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Visual Culture in Britain

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Things in Their Places

David Brett

To cite this Article Brett, David(2009) 'Things in Their Places', Visual Culture in Britain, 10: 2, 125 138
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 David Brett

Things in Their Places

Not to be in a place is to be nowhere, and to be nowhere is to be nothing.

Ciaran Benson

Material culture and mass consumption; limiting conditions

We have been invited in this themed issue of Visual Culture in Britain to
consider a group of related but not identical problems that revolve around
political geography within Northern Ireland, and since 1994. I have been
particularly asked to address material culture within those limits. Neither
of these terms is as simple as it seems, since the meaning of limiting
conditions varies according to what we have under discussion.
The implication seems to be that the political process - usually known as
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the peace process, which culminated in The Agreement (actually several

linked agreements as to the status and future of Northern Ireland) - has
had consequences in the material culture. These consequences (in, for
example, consumption of household goods and domestic architecture)
may be substantial and causative, or merely contingent on the relative
absence of political violence.
The degree to which the expansion of consumption since 1994 can be
said to be an effect of the cessation of violence and the peace process
requires some very sophisticated research and conceptualization. It is
certainly not a simple one-way causation, since the time required to plan,
finance and execute a major shopping development or mall is several
years. The major retail outlets and parks - both inner-city and greenfield -
must have been well in progress (legally and financially, if not on the
ground) well before the Agreement. One hypothesis that would be well
worth investigation would be the contrary; that the ceasefire and subse-
quent peace process is an effect of economic expansion, rather than the
cause, and that the promise of economic normality did more to undermine
the politics of extremity than any other force.
This hypothesis would not, however, be universally applicable. If you
were employed and owned your own house, Northern Ireland had been,
for many years previously, a site of prosperity. The very low cost of
housing, whereby you could buy a substantial inner-city house for one
years fairly ordinary salary, meant that the professional middle class had
a lot of disposable income that found its way into high levels of sociability,
quality cars and foreign holidays. This has had effects within the worlds of
objects and images that appear unconnected to political matters. One
writes appear advisedly, since the particular forms of consumption and

Visual Culture in Britain ISSN 1471-4787 print/ISSN 1941-8361 online

# 2009 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/14714780902924765
 126 things in their places

the acquisition of commodities are the actual sites of fetishization, which

proceeds largely without conscious inspection.
What follows owes a certain debt to Daniel Millers Material Culture and
Mass Consumption.1 In his introduction Miller describes material culture
studies as a residual box, housing otherwise homeless interests such as
the links between archaeology and social anthropology, or cross-cultural
studies in the arts and technology. He invites us to participate in the
rather perilous activity of taking objects which are generally considered as
trivial, and holding them up for academic scrutiny.2 His book proposes a
positive stance toward such matters as mass consumption and popular
taste in terms that are now more easily grasped than they were when the
book first appeared twenty years ago.
I came upon Marc Auges Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity, clearly of relevance to my own approach to what I shall be
calling placedness.3 In a still more general sense I have found material to
ponder in Ciaran Bensons more recent study The Cultural Psychology of Self,
which has much of value to say about the locative functions of culture.4
Miller stresses the physically concrete aspect of artefacts and their impor-
tance in early play. Its physicality enables the artefact to act as a bridge, not
only between the mental and physical worlds, but also, more unexpectedly,
between consciousness and the unconscious.5 It is clear that during a
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certain stage in the childs development, artefacts become its principal

means of articulating feelings and desires.6 His argument here is recogniz-
ably connected to strands in psychoanalytic thinking, but he also draws our
attention to the relative crudity of language when faced with objects. We
habitually make very fine distinctions between things that cannot be repro-
duced or conveyed in language. We are up against the limits of language in
much the same way as we are when faced with music, or colour; there is
something ineffable about the thing.7 While consciousness (almost wholly
formed in and by language) deals with the surface of cognitive processes,
objects retain their place in the ordering of the unconscious world.8 The
acquisition of things becomes, in such an approach, a form of internalized
consumption or assimilation. We become what we buy.

