Ireland's unfinished buildings as a new kind of ruin

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Garrett Fullam 07301383

Ireland�s Unfinished Buildings: A New Kind of Ruin

Abstract

Unlike ruins in the traditional sense, the ghost estates and unfinished buildings of Ireland were stillborn. Most buildings have one life serving the purpose for which they were designed and if lucky maybe more. The unfinished buildings of Ireland may never have a life or may have a life other than the one intended, as total demolition and adaptation are among the options being discussed in the on-going debate about what to do with them.

The aim of this dissertation is to develop a greater understanding and a more informed way of thinking about a building type and a situation to which we are unaccustomed: an oversupply of incomplete buildings. Unlike much of the writing on Ireland�s unfinished buildings, this paper is more concerned with the characteristics of

the buildings as they currently stand as opposed to the question of what should be done with them. Rather than seeking to propose or advocate a particular strategy for dealing with them, this dissertation sets out to understand, document and contextualise the artistic, poetic, social, psychological and architectural nuances of this unique type of ruin.

This will be discussed with respect to dereliction, the use of buildings over time and the conservation or destruction of memory. Before we think about deciding what to do with unfinished buildings we need to understand our relationship with them.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 4

References 7

Part One- Intentions 8

References 15

Part Two- The Ruins of the Celtic Tiger 17

References 27

Conclusion- Moving On 29

References 30

Bibliography 31

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Introduction

Shadowlands 4, by Kim Haughton

Source of Image: www.photoshelter.com

Objects of Study

The house, like a man, can become a skeleton. A superstition is enough to kill it. Then it is terrible.1 -Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer

Colloquially known as ��ghost-estates��, the unfinished buildings of Ireland seem to

lend themselves to poetic descriptions. Loaded with psychological, social and poetic meaning, their significance goes way beyond economics. While a building usually has a life-span after which it is demolished or falls into ruin, these buildings were ��stillborn�� in

that they went straight from construction sites to ruins. This dissertation is an investigation of the meaning and significance of a new and strange phenomenon; the instant ruin.

The idea of these unfinished structures, their presence on the mental landscape, is of equal interest to their presence on the physical landscape. Because over-construction of housing was both a cause and a result of the property bubble in Ireland, unfinished houses are more than a symbol of the Celtic Tiger and all it entailed; they are inseparable from it. The focus of the dissertation is therefore on housing due to its primary role in the situation.

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Interpretive Ideas

As well as their meaning to society, there is the question of what to do with these stillborn buildings whose new-found lack of purpose warrants their demolition while their potential asset value seems to prohibit it, whose intrinsic heritage and architectural value is almost zero while their historical significance is considerable.

In The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics J.B. Jackson explains the usual process of ruination whereby a building that has fallen into ruin goes through a period of time (usually very long) before people see it as something worth preserving again because of its heritage value:

First there is that golden age, the time of harmonious beginnings. Then ensues a period when the old days are forgotten and the golden age falls into neglect. Finally comes a time when we rediscover and seek to restore the world around us to something like its former beauty.2

This process which usually occurs over many years has not happened at all in the Irish case; instead buildings have gone from unfinished structures to ruins overnight. The situation is like a ��stalemate��; half-finished buildings with little intrinsic architectural value remain on the landscape in the hope of recouping their financial cost, yet the lack of demand for them makes this unlikely. Dublin City Architect Ali Grehan speaks of the predicament presented by unfinished buildings in NAMAlab:

Not all NAMA properties should be redeveloped; nevertheless, there are increasing numbers of vacant premises and sites corroding the fabric of our cities and towns. It would be unsustainable and potentially profoundly damaging for them to remain this way for years to come.3

Minister for Housing Jan O�Sullivan said recently that ��it�s a question of making

the decisions required to make life better for people in these estates. Hard decisions will have to be made in some parts if these estates are not viable.��4 Due to their inherent contradictions it is hard to make sense of Ireland�s unfinished buildings, let alone decide

what to do with them. I am not setting out to solve the problem but rather to investigate the phenomenon in a holistic manner incorporating its artistic, poetic, social, economic and psychological aspects.

Using the ruin as a vehicle I intend to discuss the built fabric itself and also the issue of the meaning of these structures to us as a society. The aim of this dissertation is to try to understand the nuances of these structures on their own terms, structures to which we may be saying ��goodbye�� not long after saying ��hello��.

Academic Context

Much has been written about the economic policies that contributed to the situation in which Ireland now finds itself, an aspect which has been widely covered in newspapers and recent books. It is not my intention to further investigate the influence of political and economic factors on the built environment. My work is centred on what is left after the forces which created it have gone.

Good books have been written about the emergence of contemporary Ireland and about the policies that caused the building boom, such as Understanding Contemporary

Ireland, edited by Brendan Bartley and Rob Kitchin (2007). Some anthropological studies of Irish society have been carried out by NUI Maynooth since the collapse of the boom, such as Death of a Tiger: The Collapse of Irish Property Dreams (2012) as well as geographical/planning papers such as A Haunted Landscape: Housing and Ghost Estates

in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland (2010). Many artists, writers and art critics have also turned their attention to the idea of ruins in recent years, a lot of which is collated in Ruins:

Documents of Contemporary Art (2011). Work has been done in the area of proposing

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and documenting ways of reusing these buildings, such as the NAMAlab project carried out by DIT. While interesting projects like this are referred to, it is not the aim of this paper to document individual proposals.

Irish newspaper articles concerning unfinished buildings tend to focus on their asset value or who to blame but there has been relatively little written about unfinished buildings as they are in the present, less still on the aspects that I intend to address, but that can be overcome by combining the factual information and anthropological studies available on unfinished buildings in Ireland with writings from a variety of sources from abroad.

There is a tendency for thinking on the subject in concern to be contained within one field of interest or expertise. The issue is often considered from a purely economic, architectural, artistic, planning or social point of view. Ali Grehan draws attention to this fact in NAMAlab: ��Every place is overlaid with and shaped by juxtaposed boundaries- geographical, social, cultural, political and fiscal, which influence the place�s quality,

character and complexity.��3

Throughout the dissertation I intend to draw from various disciplines that have concerned themselves with issues relevant to our unfinished buildings with the intent of gaining a richer understanding of the phenomenon. It is the way in which various angles of investigation are combined that is the point of departure for this dissertation.

Methodology

The academic methodology is open-minded and seeks to ask questions rather than starting with the answer and trying to justify it, embracing the ambivalence and paradoxes of these structures.

