Railway Architecture: The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) at Dundalk

ABSTRACT

This article is adapted from the dissertation ‘Railway Architecture: The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) at Dundalk’, completed by Siobhan Osgood for the MPhil in Art History: Art + Ireland, where it was awarded a distinction. The study provides an historical analysis in the context of architectural development and broader railway culture in Ireland to provide an interpretation and understanding of the use of polychromatic yellow, red and black brickwork to create a visual identity for railway architecture. The use of accented colours to pick out key features is repeated across a series of buildings, thus creating a distinctive style of ‘brick-branding’. These are most prominent in the town of Dundalk, where the GNRI had its central engineering works at the halfway point on the Dublin to Belfast mainline and at the point where the Irish North line extended west and north. The buildings were each intricately designed by the GNRI's first chief engineer, William Hemingway Mills, a second-generation railway engineer who merged the roles of architect and engineer using an amalgamation of architectural designs from his earlier career in Derby, Scotland, Mexico and Spain. Mills thus created his own ‘Millsian’ style of industrial architectural design.     

Wills,deeds, acts: women's civic gift-giving in Ottoman Istanbul

The waqf (plural awqaf) is the Islamic pious endowment founded for charitable purposes. The Ottoman waqf, especially between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, became a gift-giving practice of solidarity in which women played an active role in founding and maintaining endowments as benefactors. These endowments served almost exclusively civic public services. While there has been considerable research on women and waqf, by moving beyond interpreting the ostensible motives that are always intertwined with women's role as ‘family caretakers’ or ‘devout Muslims’, we attempt to suggest that, interpreted as acts of piety, awqaf, and especially those that were founded as organized spaces known as külliyes, became institutions by which women were able to cultivate (in themselves and others) civic identities, and articulate civic solidarities as citizens of their cities. This image of women as civic gift-givers recasts them as active citizens of Ottoman cities, especially Istanbul.     

Memorandum of Association of the Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Recent investigation and a firm tree-ring date have made it possible to place this well-known early fourteenth-century building more securely in the chronology of the development of the medieval hall-house. It shows some of the characteristics of early manorial complexes comprising various discrete domestic units but well advanced towards the classic arrangement where the principal accommodation is concentrated within a single structure. Its overall design and dimensions suggest that it is the work of an architect who probably operated from an ecclesiastical workshop.     

Medieval Ireland and the Shannon Hydro-Electric Scheme: reconstructing the past in independent Ireland

This essay considers the position of Irish medieval buildings in the early years of the twentieth century. Focusing on the treatment of the oratory of St. Lua at Killaloe, it examines the ways in which the ruins of the medieval past were used to signify a range of political, religious and cultural ideas and attitudes. The rising water levels following the Shannon Scheme works (begun in 1925) meant that this stone oratory was moved from its original position on Friar’s Island to the grounds of St. Flannan’s Roman Catholic Church in 1929. The resulting paper trail reflects the complex processes of decision-making within a civil service in transition as the new Irish Free State calibrated its position with regard to the past and the treatment of medieval ruins throughout the countryside. The case study of St. Lua’s oratory is considered here in the context of the nineteenth-century tradition of scholarship on medieval buildings, the development of the idea of a national Irish architecture during this period, and the impact of this tradition on subsequent engagement with the buildings of the medieval past.