Place and mass consumption

Nonetheless, the constraint of being in a place adds an extra challenge. To
what extent is the political territoriality of Northern Ireland a significant
factor in such matters as material culture? Indeed, to what extent is place
or location formative of culture? Here we seem to come up against distinc-
tions between material and visual culture. If the one deals mainly with
things and objects, and the other with images and appearances, do the
geographical constraints operate in the same way? Given that we can
speak of visual culture as a field that comprises advertising, film, photo-
graphy, various arts, fashion and a whole panoply of interlocking and
overlapping practices, large parts of the field seem to have no connection
to geography whatever, no matter how construed. They exist in the realm
of imagery, not stuff. Imagery is usually moveable, but stuff always exists
in real, concrete places. This raises a new set of questions.
 David Brett 127

For example: does it make much sense to talk of fashion in Northern

Ireland as something distinct from fashion in general? (I leave aside, at
some risk, the study of fashion as a business). Fashion is, indeed, a crucial
field of contention between social forces and their means of recognition
and self-recognition. Fashion, being an art of display and appearance,
seems to belong in the visual realm; but as a domain of embodiment and
posture, it belongs within the most existential core of material culture.
How and through what medium do we relate to our bodies? The experi-
ences of wearing different fabrics and clothes that impose different move-
ments and space-awareness on the body are related to how we experience
the world as a whole, and they bring with them a rich symbology.
There is an often-repeated notion that Northern Ireland contains two
cultures; for this to be so, we would need to be able to distinguish them
through fashion, body language and grooming. One might expect them to
demonstrate significant cultural difference. But I am aware of no such
symbology in Northern Ireland in the past 25 years.
The meanings of contemporary fashions are exceptionally labile and
diffuse, and float, themselves shifting in the shifting alliances of style
and habitus. The complicated and fissured social matrix of Northern
Ireland does not respond easily to Bourdieus class and social-formation
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distinctions.9 For a great number of people, fashion (and mass consump-

tion in many fields) provided and provides a way out of the extremely
constricted allegiances obviously available; it was and is a kind of play-
ground for the imagination that appears politically neutral. It has had
(I posit) a liberating function, overriding overt affiliation, which it renders
inert. But the structural fissures in social life remain.
Something similar can now be observed in the retail of furnishings and
household goods. The opening of an IKEA outlet store in a retail park
outside Belfast occasioned a three-mile traffic jam and a spasm of comment
in the media (Figure 1), in which the advent of IKEAdom was seen as a
welcome assertion of normality. At last, we were rejoining the human race!
We could go shopping!
The earlier opening of a Habitat store in central Belfast, though well-
attended, was nothing like so spectacular an affair, and (speaking anecdo-
tally) the writer supposes this to be because Central Belfast is not seen as
neutral; the retail parks around the airport, on Boucher Road or
Sprucefield provide a space without entailments, where anyone can feel
at home, because they are, in Auges sense, non-places. Shopping is for
everyone.10
We ask: does the material culture of objects admit to the same kinds of
questions and categories that we can apply to images and appearances?
Are all objects treatable in similar ways?

Place and placelessness

There is, I argue, a significant difference between those things that are
particular and placed, and those that might just as well be anywhere else.
Thus, the goods sold through IKEA are certainly a distinct part of the
 128 things in their places

material culture of contemporary life, but they are hardly distinct to

Northern Ireland. Were they so, they could not be part of IKEAdom.
The same is true of clothing and commercial architecture. This was
noticed by Hermann Muthesius in the Deutsche Werkbund debates
around typification as long ago as 1901:

as our life is becoming international, a certain uniformity of architectural forms will spread
across the globe. We have this uniformity already in our dress. From pole to pole people wear
the same jacket and the same blouse. Associations for the conservation of folk dress will not
alter this tendency, nor will movements to conserve folk-art stand in the way of the
internationalisation of forms.11