While the section outlining how these buildings came to be is quite factual, the second section exploring their meaning is a more interdisciplinary and essayistic approach which refers to writings and works by artists, architectural theorists, photographers, critics, curators, social scientists and psychologists. A book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton called The Meaning of Things: Domestic

Symbols and the Self, which includes an empirical study on the psychological meaning of domestic objects and the home, was particularly useful for relating some of the more theoretical writings to fact.

I acknowledge the rise of what is known as ��ruin lust��, the deliberate seeking of

aesthetic pleasure in images of decay, something which this dissertation seeks to avoid. Although the paper itself seems without a pragmatic purpose, this stems not from a desire to discuss the ��ruins�� for enjoyment but from the belief that to think of them

purely instrumentally is to deny their full significance.

Structure

The first part of this dissertation, entitled ��Intentions��, traces the origins of Ireland�s unfinished buildings including the government and planning policy that

encouraged the building boom and the aspirations of the society that built these structures. It also draws on anthropological work to understand what the ��homes with

personality��5 so often talked about actually meant to people which then forms a base for understanding their ruins later on.

In the second part, ��The Ruins of the Celtic Tiger in the Context of the Contemporary Ruin��, the characteristics of the structures as they currently stand are explored in an essayistic manner, in both an intellectual and a physical sense. The contemporary ruin is the vehicle for this exploration which covers diverse aspects ranging from the nature of their conception and its consequences to their presence in

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relation to our understanding of continuity, to their disquieting presence and their meaning as monuments.

The conclusion addresses the idea of a ��stalemate��, the contradictions of the

phenomenon that make deciding what to do with these structures so difficult. It does not aim to recommend a particular strategy but rather to finish by looking at the likely fate of these places in light of what has been previously discussed.

References:

1. Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer, p.51, cited by Anthony Vidler in The

Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (London, England and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992) 20.

2. J.B. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1980) 101-102.

3. Ali Grehan, NAMAlab (Dublin School of Architecture Press 2011) Forward, 2. 4. Paul Melia, ��Housing Minister Jan O�Sullivan admits some ghost estates will be

demolished.�� Irish Independent, July 5, 2012 5. Caitriona Coen, Mark Maguire, ��Death of a Tiger: the collapse of Irish property

dreams,�� Anthropological Notebooks 18, no. 1 (2012): 16.

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Part One- Intentions

Monuments and Ruins

Irelands ��unfinished�� buildings were not intended to be like that. While it seems obvious to say that they were intended to be completed and inhabited, the fact that they were never completed has changed their nature entirely. By lying unfinished they remind us that they were not needed in the first place or that they were built by people who could not afford them: ��Ireland is awash with buildings that few people either can afford or want to purchase.��1 Calling them ��unfinished�� only defines them by what they are not

(finished) and suggests that they are like any normal construction project that has yet to reach completion. In A Haunted Landscape Kitchin et al. predict that ghost estates in some areas of Ireland could remain vacant for ten years or more2, a prediction which it concedes is a ��best-case scenario.��2 They go on to raise the issue that by then the buildings may no longer be fit for purpose.2

A better description of ��unfinished buildings�� is needed, especially considering some have already been demolished, such as Carraig Linn in Loughrea, County Galway which was demolished by the developer himself.3 Understanding them as ruins reveals the full significance of these structures; what they were supposed to be, why they never became that and what they are instead. The fact that these buildings have been ��unfinished�� for five years already means that regardless of their eventual fate, they will have had a presence on the landscape during which time nobody could say whether they would be finished, adapted or demolished. They therefore demand to be understood for what they are and in their own time.

If the unfinished buildings that fill our towns and cities can be seen as a type of monument then it is important to understand what they stand for. The origins of the word monument can be traced to the Latin verb moneo, monere: to warn, advise. J.B. Jackson speaks of traditional ��hortatory��4 monuments referring to the traditional use of monuments as a way of communicating to people that they should imitate certain virtues or as a display of power to discourage disobedience. But formal monuments are not the only kind; things can assume the role of monuments by virtue of what they represent to people as seen in the short story I and My Chimney by Herman Melville in which an awkward chimney becomes a monument to the narrator�s broken promise to have it demolished:

At length my wife, getting much excited, declared to me, with pointed finger, that so long as that chimney stood, she should regard it as the monument of what she called my broken pledge.5

In his essay and photographic series A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New

Jersey Robert Smithson�s subjects were not intended as monuments at all but by virtue of their disuse became ��memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.��6 It could be said that the unfinished structures of Ireland are that and more. They are memory traces of a period of corruption, greed and bad governance in our recent history and also reminders of failed aspirations and broken dreams. This section goes back in time to before the collapse of the boom to explore the values and motivations of the society that built these structures.

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A Societal Overview

Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was to buy Ireland. From each other.7- Michael Lewis, Boomerang

As outlined by Brendan Bartley in Understanding Contemporary Ireland, the country is in its third major phase of planning policy (1986 to present day) since the foundation of the state, the economic aim of which has been to attract ��high-growth, high-tech industries and services��8 while ��adaptive entrepreneurialism (with) targeted

regeneration and flexible planning��8 characterise urban planning, along with ��polymorphic inner city renewal��8, with the effects of increased suburbanisation and commuting. Especially in Dublin, the degeneration of the inner-city core was a condition created in the previous phase (1960-1986) which helped cause the construction boom in Phase Three.

Planning policy which encouraged State and private investment in suburban areas during the 1960s and 1970s in combination with city council policy of relocating inner-city dwellers to social housing schemes in the suburbs led to the decline of the inner-city and the rise of suburbia.9 To counteract the decline of the city core the government passed the Urban Renewal Act of 1986 whereby tax-incentives were made available to encourage private investment in the inner-city.10 Developers later realised that there was a viable market for apartment schemes in areas aside from the traditionally prestigious areas of the city centre, schemes which gained support from public agencies, particularly in the Designated Areas of the Urban Renewal Initiatives.11 In conjunction with the more conducive economic conditions of the early 1990s, these circumstances brought about a building boom in the commercial, office and residential sectors.9 On top of this the government stimulated the market for new construction by providing tax-incentives for the occupancy of commercial and residential property.10

As time went on the Irish economy became increasingly dependent on the property market, especially housing. The lowering of Capital Gains Tax and the availability of cheap credit in the latter stage of the Celtic Tiger (2001-2007) helped produce this dependence.12 Property values continued to increase despite increases in supply, with average house prices rising by 11 per cent in 2004.13 As property speculation became more lucrative it became the primary driver of the Irish economy to the point where property speculation (using poorly regulated bank loans) was increasing the cost of buying property (using poorly regulated bank loans). Supply and demand were effectively the same thing.

