allan . curran . architects

The other day my son asked me ‘Dad, what do you call the people who own football?’ He meant FIFA of course, and it’s interesting that that’s the way it’s seen nowadays. I put it to him that he owned it, and I owned it, and so did everybody else. At least that’s how it was when I was his age. All football fans know that this is a World Cup year, or a FIFA World Cup ™ year as FIFA would have it. FIFA are in the spotlight because of street protests in Brazil against the cost of hosting the World Cup there this summer, and because of the number of deaths among poorly- paid foreign labourers working on the construction of the 2022 stadia in Qatar.

Back when I started watching football in the mid- seventies, I was fascinated by Wembley Stadium, scene of the FA Cup final every year and incredibly glamorous in my mind. I soon discovered the then- futuristic Olympic Stadium in Munich, which totally blew me away with its’ spiders web roof hung from poles. (Later, in architecture college, I made a model of the roof from a pair of tights).At the same time, The Big Match and Match of the Day provided weekly doses of English football grounds steeped in history and atmosphere.

That’s not to say it was idyllic, with football hooliganism rampant. The first game I went to was at the old Wembley Stadium in 1983, and my outstanding memory is of the heave in the crowd ten minutes before kickoff as the latecomers piled in. I ended up a fair bit away from where I started, squeezed far apart from the people I had gone to the game with. It wasn’t good, and of course the Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough disasters were to come.

 The Olympic Stadium in Munich.

The Taylor report that followed Hillsborough recommended that football stadia become all- seater, and with Sky tv money soon pumping into English football, the experience of watching a game live was dramatically changed. On the positive side it became family friendly, but on the negative side it became corporate and sanitized, often out- of town and very expensive. In November 2012 I paid €180 for a ticket to watch a Champions League game in Madrid, at another of the old stadia from my childhood.

The seat was perfect, right on the halfway line, and the game was good, but I was really puzzled by the atmosphere. For a vital game, it was flat. The Borussia Dortmund fans in their bee- coloured jerseys made most noise in the away end, partly because their team was playing so well against Real Madrid, but also (I’m convinced of it) because they were standing up. They seemed to be having a party. German stadia allow standing up, and now there is a move on to allow it in English stadia as well. I’m all for it, even though the last standing game I was at, in Arsenal’s  old art deco Highbury ground, I spent the ninety minutes standing on one leg on my tiptoes leaning all over the man in front of me, like thousands of others around me. Now Arsenal play at the Emirates Stadium, with a famously dull atmosphere. Meanwhile, on quiet nights, you can hear the ghosts of Herbert Chapman and Cliff Bastin in the back gardens of the Highbury Square apartment development….

The art deco style Highbury ground, former home of Arsenal FC.

For me, the new football stadia are architecturally interesting, but are becoming the same the world over as FIFA strive for corporate uniformity. The old grounds, tightly bounded on all sides by the redbrick communities they sprang from, are becoming a thing of the past. The twin towers of Wembley, with all their history, are long gone and the most interesting things about the new stadium are Bobby Moore’s statue and Geoff Hurst’s crossbar from the 1966 World Cup final in the museum there. The new stadium lacks the atmosphere of the old stadium on match days, and has little individuality to differentiate it from the identikit stadia springing up the world over. God be with old- style regional variation such as the moat around the pitch that sticks in my mind from Argentina 78, or even the now disused- for- football Olympic Stadium in Munich. People are different the world over and our football stadia, our secular cathedrals of communal experience, should reflect that.

Bad luck and bad timing (a few days before Christmas) with our electric shower, gave me an opportunity lately to put my ‘make do and mend’ impulses to work. Anybody who knows me will know I am wont to spending Friday evening fixing the brakes or straightening a wheel on my bike. We are often too quick to replace rather than repair domestic appliances and something in my nature resists that, if there might be a chance to open up and fix instead.

Cold water continued to flow through the shower at a great rate after I switched it off, so it was obvious that a valve of some kind had given up. Luckily I had a cut- off valve on the supply pipe to the shower, so a quick trip to the attic stopped the flow. Still, after taking the cover of the shower and staring at it blankly for a while, I knew it was a job for an expert as any attempted repair by me would likely lead to flooding or electrocution (or both) so I decided it would be best to call The Shower Man.

Tim www.showerman007.com/ , had a good look and said that there weren’t any of the usual signs of wear and tear on it, and that there was no need to replace it yet. Good, that was about €200 saved. Tim explained that it was teenagers who kept him in work- electric showers are designed to run for 15 minutes and cool for 45 minutes, but it’s the other way around when it comes to our young ones leading to a shortened lifespan for the shower unit.

Tim showed me that the filter on the solenoid had started to break up, and it was likely that a small piece of that had jammed the valve open. After replacing the part and opening the valve on the supply pipe, the shower was ready for (hopefully) another few years of action, teenagers notwithstanding. The charge for the callout and replacement part was very reasonable considering the amount I could have spent on a new shower, and the whole operation only took around half an hour.