My argument is not that place is good and non-place is bad, or vice

versa, but that the condition for objects of being in a place, or a placeless
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Figure 1a. IKEA arrives, to

jubilation! (Reproduced
courtesy of The Belfast
Telegraph.)
 David Brett 129

Figure 1b. IKEA arrives, to

jubilation! (Reproduced
courtesy of The Belfast
Telegraph.)
Downloaded At: 21:02 26 February 2011

non-place, is unavoidable and has to be considered in any cultural analy-

sis. Each has its own authenticity. The lack of placedness that is mani-
fested in the identical dark-blue sheds of IKEA, which are now to be found
all over Europe, is a perfectly acceptable authenticity of its own kind, but it
is hardly a feature of social affiliation or ethnic identity, in Northern
Ireland or anywhere. Actually, it exists in order to displace identity.
The goods sold through IKEA, through M&S and Tesco, are not, in my
sense, placed, whereas most buildings are quite literally placed. Indeed
it is often the case that places are defined and created by the buildings that
can be found there - obvious examples are Crystal Palace or White City,
which are locations named after buildings that are, in fact, no longer there.
There are, however, many types of building that are ubiquitous and just as
unplaced as a motor-home (namely, IKEA, Tesco and the rest - the whole
family of sheds that can be found in retail parks and industrial estates).
There is no implication of quality involved in the ascription of place,
unless we are concerned with movements to conserve folk-art - in which
case the ascription of a particular place (region, nation, volk) is assumed to
 130 things in their places

be a precondition of quality. Thus a recent housing development in

Carryduff, outside Belfast, was advertised as a return to traditional
values and consisted of semi-detached tudor-bethan cottages. They
might, more correctly, have been located in Essex. The ideological oddness
of these particular traditional values does not need to be stressed.
But location is of importance in most classes of buildings, and particu-
larly dwelling houses. Such buildings are usually designed with places in
mind, and the boundaries of architectural zones do not always fit well with
the boundaries of political zones.

The reciprocal dialectic of space and social relations

David Harvey has written that There can be no politics of space indepen-
dent of social relations,12 but I want to assert the reciprocal position:
There can be no social relations independent of the space within which
they are conducted. This brings architectural discourse and real buildings
and housing estates into a direct relation with political reality - the one
creates the other.
The architectural zone of the northern quarter of Ireland is not contig-
uous with the state of Northern Ireland. In another context, Alan Jones and
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I have argued that, whatever may be the political status of Northern

Ireland, within architectural space the most appropriate term would be
Ulster, which is not the same. (Ulster is one of the ancient four provinces of
Ireland and consists of nine counties, but Northern Ireland is a recent
invention called, in some circles, the occupied six counties.) The one
belongs essentially to physical geography and history, and the other to
recent political geography. Writing in more general terms still, an Ulster
architecture should be viewed in the regional terms of a northwesterly
zone that comprises most of the Atlantic seaboard of these islands.13 This,
we have argued, is the substantial, concrete place with which we are
to deal, rather than the place of Northern Ireland. The unity here encom-
passes meteorological and geological conditions and the realities of mate-
rial resources.

Place and material resources

The material resources for building are the most elemental and placed
constraints on the architectural culture of any area (no matter how we
describe or name it). Older and traditional building throughout Ulster has
in general had to deal with poor quality or intractable stuff such as basalt,
or it has been compelled to import materials. This has had a determining
effect on the appearance of older buildings, which generally are made from
rough block and rubble, harled and rendered with a concrete or mortar
skin; this in turn has often required a coat of paint or limewash, white or
strongly coloured. Brick came late and is largely a product of the railways
and the canals, except within the larger towns. The boisterous weather has
also been a determining factor in Ulsters vernacular building - the typical
farmstead of the older kind consists of a range of low barn-like structures
 David Brett 131