Office development trends also changed radically during the boom. Usually during a boom the development of office space expands to areas surrounding the city core and during a recession contracts back into that core.14 However the modern office stock in Dublin, which had taken thirty years to accumulate, more than doubled between 1990 and 2004.14 Tax-incentive schemes and rezoning pushed office development further afield to places like Sandyford, where land that was occupied by an industrial estate was rezoned for use by office-industry. Following this ��land-use upgrade�� office space

increased from 5,967 sq. m. in 1990 to 161,600 sq. m. by 2004.15 However supply outstripped demand and already by 2004 the vacancy rate stood at 23.7 per cent.15

Consumption of land and increases in house prices (181 per cent between 1995 and 200216) caused suburban sprawl to push the Dublin commuter belt further out (50 miles outside the city9) so that in the mid-1990s most rural housing was being built in the mid-Leinster region. Despite a decrease in average family size from 3.72 in 1981 to 3.09 in 2002 average house sizes in rural Ireland increased. The number of dwellings with eight rooms or more had the strongest growth over the period of 1991 to 2002, which amounted to almost a third of all new rural dwellings.17 By 2007 3 per cent of

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newly built houses were second homes, up to 12 per cent of which were in the most scenic parts of rural Ireland.11

Although some conflicts of interest between development and preservation are inevitable, landscapes that were once agricultural are now populated by large houses with ��double garages, manicured lawns and patios.��18 Ireland has one of the most relaxed rural planning systems in Europe, one where local need is not well catered for and the influence of local politicians is considerable.18 In Understanding Contemporary

Ireland Corcoran, Keaveney and Duffy refer to suburbanisation as both ��post-urban�� and

��post-rural�� by which they mean that the spread of housing estates threatens the

sustainability both of the rural landscape and of the city centre, as it has become common for people to commute to surrounding towns and villages for goods and services rather than to the city centre,10 the traditional location of work, consumption and leisure facilities.

��One of the unintended effects of the Celtic Tiger phenomenon has been the

generation of both winners and losers in the housing market.��19 Despite increased prosperity the provision of social housing did not improve accordingly. Record numbers of private houses were built in 2004 but the number of social and affordable houses built fell from 13,000 to 12,145 and in 2007 there were still 50,000 people on the waiting list for social housing.20 Although Part 5 of the Planning and Development Act of 2000 was meant to ensure that affordable housing was provided in any development of four or more dwellings, many developers donated other sites or sums of money to local authorities to avoid doing so.20 In a 2005 critique of the Irish housing system, Drudy and Punch (cited in Understanding Contemporary Ireland) argue that ��housing for too long

has been treated as a commodity for generating wealth rather than for social good.��19

Lifestyle changes during to the boom years caused changes in the housing sector. No longer was it normal for people to remain in the same home throughout their lives; people now had ideas about upward-mobility. ��Starter homes�� were built that were seen

as the first rung on the property ladder. Estates like these were built that had a transient kind of occupancy, with young owners seeing them as stepping stones to elsewhere.13 To facilitate this, older people were encouraged to downsize to release equity for their children to get on the property ladder.13 Irrational factors also contributed in a country that has an internationally high rate of home ownership (77 per cent in 200710). In

Death of a Tiger: The Collapse of Irish Property Dreams Caitriona Coen and Mark Maguire point towards desire as one such factor; ��Property was not a right nor even a privilege but rather a marketized unit of desire��21 and the Irish association of denial of property ownership with oppression as another:

In a country where home ownership has long associations to the era of British rule during which the majority of the population was debarred from property ownership, people dreamed- and were encouraged to dream- about how they could fully appreciate the lifestyle value of their homes while realizing the full exchange value of their houses.22

The economic collapse of 2008 was almost Pompeii-like in that the actors disappeared while the stage set was preserved. Due to the reciprocating nature of an economy driven by construction, unfinished buildings represent both the cause and the effect of the boom and of its demise. Currently there are 1,770 unfinished estates or 2,876 if you include vacant but finished estates.23 An unfinished house may be there because a developer went bankrupt or because an ordinary person lost their job in the recession and could not afford to finish it. The spectrum between these poles ranges from those who borrowed slightly beyond their means to those who bought a second home to those who were part-time property developers. The Angel of Debt knocked at every door along the way.

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Graph showing Years supply of Housing and Zoned Land

Graph showing Ghost-Estates per 1000 Population

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Distribution and Size of Ghost-Estates

Source of Images and Graphs: A Haunted Landscape: Housing and Ghost Estates in

Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, ed. Brendan Bartley, Rob Kitchin (London: Pluto 2007)

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Aspirations

Across Ireland people are unable to extract themselves from their houses or their bank loans. Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them do it.24- Michael Lewis, Boomerang

The aspirations of the buyers and builders of real estate during the Celtic Tiger ranged from the modest to the outlandish. Some aspired simply to have a home for their family, others to have a house that would permit their desired lifestyle, others to acquire property that would confirm their status and others to make a profit to increase their wealth. Whether an office block or a private house, the concept of identity and self-worth was woven into the fabric: ��A great many people bought dream homes, and into those homes they poured self-worth, life-style dreams and hopes for the future.��25 Sometimes even the names chosen for office blocks show that status and identity were key selling points, an example of which is the Sentinel Building in Sandyford (currently lying unfinished with plans to convert it to apartments), rising to 14 storeys and visible from as far away as Howth, it is no coincidence that this development was called the Sentinel.

