Looking back, House fits precisely with the early 1990s postmodern (’pomo’) Zeitgeist, where insides and outsides and the permeable, shifting liminal zones between them were in a flux of radical undecidability, even of alterity. Clearly, the period’s critical theory buzzwords still flow fluently. In 1993, I was a student of English literature, particularly taken with critical theory, and it shows. It also explains why House made its mark on me, or should I say, it accounts for the continuing inscription of the Zeitgeist’s discourse onto the palimpsest of my (en)cultur(at)ed Weltanschauung. Still, it’s easy to sneer.

From Zeitgeist to Geistzeit. It was Halloween when I first noticed the moulding on this exterior wall of a basement in Dublin. Perhaps it was something to do with the way the drapes hang like a white-sheet ghost that drew my attention. The moribund plant container and the odd negative jail-cell bars on the frosted glass certainly played a role too. But I think it goes deeper than just association of ideas. Things that are inside-out can be disturbingly uncanny because they give solid form to what is not normally solid. That is not to say that inside-out buildings are always uncanny – the exposed entrails of the Centre Georges Pompidou or of the Lloyds Building are merely interesting. But when a building or its surfaces bear the trace of something now missing, as in House, or when concrete bears the mark of the piece of wood that contained it (example here), we are faced with some kind of ghostly remnant (if this sounds like Derrida, it is because it occurs to me that his Specters of Marx also dates from 1993).

On a cold winter’s day in Paris, when you notice the marks where, months before, the kickstands of parked motorbikes have sunk into the softened tar, the ghostly heat of that summer’s day brushes your cheek.

In Derry, are these micro-sculptures meant to be emerging from beneath the pavement, or have they fallen from above? Either way, they are imprints of the missing oak wood – Derry comes from ‘Doire’, which means oak wood – that once occupied this spot. The name of the city is contested – officially it is Londonderry, the colonial name, but the great majority of its residents call it simply Derry. The micro-sculptures are evidence that the ghost of the original wood has not forgotten, and will not forget, that this is an undead doire. It’s a good example of how the nationalist population of that city have won the cultural war, spending UK-exchequer money on deconstruction-influenced sculpture that proclaims the passing nature of the centuries-long British occupation.

The grisly curtains in Dublin make me wonder, with a quickening of my pulse, if the original curtains are still in there, undead and entombed inside the plaster? Whiteread’s scultpure always did have something of the sarcophagus about it, as if some ghastly entombment had happened there. Years after House was demolished, I lived in London and for a long while passed the spot regularly without knowing what had stood there. What I always thought of as I passed that spot was how 200 people were made homeless and 6 were killed there in 1944 by the first successful German V-1 ‘flying bomb’. There’s no trace of that.

It was to have been the headquarters of Anglo-Irish Bank (abbreviated to the miserable “Anglo” in everyday speech), the mismanagement of which has so far cost Irish taxpayers roughly 35 billion euro in recapitalisation bailouts. If completed, it would only have been a porcelain crown in a set of expensive ugly teeth …

This building and the bank for which it was conceived have become metonyms for the financial disaster as whole, as if the building was both cause and effect, illness and symptom. This crisis has stifled the prospects for a certain kind of architecture, but it is perhaps not a type to be mourned: the golf-club digressions of men gassy on their own importance. And if there isn’t a rush to add to Dublin’s store of new buildings, that doesn’t mean that architecture is dead. With a pen and paper, or just the white wall of a small gallery, it’s entirely possible to work out any orthogonal urges that need expressing. I thought of the unfinished Anglo-Irish building when viewing Anne Cradden’s work in “Edges and Margins,” an exhibition in The Market Studios.

Executed directly onto the wall, this drawing thrills as a powerful piece of op art accomplished with an economy of means. It’s a reminder that our feelings about space can be triggered and affected just through the line on a wall. It’s worth bearing in mind that, at a distance, three-dimensional objects register only as two dimensional, so that Cradden’s drawing of space offers, in effect, a similar experience to viewing the Anglo-Irish building from the opposite side of the River Liffey, as in the following image.

As much as architects need to consider the building as something inhabited by people, it is often the case that a building remains only a spectacle, and often just a two-dimensional one, in people’s lived experience of the city. Consequently, it is sometimes possible to engage with the way in which architecture affects the observer’s consciousness without resorting to the expense of actually building it.

The artist even succeeds interestingly in introducing depth to this work by layering one drawing over another, the bright ink from the background drawing only a little dimmed through the foreground sheet. Another drawing in this show becomes more performatively architectural by occupying a conspicuous spot of the gallery building: A tower of ink lines rises in a stairwell. A modest architectural behemoth that can be rolled up and tucked away in a wardrobe. Imagination and ambition that doesn’t increase our national debt.

Your Slab contributor, cognizant of the fast-approaching quarter finals of the Champions League, and always conscious of the many Tottenham Hotspur fans out there among the readership, considers it time to look at things on aggregate. When it comes to buildings, aggregate is the term for any fine material that is used to bulk up the volume of a composite, such as concrete. In this sample, taken from the front of an art gallery on Rue Bonaparte in Paris, the shards of black and white are the aggregate.

Generally, I would associate such large-scale use of aggregate with certain institutional buildings of the 1960s and 1970s, such as this industrial school, now an art college, in Dublin.

The suburban slouch of this low-slung staircase, where real estate is not at a premium, contrasts with the verticality of the next staircase, from a Dublin city-centre hospital refit of the same era.