aligned to the prevailing wind. Vernacular architecture is, by definition, a

placed architecture.
But an architectural culture is also created by laws, by customs and by
land use. The land-use patterns of Northern Ireland are largely based
around the concept of the townland, a division of very ancient origins
that was still used as a unit marking out the plantations of the seventeenth
century, when many thousands of Scots were emigrating across the North
Channel every year. These settlers brought with them the practice of
systematic crop-management (requiring defined fields) and enclosure.
The original Gaelic concepts of land division and ownership were replaced
by different agricultural practices, and the original clan/communal terri-
tory, the tuath, had to be divided into a patchwork of tenancies and private
holdings.
The townland is a spatial concept that generally assumes intervisibility,
but it does not have a given centre; it is not a village, but a tract of land.
Within a townland, significant buildings such as churches and schools
may be positioned anywhere. If a townland has a defined centre, it is likely
to be no more than a crossroads with a store and a bar. This gives a pattern
of settlement not unlike that of North America, without common traditions
of land use, or social responsibility for its appearance. It is settler architec-
ture spread across the land, rather than indigenous architecture placed
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within it. There are, in fact, some common principles at work on both sides
of the Atlantic; one of which is the relative absence of common land as it is
understood in British law. In consequence, there is an absence of rights of
way and old footpaths; there is no right-to-roam. It can be difficult to take a
country walk.14 The places of Northern Ireland are defined on different
principles from the places of the rest of the United Kingdom.
Planning legislation is still minimal and, during the period of Direct
Rule (1972-2002), was reduced mainly to ministerial fiat exercised by civil
servants; these were subsequently considered democratic discrepancies,
but they enabled ministers to dismantle the Unionist hold on planning
decisions and housing. A Town and Planning Service was established in
1973, on the English model, with regional development plans and the like.
This generally worked according to English norms of village settlement, to
which the townland was unknown.
The planning powers invested in ministers were amongst the first to be
rescinded by the new post-settlement Assembly, returning the control of
land use to its earlier model of extreme individualism. From this, with the
relaxation of planning regulations, has followed a sharp increase in com-
mercial house-building, resulting in large, widely scattered, privately built
housing estates in unlikely and impractical locations, built quickly and
with little sense of a communal aesthetic responsibility;15 and a parallel
growth in private villas. This was a market response to a real demand, and
a cultural response to a need for freshly defined spaces that carried no
obvious sectarian entailments.16
There is a real question as to the long-term viability of some of these
rural developments. This is not, of course, a problem unique to Northern
Ireland, but what is striking is the speed of its spread within our borders. It
is a sort of slash-and-burn attempt to grow a once and once only cash-crop
 132 things in their places

of saleable houses and it is related to the decline of smaller farms. Hanging

over all these out-of-town estates is the ever growing cost of fuel and the
ever growing mountain of mortgage debt.17
They have also grown within an already existing condition, the lack of
functioning public transport services. A notable recent analysis (although
addressed to conditions south of the Border) concluded in terms equally
applicable to Northern Ireland:

the multi-directional, unguided sprawl of Irish housing cannot be serviced by a functional

transportational system, as development has spread too widely and at too low a density.
Irelands lack of viable alternative transport and accommodation models increases the
pressure for new housing on farm land to a degree unimaginable in societies having advanced
infrastructure networks and higher residential densities.18

The effect of this uncontrollable and prodigal development is progres-

sively to increase the dependence on imported petrol, following North
American models, using housing types derived from the South East of
England. Currently, the carbon expenditure of the Republic is running at
97% above the European Union norm. Northern Ireland is surely not far
behind. The most significant fact in Irish economic history was and is the
shortage of fossil fuel reserves, which have condemned the island to the
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status of an economic colony irrespective of its formal political status.

The gated community

The urban counterpart to these rural schemes has been the gated com-
munity. Northern Ireland has always been and still is a network of gated
communities, in which one neighbourhood virtually or actually excluded
another. But these are now being solidified into actual buildings. What
makes these developments novel is that they are demarcated not by
religious/political affiliation, but by earning power. The buildings are
coming in different shapes and sizes and styles - lots hacked out of
already existing old commercial premises, discreet traditional courts
in neo-vernacular brickwork, neo-Georgian terraces, and neo-modernist
blocks that advertise social differences aggressively. South Side Studios
is docked beside the working-class Tates Avenue like a cruise liner
beside a Third World port.
Some of them are buildings of a certain distinction, such as Whitehall
Square beside Sandy Row (a notoriously loyalist street). The developers
social agendum becomes only too clear when we read their publicity
material.

The brief was . . . to design a building available to all and to resolve the non-neutral
perception of the address. A neutral axis is created by striking a pedestrian link to the more
neutrally perceived Lisburn Road/Bradbury Place corner.19

There is a world to explore in that word neutral, and another in available

to all. These and similar islands of high debt and steep mortgage, electron-
ic locks and five-metre walls have become a feature of inner Belfast during
the past fifteen years. Several more are in progress. The twenty-nine-storey
 David Brett 133

Obel Tower is now rising beside Donegal Quay. Sectarian dread is being
openly replaced by class dread. They are an index of civic failure. At the
same time, inner-city peace walls have extended notably during the years
since 1994 and, by some measures (school recruitment, for example), the
population is now more physically divided than it has ever been. This is
called a peace process.20