In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard sees the house as our personal interpretation of the world; ��our house is our corner of the world,��26 and explores how the house is more than just the bricks and mortar: ��he experiences the house in its

reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams.��27 As a study carried out by Caitriona Coen and Mark Maguire on a West-Dublin housing development called Olcote Village (pseudonym) illustrates, people were being sold more than just bricks and mortar during the Celtic Tiger: ��more than anything else, however, research participants recalled being sold a lifestyle rather than simply a house.��28 The village-like character of the development attracted one lady: ��Olcote, it seemed nice, like, and God, the thought

of a village. We were, like, where we lived before we couldn�t walk to the shop or walk

anywhere�I suppose I liked the concept of it, and what has ruined it to a degree is

greedy people buying property to rent.��28 Coen and Maguire reinforce this: ��she is also clear on a crucial point: the home she bought was embedded in a particular home culture; she did not just buy a house but, rather, she also bought the concept of it.��28

The thriving construction industry in Ireland was seen by many as a source of pride. Tower cranes swinging above our towns and cities reflected the success of an economy envied worldwide. Voices of dissent saying that such an economy was unsustainable, like economist Morgan Kelly who predicted the economic collapse28, were not listened to by those in power. In 2007 Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, criticising people talking down the economy said the following: �Sitting on the side-lines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity. I don�t know how people who engage in that don�t commit

suicide.�30

Ironically and regrettably people have committed suicide due to the property bubble. A 2012 article in the Limerick Post describing the efforts of an organisation called Life after Debt revealed that ��Limerick people are penning suicidal letters at a rate of three a week after being driven to despair by debt.��31 In a 2011 article entitled ��Banks are �Hounding People to Suicide�� in the Irish Independent, Master of the High Court Ed Honahan criticised ��banks and other creditors for pursuing �to the bitter end� debtors

who cannot pay judgment mortgages��32 and revealed how he ��had dealt with several

debt cases where the borrowers had subsequently taken their own lives.��32

The study of Olcote Village in Death of a Tiger further reveals that the owners had become emotionally attached to their houses and had a sense of security, unfounded as it subsequently proved to be:

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Almost without exception, research participants professed love for their houses and, for the most part, refused to acknowledge the likelihood of the outside puncturing their dream lives with cold economic realities such as immobility, negative equity or even repossession. Indeed many claimed their homes are extensions of their personalities.33

Another study carried out by M.P. Corcoran, J. Gray and M.P. Peillon in 2005 (cited in Understanding Contemporary Ireland) of four new suburban communities in the Dublin commuter belt; Leixlip, County Kildare; Esker (Lucan), County Dublin; Mullingar, County Westmeath and Ratoath, County Meath, found that although all four communities complained about local problems such as poor infrastructure and services there was a big difference between the attachment to place of those who had moved to the countryside as a lifestyle choice (Ratoath for example) and those who had moved to estates out of economic necessity (Esker for example).34 In either event, the strength of the universal meaning of home is enough to make its potential loss significant, as demonstrated by the results of a survey carried out in Chicago by Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton for The Meaning of Things, which led the authors to conclude that the home is ��the most powerful sign of the self of the inhabitant who dwells within��.35

The extent to which the loss of their home contributed to people considering or committing suicide is impossible to know. However it has been shown that a considerable amount of self-worth, personality and hope was put into homes during the Celtic Tiger, the only remnants of which are the brand-new ruins which litter the landscape. In the conclusion of Death of a Tiger, Coen and Maguire raise the question: ��is my sense of self-worth or self itself built upon more than illusions, and therefore am I able to operate in the world?��36 Advising against trying to fulfill all our aspirations in one go, Bachelard argues:

Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it.37

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References:

1. Rob Kitchin, Justin Gleeson, Karen Keaveney, Cian O�Callaghan, ��A Haunted

Landscape: Housing and Ghost Estates in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland,�� NIRSA

(National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis) (NUIM) Working Paper

Series 59 (July 2010) p.56. 2. Kitchin et al. ��A Haunted Landscape,�� 34. 3. Edel O�Connell, ��Roof Comes Off as Ghost Estate Demolished��, The Irish

Independent, April 6, 2012. 4. J.B. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press 1980) 94. 5. Herman Melville, I and my Chimney. (First Published 1856) http://www.online-

literature.com/melville/160/ 6. Robert Smithson, ��A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey�� (1967) in

Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Ed. Jack Flam (New York: New York University Press 1979) 72.

7. Michael Lewis, Boomerang, (London: Allen Lane 2011), 84. 8. Brendan Bartley, ��Planning in Ireland�� in Understanding Contemporary Ireland,

ed. Brendan Bartley, Rob Kitchin (London: Pluto 2007) 32. 9. Mary P. Corcoran, Karen Keaveney, Patrick J. Duffy, ��Transformations in

Housing�� in Understanding Contemporary Ireland, ed. Brendan Bartley, Rob Kitchin (London: Pluto 2007) 250.

10. Mary P. Corcoran, Karen Keaveney, Patrick J. Duffy, ��Transformations in


11. Andrew MacLaran, Sinead Kelly, ��Urban Property Development�� in Understanding

Contemporary Ireland, ed. Brendan Bartley, Rob Kitchin (London: Pluto 2007) 84. 12. Rob Kitchin, Justin Gleeson, Karen Keaveney, Cian O�Callaghan, ��A Haunted

Landscape: Housing and Ghost Estates in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland,�� NIRSA

(National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis) (NUIM) Working Paper

Series 59 (July 2010) p.55. 13. Mary P. Corcoran, Karen Keaveney, Patrick J. Duffy, ��Transformations in


14. Andrew MacLaran, Sinead Kelly, ��Urban Property Development�� in Understanding

Contemporary Ireland, ed. Brendan Bartley, Rob Kitchin (London: Pluto 2007) 73. 15. Andrew MacLaran, Sinead Kelly, ��Urban Property Development�� in Understanding

Contemporary Ireland, ed. Brendan Bartley, Rob Kitchin (London: Pluto 2007) 79. 16. Andrew MacLaran, Sinead Kelly, ��Urban Property Development�� in Understanding

Contemporary Ireland, ed. Brendan Bartley, Rob Kitchin (London: Pluto 2007) 85. 17. Mary P. Corcoran, Karen Keaveney, Patrick J. Duffy, ��Transformations in







Housing�� in Understanding Contemporary Ireland, ed. Brendan Bartley, Rob Kitchin (London: Pluto 2007) 253-254.

21. Caitriona Coen, Mark Maguire, ��Death of a Tiger: the collapse of Irish property

dreams,�� Anthropological Notebooks 18, no. 1 (2012): 16. 22. Caitriona Coen, Mark Maguire, ��Death of a Tiger: the collapse of Irish property

dreams,�� Anthropological Notebooks 18, no. 1 (2012): 14.

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23. Rob Kitchin, ��Picture of Ireland: Where are our ghost estates?��, The Irish Times, January 26, 2013.