A few helpful hints then based on my own experience:

•  If you are in the process of building a house or a bathroom extension, have the plumber fit a cut- off valve on the water supply pipe to the shower. To avoid pressure problems, electric showers are usually fed off the mains supply to the house, rather than from your water storage tank. Without a cut- off valve on the supply pipe, you may have to cut off the water mains supply to the house in the event of a problem with the shower unit. That would be a huge nuisance at the best of times but definitely not something you want to face a few days before Christmas.
•  Don’t assume that an older shower unit is finished if it starts to give trouble- a specialist in shower repairs could save you a fair amount of money by replacing a part rather than the whole unit (legitimate funds for bike parts).
• Go easy on the shower- nobody needs to be that clean!

Broken Shower ?

We pass them every day: every field has an entrance, and most have gate posts. Most rural houses have gate pillars of one sort or another, and we take them for granted. But what if they are more than just a necessity? What if they say something to us about ourselves and the people who came before us?

The Austrian modernist architect Adolf Loos said that ‘ornament is crime’, while the American skyscraper pioneer Louis Sullivan believed that ‘form ever follows function’. Perhaps they are right but people have always had the impulse to decorate their possessions to make statements about themselves. Gate pillars from Japanese temples to the Piazza San Marco in Venice have more symbolic importance than practical value. Loos and his fellow modernists in the 1920s and 1930s abhorred any kind of ornamentation, and while they produced many beautiful buildings some of those were not liked by the people they were built for, because they lacked any kind of personal touch. I wonder what the great modernists would have made of these gate pillars in rural Donegal? The pillars are much larger than they need to be to hold up a slim metal gate, and the little finial on top of the capping is, in modernist terms, completely unnecessary from a functional point of view. At the same time I am sure the modernists, many of whom had a great interest in primitive forms, would have had an interesting discussion on ideas of marking place and ownership, of identity and belonging, and the rituals and rhythms of daily life. Perhaps it would be best to move on before they began to discuss pagan fertility symbols, and instead just imagine the pride a small farmer felt in his land, and his desire to articulate that pride and show something of his own character through big, heavyweight pillars marking his field on the side of the road.

The latest phase of the Rann Mor housing development, the A3 energy- rated Rann Mor Close has now been completed and all the homes are occupied. These GDC (Ire) Ltd. homes, designed and certified by us, were sold off the plans and were comparable in price to older, much less energy- efficient houses on the Letterkenny market. The house designs are not compromised by energy saving devices, and for those who missed out, there’s already huge interest from buyers in the new Rann Mor Meadow phase which has just gone on site. These new homes will also meet A3 energy rating standards. For more details see http://gdcirl.com/Rann_mor.html

Testimonial – Daniel Doherty, Managing Director of George Doherty Construction (Irl) Ltd says “ The overall Rann Mor Development has been remarkably successful in the last few years. This is in no small way due to the high quality of the design and the professional service provided by Allan Curran Architects Ltd and I look forward to completing the next phase of the development at Rann Mor Meadow to the same high standard. ”

Shed at Stranorlar

When the Swiss architect Le Corbusier sat down to design the Notre Dame du Haut chapel at Ronchamp in eastern France in 1950, it is unlikely that he was thinking about farm buildings in Donegal. He may or may not have known that he was about to create a masterpiece, but he was sure that he wanted to move away from traditional church designs. Instead, he drew inspiration from nature and primitive building types.

The shed at Stranorlar could be called a primitive building type, as it was built using local knowledge, building materials and labour, and was (is) very functional. Windows and doors are only where they need to be. At the same time, the shed has to do with ideas of growth and harvest, summer and winter, shelter and the order and routine of life that is dependent on nature. It is this spirit that Le Corbusier wanted to capture at Ronchamp. Perhaps the random nature of the windows, set in the frame of the heavy, solid walls, allowing light to penetrate the darkness inside, expresses this best.

It is interesting that the renowned Derry architect, Liam McCormick, was very influenced by the chapel at Ronchamp, and we can see the effect of this in his well- known chapels at Burt and Creeslough. Indeed, the windows to the side of the main door at Creeslough are very similar in shape to those at Ronchamp, and every bit as beautiful, albeit on a much smaller scale. At least we can be sure that Liam McCormick was aware of our local farm buildings when he sat down to design the chapel at Creeslough. Because of this, we can trace a circle from our simple farm building in Stranorlar through arguably the greatest building of the twentieth century, and back again to one of Donegal’s finest pieces of architecture, in Creeslough.

This little shed catches the eye for so many reasons- it proudly states its importance by standing its ground, making an otherwise straight road defer to it. It is angled towards the passer- by, uncompromisingly meeting your gaze. While the rest of the road is in shadow, this shed has a place in the sun.

The red corrugations of the tin cast shadows that give the roof depth and texture. These shadows change as the hours go by, which gives the roof an organic, natural look that contrasts beautifully with the smooth- plastered walls below. Indeed the curving ridge, grain of the corrugations and frayed lower edge of the roof could almost allow it to be seen as a brightly- coloured leaf amongst all the background greenery.

Below, the dark void is mysterious- what is inside? At a primitive level, it draws you in and provides shelter and storage. There is a very fine visual balance between the solid of the walls and the void of the openings, while the roof appears to barely touch the walls below. Meanwhile, the shed directs you to the house alongside.

When the passage of time (changing seasons, changing weather, and changing light) is added, we find ourselves with a rich visual treat. All this in a small shed on the side of a local country road!