Place in contemporary society

What does place mean in contemporary circumstances when technology
and production have been effectively made ubiquitous, if not universal;
and when the project of normalization is urged upon Northern Ireland by
every public body, by major development companies (of which the
Laganside Corporation is the most obvious), and by UK, Irish and US
governments? This condition of normality means, within the current
material culture and the current ideological argument in Northern
Ireland, the condition of placeless consumption. The bulldozed site is a
constructed placelessness, and the refusal of natural conditions of weather
and location can only be maintained by expensive services, gross con-
sumption of energy and conspicuous waste. A sustainable architecture
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(and a sustainable community) has to take this into account, and it may be
that the past fifteen years of construction has actually been the building of
tomorrows slums.
This problematic has been seen by architectural historians in terms of a
critical regionalism,21 in which we are to strive for a critical mediation
between universal technology and consumption, and the local culture of
regional resources and loyalties. It demands a highly developed critical
self-consciousness to avoid what Kenneth Frampton calls simple minded
attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.22
Two cases of recent house-building exemplify approaches to this chal-
lenge: both have attracted a good deal of comment in the architectural press
and reporting, because both touch on the very marrow of meaning - how to
be both local and contemporary at the same time. That they are located on
opposite sides of the border follows from our previous observations about
political and architectural spaces: that their borders do not have to coincide.

Placed architecture and modernity

The house called Tuath na Mara stands (or rather, reclines) on the Donegal
shore (Figure 2). It was designed in 2007 by MacGabhann Architects of
Letterkenny for Colm Campbell and Christine Maggs (professors at the
two universities, Queens and Ulster). Tarla MacGabhann described them
to me as the fabled ideal clients, willing to engage with any idea. (This
corner of Donegal, it is worth remarking, functions as a sort of Northern
Irish outremer, and is full of Belfasts holiday homes.)
The contractual conditions were difficult since the site had to be com-
pleted within months; but this encouraged both architect and client to opt
for a highly engineered structure that could be assembled quickly once the
foundation slab had been completed. The result, in plan, is a long single
 134 things in their places

Figure 2. Tuath na Mara,

Donegal (2007), by
MacGabhann Architects;
looks out from Fanad Head to
Malin Head with romantic
sublimity. (Reproduced
courtesy of Christine Maggs.)

range comprising separate spaces linked by a long wide corridor. In its

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overall proportions, height and relation to the surrounding humps and

hollows, the house maintains a very traditional general plan and character;
but tectonically it is composed of steel girders and galvanized sheet, with
some very large panes of glass. The galvanized surface, being charcoal
grey, blends into the rocky and heathery slope; from a distance, the build-
ing is hard to see. The outlook, over Lough Swilly, is romantic in the
extreme.23
The marriage of sublime nature and rational ingenuity is one of the
characteristics of a particular strain in modernism, of which many exam-
ples could be cited; Tuath na Mara is part of an architectural conversation
that has long and deep roots. The house brings off the difficult feat of being
utterly contemporary, whilst rooted in a long tradition of sensibility and
form.24
My other example is equally placed but is formally and technically a
very different building. This is a house built by Alan Jones for himself and
family in Randalstown (Figure 3), at a site very deeply inscribed in Ulster
Presbyterian history and culture. He designed it (in 2006) as a sort of
homage to the puritan (and purist) traditions of the area. It stands between
a seventeenth-century oval meeting house of original and noble simplicity,
an Orange Hall, a war memorial, and close to a Church of Ireland of early-
nineteenth-century design. It has to hold its own in the midst of an
aggressive heritage and yet maintain the self-effacing aesthetic stance of
the Protestant plain style.25
The construction is of poured concrete throughout, copiously insulated
and clad with compact dark-grey fibrous cement tiles (this gives it from
some angles an aspect like an armadillo!); surfaces within have been subtly
modelled by coarse chipboard moulding (which have actually produced a
damask-like subtlety of effect). Windows are ample, but angled in such a
 David Brett 135

Figure 3. House by Alan

Jones Architects,
Randalstown, Co. Antrim,
with oval Presbyterian
church behind it.
(Reproduced courtesy of
Alan Jones.)