24. Michael Lewis, Boomerang, (London: Allen Lane 2011), 103. 25. Caitriona Coen, Mark Maguire, ��Death of a Tiger: the collapse of Irish property

dreams,�� Anthropological Notebooks 18, no. 1 (2012): 7. 26. Gaston Bachelard, (translated by Maria Jolas) The Poetics of Space (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1994), 4. 27. Gaston Bachelard, (translated by Maria Jolas) The Poetics of Space (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1994), 5. 28. Caitriona Coen, Mark Maguire, ��Death of a Tiger: the collapse of Irish property

dreams,�� Anthropological Notebooks 18, no. 1 (2012): 15. 29. Morgan Kelly, ��On the Likely Extent of Falls in Irish House Prices,�� Quarterly

Economic Commentary, ESRI (Summer 2007) 42 30. The Irish Times, Bertie Ahern: A Political Life

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0326/1224313895679.html 31. Bernie English, ��Three Suicide Letters a Week because of Debt,�� Limerick Post,

May 22, 2012. 32. Dearbhail McDonald, Tim Healy, ��Banks are �Hounding People to Suicide,�� Irish

Independent, May 12, 2011. 33. Caitriona Coen, Mark Maguire, ��Death of a Tiger: the collapse of Irish property

dreams,�� Anthropological Notebooks 18, no. 1 (2012): 19. 34. Mary P. Corcoran, Karen Keaveney, Patrick J. Duffy, ��Transformations in


35. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things:

Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge, England; Cambridge University Press 1981) 123.

36. Caitriona Coen, Mark Maguire, ��Death of a Tiger: the collapse of Irish property

dreams,�� Anthropological Notebooks 18, no. 1 (2012): 20. 37. Gaston Bachelard, (translated by Maria Jolas) The Poetics of Space (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1994). 61.

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Part Two- The Ruins of the Celtic Tiger

What is this Irish landscape of the present and not-too-distant-future? It seems familiar, but it is different.1 � Kieran Keohane, Haunted Houses and Liminality

If not the buildings they were intended to be, then what are the ��unfinished��

buildings of Ireland? No longer under construction but not yet being demolished, they inhabit a kind of limbo. Caught in transition, they are most often discussed in the future or the past tense, because they seem to make so little sense in the present. It is clear that they cannot remain as they are but unclear what to do with them. Visually they are not dissimilar to the construction sites they used to be except that they are frozen in this state. Yet their situation has as much in common with ruination as with construction.

Based on the theory of John Dewey, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton differentiate between recognition, which is to encounter something and interpret it only as something we already know, and perception, which is to encounter something and realise its inherent characteristics2. This section discusses both the abstract and physical characteristics of the ruins of the Celtic Tiger in relation to thinking on traditional and contemporary ruins in the hope of highlighting their nuances and peculiarities.

Stillborn

The states of dereliction and ruin are often equated to the death of a building, exemplified by the phrase commonly used in relation to restoration: ��to breathe new life

into something��. The remains of the Celtic Tiger differ in conception from the traditional idea the ruin, which usually falls into ruin after being inhabited for some time, in that they had almost the opposite trajectory; construction began as with any normal building but never reached completion, leaving empty shells in the place of buildings. In this way they have much in common with what Robert Smithson refers to as ��ruins in reverse��3 in his essay and photographic series A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey:

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is- all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the �romantic

ruin� because the buildings don�t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise

into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other �out of date� things.3

The images (some of which are shown below) were taken on a Saturday when many of the machines were inactive and depict engineering works paused in mid-construction. For Smithson the state of ruin was a transitory as well as a terminal state, as in the traditional ruin whereby a complete building falls into ruin for whatever reason and recedes towards a tabula rasa eventually leaving no traces. Smithson�s concept of

��ruins in reverse��3 implies starting from a tabula rasa and ��rising into ruin��5 on the way to completion. The state of ruin is a point where these opposing trajectories coincide.

The structures that populate the Irish landscape have been frozen in time by a change in economic climate much like that Saturday in Passaic in 1967 was frozen by Smithson�s Instamatic camera. ��Born dead��4 or stillborn, they went straight from construction to ruin, often before completion. Because the ruins of the Celtic Tiger did not have a long and fulfilling life (or a life at all) they do not rest in peace in the manner of a traditional ruin. Ruins by virtue of their obsolescence, the wastefulness of their newfound worthlessness compared to their original cost troubles our conscience.

Housing had become a consumer commodity with the cycle of buy one, sell it and buy a better one swelling demand for more and more construction. In Anxious

Landscapes, Antoine Picon proposes that in cities ��devoted to mass consumption and

18

its consequences, the contrast between commercial spaces and garbage dumps might well have replaced- on a level more symbolic than real,� the old opposition between centre and periphery ��,5 which calls to mind the city of Leonia in Invisible Cities, whose opulence is best measured not by what it creates and consumes but by ��the things that

each day are thrown out to make room for the new��.6 In Leonia nobody wondered where the street cleaners dumped their refuse as long as it was outside the city, and in Ireland the waste was invisible until the false demand evaporated and we realised that in fact the brand-new construction was the waste.

The Fountain Monument The Great Pipes Monument

The Pumping Derrick

Source of Images: www.robertsmithson.com

19

Continuity

While there was confidence in the linear and progressive construction of history, traditional ruins promised redemption, in as much as they secured an understanding of continuity.7 - Magali Arriola, A Victim and a Viewer: Some

Thoughts on Anticipated Ruins

Traditional ruins provide society with a reassuring sense of continuity. But the ruins of the Celtic Tiger are not traditional ruins, they are stillborn buildings, which are different to ��ruins in reverse��5 in that they are no longer on their way to completion and instead exist in a present that is a disruption of the continuity from past to future, their trajectory is paused at the point where it becomes unpredictable based on what has gone before. Our sense of the natural order of things is confounded by the creation of ��instant ruins��:

The bewilderment which follows the simultaneous occurrence of new life and death relates to the general assumption that there will be a life-span�separating

the two events. When new life and death appear to become fused together, our entire perception of the world may be called into question.8

Instead of old buildings falling to make way for new and better ones, the way death makes way for new life, we are instead faced with the possibility of new buildings falling to make way for nothing. The substitution of time, which is ��linear and

progressive��7 with economic disaster, which is cyclical and unpredictable negates any sense of continuity in the ruins of the Celtic Tiger. Although this seems to depend on the idea of a linear concept of history as opposed to a cyclical or helical one, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that ruins are also a mark of resilience: ��Ruins are evidence not only that

cities can be destroyed but that they survive their own destruction, are resurrected again and again.��9

However a certain perspective distance gained by the passing of time is necessary for us to see ruins as reassuring marks of resilience. The ��understanding of

continuity��7 that Arriola speaks of is based on distant ruins as points of reference that reassure us that we are on the right path, that we are building progress on the foundations of the past. But the flattening of distance and time which appears to have taken place in an instant ruin forbids it from assuring such continuity. A ruin cannot be its own point of reference, and in the absence of a point of reference there is nothing to tell us what will happen next.

