Of interest to this discussion is the Doherty House of County Derry, Northern Ireland [fig2] which sits uneasily in its situation, being neither a companion to the typical Irish suburban development surrounding it nor strictly authoritative regarding a definite past by which to justify it.
The question then becomes — what precisely is it that makes this project so visually troubling as to demand engagement and reconciliation? References could be drawn, and likely are present in one’s perceptual horizon if one happens to be native-born Irish, regarding the historic lineage of the work. Standing defiantly apart from its suburban neighbours, askew from the rigour of road systems and plot lines, choosing instead land-form as its guiding geometry, the Doherty House establishes its prior presence, its prior right to this landscape eliciting associations with the mid-sized Irish country houses of the 17th and 18th century. These historic constructions, established under the influence of the Palladian ideal villa as perfectly rendered object within a field, remain coherent within the now denser contemporary developments precisely because of their anomalous positioning. Yet the Doherty House in County Derry is only now being completed by de Paor Architects, the newest addition to a developing suburb. One might be tempted to accuse de Paor of direct reference, but the truth has more interest. The design consciously makes use of the landscape itself for views to and from the house, rather than the road system laid down before the development of any of the surrounding buildings. The introduction of these new houses prior to the completion of its design forced the geometry of the Doherty House to shift subtly in its siting to reconstitute a clear view of landscape rather than allow the compromise of this initial governing principle. And this is the first and most critical conclusion one can draw about this work. That despite its apparent reference of the traditional country house, it was not the adoption of form (as in Venturi’s work) that establishes the association but rather a similarity in the underlying principles which give rise to half-recalled memories.
figure 2. Doherty House
Like the photographic works of the artist William Doherty, for whom the house was built, where the ubiquitous is rendered visible through partial imagery or an unnatural over-saturation of colour or contrast, this place demands our attention in an effort to clarify this troubling uncertainty. Merleau Ponty describes attention as being part of the perceptual process, a focusing to achieve knowledge, or as he describes; to give rise to the knowledge-bringing event 2 . And thus it is that the ubiquitous and ordinary is rendered present to us, by virtue of the uncertainty of the equivocal which demands reconciliation with prior knowledge through an imaginative engagement. The critical interest in this work is in how such a state is achieved, not through overgrown neglect and forgetfulness as was the case of our faerie forts, but through conscious design on the part of the architect, Tomas de Paor. Earlier thoughts on the subject by Venturi would suggest that the overt, or even covert, use of symbols latent with prior associations in an unconventional manner would achieve such a condition. Yet the work that resulted on the heels of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture , most especially the post-modern work, was less equivocal than it was contradictory, more didactic or even ironic rather than the evasions of the Doherty House. It is the quality of evasiveness that makes this work stand apart from associations to either this outdated architectural theory or any other clear reference that could provide a stability of meaning.
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