CIRCA Art Magazine - Summer 2002 - Letterkenny: Bungalow Blitz at Letterkenny Arts Centre

From 'bliss' to 'blitz' seems a characteristic Irish journey, and a civil war seems a natural Irish state of affairs. This exhibition embraced both, taking as starting points Jack Fitzsimons' book Bungalow Bliss (a manual of architectural plans and contracts for affordable bungalows hugely popular here in Ireland since its first printing in 1971) and the sometimes virulent debate around building new homes in the Irish countryside. Fitzsimons' book is a fascinating social document - like any planning document it is full of fantasy and aspiration. The figures sketched in its architectural plans are perfectly formed and poised modern/contemporary beings, and the hills sketched in some of its plans (to give guidance on the role of site/view/perspective) are perfectly curved Arcadian idylls. In either case, the reality of life in the southwest Donegal seaboard, the area studied by the show, seems some distance away from the world sketched by Fitzsimons. There, the wind, rain and hail are harsh and howling, the transport parked at the garage is likely to include a tractor alongside the four-door saloon, and the hills surrounding the home will be rugged, eroded, and boggy. The photographs in the show make vivid this chasm between plan and reality: many of the men photographed at home in their family bungalows seem too tall for their own ceilings; one pictures them stooping to enter their doorways and ducking to avoid light fittings. The bungalow, almost by definition, verges on the dainty or petite - suited to older age perhaps when we all thin out and stoop under the weight of years. Bungalows, some of the audience commented at the show, are a psychological trace of the thatched cottages of the past: such perspective makes the buildings seem as yet still only half-evolved, as if they had not yet made the full passage to standing tall and being two storeys high, still staying low and stretching outwards rather than upwards, somehow wary of themselves. The audience comments on the show were heartfelt and impassioned, fulsome examples of the angry debate between the An Taisce 'SOS our nature' crew and the embittered rural cry of "Go home you townies," a debate currently generating more heat than light. Likewise, some of the local press objected to locals being 'studied' by urban types: an understandable knee-jerk reaction perhaps, but revealing a real misunderstanding of the inclusive and open nature of the show. The show itself displayed its insights coolly and without fanfare: I loved the way that the windows of the bungalows acted internally as wide-screen cinema views onto the wildness outside, safely double-glazed away from the harsh realities of the south-western seaboard, but remaining fascinated and unable to stop looking. And, likewise, the windows at night, with the bungalow lights on, acting as warm beacons seen from a distance. Many of the bungalows are built on family land, contemporary replacements for the old thatched cottages. The contemporary big windows, in their demand to see as much as possible of the outside, seem another characteristic of the poetry of unhappiness, an inability to turn away from the 'harsh' or the 'howling', to turn away from the heritage of tough lives of the south-western Donegal seaboard. The contemporary bungalows are neither betrayals of a thatched and harsh rugged past, nor of the rough and beautiful rural environment: they are just another step in the evolution of living in such a place.

Declan Sheehan is a writer on art and film, and Director of the Context Gallery.

Paul Antick and Andrew Kearney: Bungalow Blitz, Letterkenny Arts Centre, May/June 2002, curated by Aoife MacNamara. A documentary on Bungalow Blitz is planned for Spring 2003 on tg4.

¹Heinrich Böll, Irish Journal, translated by Leila Vennewitz, Northwestern University Press, Illinois, 1994.