It is as if the pause button has been pressed in an architectural sense but not a temporal sense. Continuity is only possible if these buildings endure the icy economic conditions and emerge on the other side still fit for purpose. Otherwise it is necessary to imagine some kind of ��rebirth�� or reincarnation to get beyond what seems like the end

of the road for these structures. In the meantime we are trapped in a physical and mental landscape populated by obsolete and unresolved objects. According to Antoine Picon, we are uncomfortable with obsolete objects because they do not reintegrate into the landscape like ruins, instead they haunt the landscape ��a bit like the living dead��10, denying the reassurance provided by the sense of continuity described above. To quote Picon again:

Why does rust frighten us so while the ruin is adorned with a reassuring character? ... The ruin, as we have said, restores man to nature. Rust, on the other hand, confines him in the middle of his productions as if within a prison, a prison all the more terrible since he is its builder.11

20

A Point in Time

It is the dual valence of the ruin as image and reality� its capacity to place us at

the end of a historical continuum or cast us forward into the future ruin of our own present- that traditional ruin aesthetics bequeaths to later artists and thinkers.12 � Brian Dillon, A Short History of Decay

Ruins have the ability to transport the viewer into the future as well as into the past. In an article entitled The Salon of 1767, Denis Diderot outlined some basic poetic characteristics of ruins in the traditional sense such as their ability to provoke thoughts about the decline of current civilisation through the manifestation of the decline of a previous one:

We contemplate the ravages of time, and in our imagination we scatter the rubble of the very buildings in which we live over the ground; in that moment solitude and silence prevail around us, we are the sole survivors of an entire nation that is no more. Such is the first tenet of the poetics of ruins.13

But it is not the ��ravages of time��13 that we contemplate when we see an unfinished building in Ireland but rather the ravages of economics, not the fall of a civilisation over time but the fall of an economy overnight. As manifestations of a widely unexpected economic crash, the ruins of the Celtic Tiger act as a warning of the precariousness of national and global economic stability as opposed to a reminder of the inevitability of the process of time.

It is in the suddenness with which construction sites were abandoned and became ruins that the similarity (in a conceptual sense) to places such as Pompeii or Chernobyl is most evident. While Pompeii was frozen in time by a sudden flow of lava Irish construction sites were frozen by a sudden end to the flow of cash. Although the similarity seems only to be conceptual, they share a type of eeriness and unease with these places (on a lesser emotional scale, naturally).

Disquiet

In traditional landscapes the productions of man, his constructions in particular, surrendered themselves progressively to nature in the form of the ruin� There is

nothing of the sort in the contemporary city where objects, if they don�t disappear

all in one go, as if by magic, are instead relegated to obsolescence, a bit like the living dead who endlessly haunt the landscape preventing it from ever becoming peaceful again.10 � Antoine Picon, Anxious Landscapes

What is it about the empty or unfinished buildings of Ireland that make us feel uneasy, causing them to be commonly referred to as ��ghost-estates��? To a certain extent, the unease can be attributed to the newness of the phenomenon. Our concept of the natural rise and fall of buildings is challenged and we feel disorientated by the paradoxes embodied by these structures, not helped by a lack of a precedent. This ties in with Ernst Jentsch�s explanation of the uncanny as a sensation of discomfort in a situation that one can�t comprehend. For Jentsch, the feeling of uncanniness was caused by ��intellectual uncertainty��14 and a ��fundamental insecurity brought about by a �lack of

orientation�, a sense of something new, foreign, and hostile invading an old, familiar,

customary world��.14

But there is something uncanny about these places in a real sense as well as an intellectual one. On one level it is the contrast between the vibrancy of human life that we expect in a residential place and the complete absence of life and uninviting space that we find instead that gives rise to this feeling. For this it helps to understand a little about the house as an archetype in society.

21

There is an expectation that houses should be ��homely�� places. Although this may be a traditional view of the home, it was still the predominant response to the study carried out in The Meaning of Things.15 When asked to describe their homes, the most common characteristic used by respondents was ��comfortable��, ��cosy�� or ��relaxing��,

which the authors suggest was intended in both physical and psychological terms.16

The ghost-estates of Ireland are certainly not homely places. Although recognisable as houses they are completely devoid of the human life we would associate with homes. The contrast between the usual liveliness and the unusual emptiness or absence gives rise to the uncanny feeling that we experience around them, something which recalls the play on presence and absence in the sculpture House by Rachel Whiteread (shown below), for which the artist made a concrete cast of the volume of the living space of a terraced house and then demolished the shell of the house, thereby exposing the newly cast volume and rendering the life of the house impossible:

�House disrupted our accustomed sense of time-space by apparently solidifying the volume that had once been the interior of the house: the living space, the space of life. Its openness had been filled in. All that was air was turned into solid. In House, social time-space was deadened, muted. The movement, the noise, the interchange; these things through which we create the time-spaces of our lives were gone.17

The stifling of the social space of the house challenges the convention of houses as homely or welcoming places, which is what gives House its uncanny nature, according to Anthony Vidler:

The very traces of life extinguished, of the �unhomeliness� of filled space

contrasted with the former �homeliness� of lived space� raised the spectre of demonistic or magic forces, at the very least inspiring speculation as to the permanence of architecture, at most threatening all cherished ideals of domestic harmony.18

Deriving his definition from the German word for the uncanny, das unheimliche which literally means the un-homely, Sigmund Freud described an uncanny feeling as one that arose when something that seemed ��homely�� at first suddenly turned into the

opposite19 because of the ��fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn against its

owners��.19 An example of the uncanny in an architectural sense is given by Vidler in The

Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely; the house which ��pretends to

afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror��.20 In a similar way the warmth and homeliness associated with the archetype of home sharpens by contrast the eeriness of the silent shells of the ruins of the Celtic Tiger.

The nature of their presence on the landscape also contributes to the eeriness. The photographic series Settlement by Anthony Haughey (see below) illustrates the nature of this presence in a way that written descriptions cannot. Standing out against the dawn or dusk, some make their elemental presence felt in a primal way by highlighting the starkness of contrast between their block-work shells and the landscape they rest on, while the lonesome glow of halogen floodlights illuminates others in the night. The archaeological associations with the title Settlement further emphasise the permanence of their presence, that silently brooding presence.

