Interpreting institutional architecture : the long lives and layered meanings of Ireland's asylums

Quinlan, Patrick (2024) Interpreting institutional architecture : the long lives and layered meanings of Ireland's asylums. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

Ireland’s asylum network was remarkable for its early inception, peak extent and relative longevity, yet it was merely one element of the nation’s architecture of containment. Ireland’s health, education and welfare systems relied so heavily on residential institutions that by the late 1950s, over one-tenth of the population had direct experience of living within a ‘total institution’ at some point. But as contemporary society grapples with the implications of mass-institutionalisation, there is a real risk of oversimplifying complex histories and effacing earlier readings. This thesis is based on the premise that the close study of buildings and landscapes over the longue durée, from conception to ‘afterlife,’ can help to recover the layers of meaning with which successive generations imbued them. Asylum sponsors encoded their buildings with multiple messages for different audiences, but later generations were influenced less by a founding vision than by the conditions of their continuing service, as recorded in patterns of alteration and maintenance, of neglect and demolition. I focus on the metropolitan asylums of Dublin and Cork cities as my core case studies, in the context of a growing religious and voluntary sector which came to dominate the Irish institutional landscape. Along the way, I discuss themes of civic pride and architectural grandeur, local and national politics, finance and governance, voluntary and statutory initiatives. In drawing together these original geographic, temporal and contextual strands, I challenge the value judgements employed in current practices of architectural conservation and cultural heritage, which despite claiming greater concern for social values, paradoxically perpetuate the elite and sometimes repressive values embodied in the enduring divide between pauper and polite spaces. Understanding the long and contingent lives of buildings runs contrary to architectural history’s fascination with founding ideas, but is essential to recovering the evolving social meanings of architecture.

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