[Extracts from Moden Ulster Architecture, by David Evans, published by the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society in 1977.]
Modern architecture is at least as old as the motor car; indeed
its sources can be traced to the first industrial revolution and
as far back as the mid-eighteenth century. It was only in the
decade following the Second World War, however that the movement
was firmly established. The Festival of Britain in 1951 was the
occasion that introduced its fully developed style to these islands.
In the quarter of a century since then, it can be argued, architecture
has achieved a degree of "stability and orthodoxy" unknown
in the preceeding two hundred years. The period between 1750 and
1950 saw successive and conflicting waves of revivalism, but it
was also marked by the growth of radical approaches to design,
often based on industrial technology, which were eventually combined
in the Functionalism of the International Style of the 1930's.
It was in 1951 that the Royal Society of Ulster Architects, with
R.H. Gibson as president, celebrated its Golden Jubilee and was
host to the annual conference of the Royal Institute of British
Architects. In that year also Robert McKinstry reviewed the state
of architecture in the province in the Architects Journal. He
paid tribute to the work of, among others, R.S. Wilshere, T.F.O.
Rippingham, R.H. Gibson and John McGeagh, and remarked that the
houses designed by "such young architects as Henry Lynch-Robinson
and Houston and Beaumont are making history".
The R.S.U.A. mounted an exhibition for the Festival of Britain,
in Belfast, to promote the new ideals. It was assembled by the
younger generation of school-trained architects including Philip
Bell, Denis O'D. Hanna, James V. T. Scott, Raymond Leith, Ian
Campbell and Max Clendinning. It is interesting to note that the
souvenir handbook contained an essay on the Ulster Tradition by
Denis O'D. Hanna and a "Message" from Clough Williams-Ellis
and both were a little apprehensive in their welcome to the new
architecture. The exhibition included photographs of modern buildings
here and overseas and also displayed a "modern" living
room with some furniture designed by a student, Max Clendinning.
Writing in Causeway (1971) Robert McKinstry stated that the exhibition
"celebrated the aims of the modern movement with a clarity
of vision that was never to occur again". McKinstry himself,
like an architectural John Aubrey, has chronicled the brief life
of modern design in the Province and in his own work has contributed
notably to its achievements. In addition, his association with
the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society and his rehabilitation
of historic buildings reflect a deep concern with past values
and conservation...
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GP & RH Bell, 1934:
Hailed as the first modern house in Ulster, this small building
wears its International Modern Movement uniform well; it is white
in colour and cubic in shape, the lines are horizontal, the roof
is flat and it has corner windows. To some critics the virtues
of this style were those of default; the architecture was not
fussy and overdressed, it was not multicoloured, romantic or nostalgic,
in short, it was everything that Victorian architecture was not.
In the desire to purge architecture of all former associations,
there was an element of shock tactics, of the 'topsy turveydom'
of John Summerson's phrase, in which, as in the work of Le Corbusier,
the garden was sited on the roof of the house as a walled enclosure
or as here, windows were placed where you would least expect them.
The house presents too some of the more positive virtues of modern
architecture; the clarity of form and the concern that all facades
should be of equal importance. It is well proportioned and human
in scale. The thatched-roof house nearby, but just out of the
picture, is an unlikely companion for this clarion call of the
modern movement.
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