The form of these structures arouses uncanny feelings on another level. The mutated or skeleton-like form of the block-work shells brings forth the uncanny in what Vidler would call ��architecture dismembered��.21 To explain the concept of architectural empathy Vidler cites Heinrich Wolfflin:

We judge every object by analogy with our own bodies� not only are we

convinced that this creature must feel ill at ease if it does not stand upright and

22

seems to fall over, but we go so far as to experience, to a highly sensitive degree, the spiritual condition and contentment or discontent expressed by any configuration, however different from ourselves.22

Stillborn houses, stunted and deformed in their development are disquieting in contrast to our Platonic idea of what houses should look like, heightened by the epitome of ��house-ness�� that are Irish estate houses, their similarity to what Vidler calls ��the

archetypal �child�s house,� a commonplace compilation of the fundamental elements of

the dwelling��.23

Having visited Pompeii, Francois-René de Chateaubriand described how lava froze a woman in her youth: ��Death, like a sculptor, has moulded his victim��.24 It could be said that Debt has done the same thing in the post-Celtic Tiger Irish landscape.

House by Rachel Whiteread

A Ghost-Estate in Longford Town

23

A Ghost-Estate in Leitrim

Settlement (2) by Anthony Haughey Settlement (3) by Anthony Haughey


24



Source of Images: www.anthonyhaughey.com

25

Monuments and Society

Materially and metaphorically, visually and psychologically, personally and communally, they represent the intense transformations and aspirations of the Celtic Tiger period and the sobering anxieties and uncertainty of the current period. They are literally places haunted by the Celtic Tiger.25 - Cian O�Callaghan, Introduction to Settlement by Anthony Haughey

Ruins by their basic nature tell the story of their own destruction and manifest the decline of the individual or society that built them. However, due to the fundamental role played by the property market unfinished buildings are capable of telling not just the story of the decline but the whole story of the Celtic Tiger. Because construction was the cause of the boom, more construction was the result of the boom, too much construction was the cause of the decline of the boom and unfinished construction was the result of the decline of the boom, as both ��image and reality��12 unfinished buildings not only represent but also embody both the cause and effects of the Celtic Tiger.

Since they have been severed from their purpose as homes, these structures demand a fresh evaluation unless we are to fall into the trap of recognition as opposed to perception. It is useful to look to the world of installation art, especially Ilya Kabakov and his lectures on the ��Total Installation��, in which he describes how the observer should be ��simultaneously a victim and a viewer��26 and ��the importance of the

observer�s inclusion in that which he observes��.26 The observer brings with them their preconceptions and social customs which will either be confirmed or denied by what they encounter.26

While Kabakov uses the word ��victim�� in an artistic sense, meaning that the

viewer should be affected by that which he observes, literally being victims of the recession can only increase the effect of the presence of the ruins of the Celtic Tiger on society. Also, despite the tendency to blame the banks, government and property developers for the whole bubble, ordinary citizens were also responsible to a certain extent as people borrowed beyond their means. Michael Lewis makes this point in Boomerang:

The Irish nouveau riche created a Ponzi scheme, but it was a Ponzi scheme in which they themselves believed. So, too, for that matter, did some large number of ordinary Irish citizens who bought houses for fantastic sums.27

In reality it was very hard for people not to get caught up in the runaway consumerism in some way. However, this small twinge of guilt only increases the involvement of the viewer in that which he views. Perhaps it could be said that to varying degrees an Irish person contemplating these new ��installations�� on the

landscape is simultaneously a victim, a viewer and a culprit.

Personal experience greatly affects the relationship a person has with these structures, whether they are a victim, a culprit or just a viewer. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton give us a basic explanation of how people relate to things: ��When we

interpret a thing it acts as a sign (first element), standing for something (second element), through creating an interpreting thought or emotion (third element).��28 A person who had lost their house or whose job was in the construction industry might feel anger where someone else would just see ugly scars on the landscape.

Unfinished buildings are a very literal reminder of the property crash and the devaluation of investments, loss of jobs and loss of homes that came with it. It is impossible to imagine the different personal experiences of individuals but worth remembering that they influence people�s relationship to the remnants of the era, just like the influence of personal experience of house and home on the interpretation of House:

26

Perpetually it draws us back to what has been lost, in all its uniqueness, and all its typicality. If our House has been turned inside out, how can we ever go �home�? If the last time we saw single houses standing where once there were rows was in childhood, after the war, what might House mean? Or if our parents had been forcibly resettled in Dagenham in the 1960s, or scooped up into tower blocks in the 1970s? There is no single answer to such questions.29

But the ruins of the Celtic Tiger represent a loss for society in general as well as for individuals. Because the guarantee of the Irish banks includes the now extinct Anglo Irish Bank (half of whose business consisted of property developers) as well as regular retail banks, all construction-related losses have become the Irish citizen�s problem as

the taxpayer ultimately bears the cost. More than just a symbol or a sign, these structures literally are the source of the Irish taxpayer�s debt. It is because they cannot be sold, because there is no market for these buildings that the Irish nation is in debt. Therefore the waste of money has become something for us all to rue when we see or think of the unfinished buildings around the country.

The loss is not purely financial however. According to Czikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton ��money is objectified psychic energy��30, i.e. a person is given money in exchange for their work (the use of psychic energy) which they can use to buy the work (or psychic energy) of others. In The Meaning of Things they also explain how this attention or psychic energy is finite thereby causing an exchange of psychic energy when someone turns their attention to something31:

The fact that attention can be condensed to tasks or objects also opens up the possibility of expropriating psychic energy. If, for instance, a farmer devotes years of his life to cultivating a field but then the field is taken away, the farmer loses the object in which his life energy has been condensed.32

The loss of psychic energy in the unfinished buildings of Ireland is three-fold. Firstly the financial and creative effort of their builders has been lost, secondly the loans associated with them continue to drain money (and the ability to use it for other things) from Irish citizens and thirdly they will require a further investment of psychic energy, probably just to return many of the sites to the way they were before it all began. The ruins of the Celtic Tiger are black-holes of psychic energy.

27

References:

1. Kieran Keohane, ��Haunted Houses and Liminality: from the Deserted Homes of

the �Faithful Departed� to the Social Desert of Schismogenesis��, International

Political Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2009) 9. (http://www.google.ie/#hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=haunted+houses+and+liminality&oq=haunted+houses+and+liminality&gs_l=hp.3...1129.8205.0.8789.29.23.0.6.6.0.73.1235.23.23.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.aEBAGFo8a50&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=3337f28ceec3e5ae&bpcl=38897761&biw=1584&bih=788)



3. Robert Smithson, ��A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey�� (1967) in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Ed. Jack Flam (New York: New York University Press 1979) 72.