way as to give a wide view out, but very little view in. The lower part of the
Downloaded At: 21:02 26 February 2011

house is a grand hall of almost medieval character; the bedrooms are

tucked into the roof with ingenuity. The building seems to be small from
without, but to get bigger as you go in. It fits so well into its location,
amongst churches on the edges of the little town, that it has been mistaken
for a church hall.26
I have given these houses as examples of what I take to be one very
positive result of the housing boom in the northerly quarter of the island:
adventurous private building. Many other examples can be found, ranging
between the kitsch and the gross, and some very well considered buildings
in between: but since a great deal of new housing in any country district
will be housing built for town dwellers as a country home or a holiday
cottage, it follows that most of what is produced is a sort of tourist
architecture; in which heritage values are pastiched.
It is very easy to be patronizing about bungalow bliss and the pattern-
book approach to country design that has accompanied the expansion of
semi-rural housing all over Northern Ireland, and Ireland in general. But
a more dispassionate approach to the topic has to recognize that we are
now better housed than we have ever been. And buried within the
pastiche of localism there may be a deeper and much more creative
attention to the place we are in. Among the very few benefits of political
failure may be a willingness to reconsider exactly where we find our-
selves. Culture, in this sense, becomes locative and placing; this architec-
tural aspect seems to me the point at which cultural life is given material
form and made manifest.
With this has gone a growth in the construction of public amenities
such as theatres, sports halls, arts centres and the like. Several of these are
buildings of high quality and conspicuous modernity.27 The pursuit of
conspicuous modernity within Northern Ireland is an unavoidably
 136 things in their places

ideological project, whose intention is to transcend sectarian division and

its allied but not identical political affiliations. Its success in any longer
term depends on the political will of the population as a whole - some-
thing by no means certain. The material culture, as it emerges through
public architecture, is the clearest, because most public, manifestation of
the state.
The very poor quality of public housing in the province during the post-
war years was a major and legitimate cause of intense sectional resent-
ment. Housing was used, consciously and deliberately, to manipulate
electoral and sectarian policies. The Northern Ireland Housing
Executive, which was created by the Callaghan government in 1971, was
in its final effect a major contributory cause of the subsequent peace
process, since it took control of housing policy out of the sectarian
(Unionist) hands, under whose control it had reached a nadir of squalor.
The general architectural policy undertaken was the antithesis of British
slum-clearance methods, since the population was not shifted wholesale,
but rehoused on familiar ground with houses recognizably of a similar
kind (only very much better built). The more this policy is considered, the
wiser it appears - and yet we have to recognize its limits, since it recast,
in new brick terraces and friendly courts and closes, the same sectarian
Downloaded At: 21:02 26 February 2011

divisions.
The dominant planning concept was, in effect, that of defensible space.
Harveys dialectic of political space and architectural space, in which one
creates the other, is clearly and permanently on view.
***
The material culture of Northern Ireland - considered in this way,
through the prism of architecture - consists of a process of externaliza-
tion, in which its contradictions and fissures are objectified and made
manifest. Considered as consumption, it begins to appear as a means
whereby real problems are magicked away in a haze of retail therapy, as
if buying the same things in the same places made us all good neigh-
bours. But in either case, difficult questions are raised that are primarily
philosophical rather than sociological and political, and they have to
find a philosophical answer. What is most at issue is the concept of a
place.
In the course of his essay, Marc Auge makes a distinction: between the
place studied by the ethnologist, and the place inhabited by the indigenous
people. But both are prey to what he calls the indigenous fantasy the
closed world founded once and for all and long ago, . . . anchored since
time immemorial in the permanence of an intact soil.28 But it is precisely
this fantasy that is contested within Northern Ireland; for a large part of the
population, Northern Ireland is a kind of non-place, and to be in a non-
place is to be, perhaps, a kind of non-person. It is a temporary or provi-
sional structure, just as IKEA is housed in provisional architecture. For
another, rather larger part, that is the reality not a lie but a myth . . . whose
singularity it founds, subject (as frontiers are) to possible readjustment and
for this reason doomed always to regard the most recent migration as the
first foundation.29
 David Brett 137

With two such mutually antagonistic mythic structures in play, it is no

wonder that the only place where the participants can meet easily is in the
non-place of consumption.

