could be. The rates of pay of the individual tradesmen and labourers working for their masters are set out without comment (pp. 36–7). There is no exploration of the actual work practices on building sites, or of the conditions under which the various operatives worked, perhaps for lack of documentary evidence. One publication which would have helped in that regard is the Life of James Gandon (Dublin, 1846), which contains a great deal of detail about work on site as well as labour relations from Gandon’s own notes and letters.
The economic aspects of the trade in building materials are also very well covered. The price of timber in ‘baulks and deals ex Trondheim in Norway’ (p. 117) and the delivered costs of Baltic timber at Irish ports and inland locations accessible by river (p. 121) are, for example, discussed. The same is also true of the procurement of other building materials and the emergence of specialist traders and stockists in them. The productivity gain and material cost saving by the change from oak to imported deal for floor structures is argued to be a completely Irish phenomenon initially.
The surviving records of the trade guilds and their formation is well examined, revealing much useful detail. The joiners, for instance, left the carpenters’ guild to form a new guild in 1700. They included among their founding members the Attorney General, the Solicitor General and the Deputy Receiver of Revenue, as well as William Robinson who at that time was the retired Surveyor General but who, as Surveyor General, had also been a member of two other powerful guilds. The author considers that the presence of such eminent gentlemen added prestige to the guild but does not explore the possibility that their presence was also one of control from the top. Membership of the guilds, as explained by the author, was restricted to people who were eligible to receive the freedom of the city where the guild was founded and, in Ireland, this franchise was normally restricted to members of the Protestant faith (p. 22).
The role of the architect runs consistently through most chapters, particularly their role in the introduction to Ireland of classical architecture. The information on their remuneration is mostly related to the Surveyors General. The Surveyors General had a salary of £300 per annum and a contribution towards staff and office expenses, but they were also entitled to receive five per cent from contracting artisans whose accounts they supervised. Edward Lovett Pierce, for example, received a gratuity of £2,000 from Parliament for his work on the Parliament House (p. 35). Their clerk supervisors had a salary of £40 per year which could double from extra payment of 5s 9d per day for site supervision.
The Surveyors General were, for the most part, military engineers and surveyors whose formal training enabled them to transition easily to architectural design. Far more numerous were the architects who had commenced their careers as apprentice carpenters, many of whom continued to work as builders as well as architects. The author deals extensively with their prominence and role as ‘architect’, but views their activity with some misgivings, commenting that ‘the employment of eighteenth-century artisans as architects has been seen historically as a necessity, thrust on their employers in the absence of professionally trained designers’ (p. 83). Pain, the author of building manuals, is described as ‘a good example of the considerable number of well-educated and cultured master craftsmen who could have practised as professional architects’ (p. 92). The author qualifies his misgivings somewhat by saying that the reluctance of artisan architects to pursue careers professionally may reflect the lack of powerful patronage to sustain these careers during this period (p. 84) and by noting that ‘the arrival of Thomas Cooley and James Gandon in Ireland in the latter part of the century might have promoted the ideal of professionalism among the architectural community’ (p. 83). The irony being that Thomas Cooley started his career as an apprentice carpenter in England (p. 83).
In the epilogue, Gibney has accepted that eighteenth-century architects came from a variety of backgrounds (p. 271). He argues that the full emergence of the architectural profession arose from the inability of the established building model to adjust to continuous cost increases towards the end of the eighteenth century. The demand for competitive prices for building works required the introduction of detailed working drawings and specifications which, in turn, led to the emergence of the general contractor in the nineteenth century and to the demise of the artisan architect.
While this book has been orphaned by the untimely death of its author, the depth and breadth of his research provides an enduring legacy for all who are interested in the history of architecture and building in the late seventeenth century and through the eighteenth century.