4. Oxford Dictionaries. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/stillborn

5. Antoine Picon, ��Anxious Landscapes��, Grey Room, no. 1 (Fall 2000) 75. 6. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, (London: Vintage 1997) 102. 7. Magali Arriola, ��A Victim and a Viewer: Some Thoughts on Anticipated Ruins��

(2005) in Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Brian Dillon (London, England; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press 2011) 175.

8. Rosemary Mander, Loss and Bereavement in Childbearing, (London, Routledge; 2006) 11-12.

9. Rebecca Solnit, ��The Ruins of Memory�� (2007) in Ruins: Documents of

Contemporary Art, ed. Brian Dillon (London, England; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2011) 151.

10. Antoine Picon, ��Anxious Landscapes��, Grey Room, no. 1 (Fall 2000) 76-77. 11. Antoine Picon, ��Anxious Landscapes��, Grey Room, no. 1 (Fall 2000) 79. 12. Brian Dillon, ��Introduction: A Short History of Decay�� in Ruins: Documents of

Contemporary Art, ed. Brian Dillon (London, England; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2011) 13.

13. Denis Diderot, ��The Salon of 1767�� (1767) in Ruins: Documents of Contemporary

Art, ed. Brian Dillon (London, England; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2011) 22

14. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, (London, England and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992) 23.


Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge, England; Cambridge University Press 1981) 144-145.



17. Doreen Massey, ��Space-time and the Politics of Location��, in House, Ed. James Lingwood (London: Phaidon 1995) 37.

18. Anthony Vidler, ��A Dark Space��, in House, Ed. James Lingwood (London: Phaidon 1995) 69-70.

19. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, (London, England and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992) 6-7.




28


24. Francois-René de Chateaubriand, cited by Anthony Vidler in The Architectural

Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, (London, England and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992) 49.

25. Cian O�Callaghan, ��Haunted Landscapes�� in Settlement by Anthony Haughey: http://anthonyhaughey.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Settlement-Source-Feb-2011.pdf

26. Ilya Kabakov, cited by Magali Arriola in ��A Victim and a Viewer: Some Thoughts

on Anticipated Ruins�� (2005) in Ruins: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Brian Dillon (London, England; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press 2011) 174.

27. Michael Lewis, Boomerang, (London: Allen Lane 2011), 103. 28. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things:


29. Simon Watney, ��On House, Iconoclasm and Iconophobia��, in House, Ed. James Lingwood (London: Phaidon 1995) 109.







29

Conclusion- Moving On

Attempts to categorise these structures fall short, as in the works of Rachel Whiteread, described by Jon Bird as ��sufficiently strange to evade the closure that

accompanies classification.��35 Classifying them as ruins still leaves the contradiction between financial cost and lack of need. The idea of using them as social housing is debatable; can we really expect estates that were poorly planned, often lacking in amenities and distanced from centres of employment to suddenly be successful when converted to social housing? Various purposes such as sheltered housing, community centres and crèches have also been proposed, all of which appear to be good ideas and could help provide the amenities some of these places lack. Obstacles stand in the way however, not least the source of finance. While the government decides what to do with them they remain unresolved in our mental and physical landscape, denying closure.

We find it difficult to live with the idea that brand-new buildings that have cost so much have become instantly and perhaps terminally obsolete, but it is their defining characteristic. It seems that demolition is inevitable even if some ghost-estates or units within ghost-estates can be completed and adapted for other purposes. Aside from unsightliness on the landscape and the effect on residents of the completed homes, there is the pressing concern about the danger to children. Depending on their occupancy rate, demolition could amount to a few houses in an estate or the demolition of entire estates in some cases. Even if demolition is not used as a blanket solution, some estates in isolated rural areas (where demand is not expected to return for at least ten years) seem quite likely to be demolished, considering they are less viable for reuse.

If demolition becomes a reality, how can we reconcile that? We justify demolition to a certain extent out of necessity; it is demoralising, unsightly and potentially dangerous for unfinished buildings to stay as they are, but the idea of costly new buildings falling to make way for nothing is still irreconcilable with normality. These buildings represent a loss of an anticipated future.

The concept of grief and coping with loss might be more useful in making sense of a situation that resists logical resolution. John Archer describes the process in The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss: ��The outcome of

the process of grief is sometimes referred to as �recovery��but �readjustment�

�adjustment�, or �resolution� are perhaps better terms. Recovery implies that the person

returns to where they were, whereas resolution and readjustment acknowledge that they can never be the same as before.��3 More specifically, in Meaning Reconstruction and the

Experience of Loss, Dennis Klass notes that while something like stillbirth can never be completely resolved emotionally, when the stage is reached whereby it is ��resolved as

much as it will be��2 people can ��accept non-ordinary phenomena as part of everyday life��.2

The ��non-ordinary�� phenomenon of the demolition of new houses may just have to be accepted but in a sense there will always be something missing. In a work called The J. Street Project, artist Susan Hiller photographed and filmed modern everyday life on all 303 German streets whose names refer to Jewish presence. This juxtaposition of reminders of an atrocity with banal everyday life created a strangeness or tension that was ��the exact artistic equivalent of the mixed feelings that overwhelm

one at the sight of a sign bearing the word �Judengasse� as everyday life goes on

unabated all around��,4 in the words of critic and curator Jorg Heiser. It revealed traces of the horror of a past event in something as seemingly innocuous as the nomenclature of streets.

The rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and its effects will be studied both in Ireland and abroad long after the unfinished houses that represent it so definitively are gone,

30

existing only on old maps, photographs and film. One can imagine a grandparent saying to their grandchild in the future: ��see that field, I remember when there was nothing there but houses��. Strange as they seem now, perhaps only through their absence will the true strangeness of the brief presence of these ruins be felt.

(8,688 words excluding references and bibliography)

References:

1. Jon Bird, ��Dolce Domum��, in House, Ed. James Lingwood (London: Phaidon 1995) 114.

2. Dennis Klass, ��The Inner Representation of the Dead Child in the Psychic and

Social Narratives of Bereaved Parents��, in Meaning Reconstruction and the

Experience of Loss, ed. Robert A. Neimeyer, (Washington, D.C.: The American Psychological Association, 2001) 80.

3. John Archer, The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to

Loss, (London: Routledge, 1999) 110. 4. Jorg Heiser, ��Susan Hiller: The J. Street Project�� (2005) in Ruins: Documents of

Contemporary Art, ed. Brian Dillon (London, England; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press 2011) 134.

31

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Ireland's unfinished buildings as a new kind of ruin

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