Notes
1 Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
2 Ibid., 5.
3 Marc Auge, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. J. Howe (London:
Verso, 1995).
4 Ciaran Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (London:
Routledge, 2001).
5 Miller, Material Culture, 99.
6 Ibid.
7 For a similar argument in connection to decoration, fashion and architectural detail, see also D. Brett,
Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure and Ideology in the Visual Arts (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge
University Press, 2005), ch.3.
8 Ibid.
9 P. Bourdieu, Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1984). Also see Millers critical treatment of the same (Miller, ibid., 155156).
10 It might be useful to develop the distinction between space as measured and space as experienced.
Auges non-places are spaces without values, but places are infused with valuations and experience,
and can belong to some rather than others, and thus be hostile.
11 As cited by J. Posener, From Schinkel to the Bauhaus. Arch. Ass. Paper No. 5 (London: Lund
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Humphries, 1972).
12 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
13 I owe this observation largely to papers and other work I have done with Alan Jones (see below).
14 For a general discussion, see A. Jones and D. Brett, Toward an Architecture: Ulster. Building our own
Authenticity; an Enquiry (Belfast: Black Square Books, 2007), 20-22.
15 The consequences of this can be severe; the reader is invited to visit the aptly named Four Winds,
a hill-top suburb of Belfast where houses built to the standards of Chelmsford confront three
times the average wind speed and twice the average rainfall. See Jones and Brett, Toward an
Architecture, 38.
16 I do not know if any sociological work has been done on this tricky question: it might well be resisted by
residents. An important paper appears to be C. Paris, P. Gray and J. Muir, Devolving Housing Policy
and Practice in Northern Ireland 1998-2002, Housing Studies 18, no. 2 (2003): 159-175.
17 This paper is being written in the week when the Irish government has been compelled to guarantee all
savings deposited in Irish banks, and British banks, staggering under the weight of unfulfilled
mortgages, have been appealing to their government to nationalize them. Also see Jones and Brett,
Toward an Architecture, 48.
18 For an exploration of this phenomenon, see S. OToole, eds., with essays by F. McDonald and
C. Gurdgiev, and contributions by 11 others, SubUrban to SuperRural: Ireland at the Venice Biennale
10th Annual Architecture Exhibition (Dublin: Gandon Editions, for Irish Architectural Foundation,
2007), and further comment by Jones and Brett, Toward an Architecture. The Dublin area has been
compared to Los Angeles without the free-ways!
19 Publicity leaflet and advertisement for The Carvill Group, Belfast.
20 See Jones and Brett, Toward an Architecture, 44-48.
21 The key text in this discourse is K. Frampton, Toward a Critical Regionalism; Six Points for an
Architecture of Resistance, in Post-Modern Culture, ed. H. Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 16-30;
first published as The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, Wash: Bay Press, 1983).
22 Frampton, Toward a Critical Regionalism, 2.
23 Illustrations of the house can be found in the architectural press, but notably in Irish Architecture Awards
2008 (Dublin: RIAI, 2008).
24 The present writer (who is given to sudden sideways leaps) links this aesthetic with that of another man
from Donegal, John Toland (1670-1721), who came from Inishowen on the farther shore of Lough
Swilly. Toland, who first used the term pantheism to denote a belief in the undivided and absolute
unity of everything, thus annihilating the distinction between God and His Creation, seems to me a true
progenitor of modern romanticism, and thus of contemporary sensibility and morals. Toland was born
to a devout and Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholic family. He studied at the University of Glasgow and
converted to Presbyterianism before becoming a wandering scribe, and atheist and pamphleteer. He
developed a very individual brand of republicanism and anti-clerical polemic; his Christianity Not
Mysterious (1696) and the later Letters to Serena (1704) were heavily condemned by authorities, but have
 138 things in their places

had a long after-life, contributing to the general theory of republicanism. Toland was described by
Bishop Berkeley as a free-thinker - the very first occasion this term was used.
25 See D. Brett, The Plain Style (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2004).
26 For a description of the house, see P. Lynch, with photographs by Alan Jones, The Graveyard Shift,
Blueprint: Architecture, Design, Culture 242, May (2006): 5259.
27 These include completed buildings by the MacGabhann practice and by Jones, in Letterkenny and
Strabane, respectively.
28 Auge, Non-places, 44.
29 Ibid., 47.
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