The material itself is of course not made for close inspection. Its effect is intended to be aggregate, you might say. But close inspection reveals a scattery world of disorder and chance, where the distribution of elements follows no pattern.

These samples provide good illustrations of how random arrangements appear to us. A truly random array of elements has a high chance of containing clusters of the same element, and of what seem to be patterns or geometrical arrangements. Of course, by definition there is no arrangement in something that is random – it is merely our pattern-seeking tendency that sometimes finds arrangements within them. It is when clustering and incipient patterning are absent that we should suspect that a human hand has intervened and smoothed things out, ironically leaving a trace of itself in the very act of trying to do the opposite.

The salmon-pink of the wall, a popular choice in boom-era Irish pub design, is well used as a contrasting background for the green paint. Did the artist intend on drawing a face, and then saw the cock-potential? Or was the sequence of events the other way around? Or was the whole thing planned? The decaying windows and doors of the pub (closed a good number of years now) are given a cheery lift by this little fella. By contrast …

… this manic action-painting offers an alternative vision of sexuality, to say the least. The medium is ketchup, applied both by hand and direct from the bottle. The anatomical strangeness achieved by spontaneous indecision gives this a wholly different kind of life. In the week after this photo was taken, a spell of dry weather, the ketchup turned brown, then dark-brown, and finally developed a slightly glossy film which then flaked off, but the original remained intact. A week after that, the wall was entirely repainted by the shop whose side we are looking at.

The convention of drawing a penis with a horizontal line across the shaft, and a vertical line to indicate the opening at the top of the penis (what is the word for it? the hole?) is well established, presumably across the world. The penis in this convention is clearly circumcised. Strange then that it should catch on in a country such as Ireland where circumcision is and always has been very rare. Where did this convention come from? When did it become established? Can we call this a skeuomorph?

I will not make any puerile jokes about the name of the street in the second image here. The source of the name, according to Julie Craig, author of ‘See Dublin On Foot: An Architectural Walking Guide‘, is the nearby but now disappeared ‘Pleasants Asylum’, which was founded in 1814 by Thomas Pleasants as a home for orphaned young Protestant girls.

Class dismissed.

Dublin underwent an intense building boom during the ten years or so until early 2008. Under Ireland’s neoliberal economic policies, the emphasis was (and continues to be) very strongly on private enterprise as the key force in transforming the built environment. Government, local and national, was dominated by parties that believe in small government and a minimum of interference in the delicate balance of the market. This meant that there was virtually no social content in most of what was built in that period – no transport infrastructure, no educational insfrastructure, no energy efficiency, no green spaces, inadequate living space, insufficient drainage, poor materials and poor aesthetics.

This box on Cork Street, which presumably contains a local telecommunications switch, is a product of its times. It once stood flush with the line of the buildings on the street, but the new structure behind it has a recessed entrance with a broad swathe of pavement in front of it. I suppose the broad pavement was designed with a view to creating a dynamism to the entrance to the glass-fronted atrium. However, whether by design or by default or by mistake, the box and its contents were never shifted back to the new wall line. And so it stands, ruining the pavement-to-atrium effect (lame though it would have been) and creating a pointless blockage on the public way.

The problem here is not just lazy design and planning, it is a result of a toothless local government and planning regime, run by people who, when they are not being witless in their monitoring of how this entirely rebuilt street functions, are spineless in their attitudes towards builders, developers and property investors. It is a box of neoliberalism.

On green-bin-day, thousands of identical green bins are wheeled onto the streets of this Dublin neighbourhood for emptying by the city council trucks. There are also black-bin days for general refuse, and brown-bin days for organic waste. In the past, everyone would buy their own bin container from the hardware shop, put all of their rubbish in it, and put the bin out on the street for collection. In that system, you knew which bin was yours because it was newer, older, bigger, smaller or different in some other respect to your neighbours’ bins. Perhaps yours had a metal body and a plastic lid, or vice versa. Ours had a highly distinctive crumpled edge, a result of being accidentally thrown in under the refuse crusher in the back of the lorry.

However, market-friendly policies pursued by the government, and in line with European Union legislation, has led to private companies moving in on the waste disposal market. These companies are paid from the city’s funds, and they run a leaner, union-free service. Less lucrative contracts for certain parts of Dublin are not taken by private companies, so the city council still has to cover them. Effectively, the city council is subsidising the private bin collectors.

This process is part of the ‘greening’ of refuse policy, which encourages people to recycle. A bin collection charge has been levied by the city council, but has met considerable local opposition and boycotts. Now in some parts of the capital, the city council has receded from public consciousness as the body that runs the city’s rubbish, while in others it is a bogeyman that brings poor people to court over non-payment.

One side effect of these policies is people stuffing domestic waste into public litter baskets, which are often full and overflowing as a result. Another is ‘fly-tipping’, i.e. driving your rubbish around until you find a secluded spot and dumping it there. The Dublin and Wicklow mountains to the south of the city are particularly scarred by this.

There are many other side effects, not to mention complicated controversies concerning an incinerator (another case of the city contracting out its work to private business). But the rather prosaic side effect illustrated here is that now each household is issued with a standard bin, each identical to the next. They have barcode identity tags, which are scanned when the bins are emptied and the owners charged accordingly. Rubbish presented in any other container is ignored. Because the bins are now all the same, people write their house number, and sometimes their street name, on the side of the bin. That way, when the collection has been made, you can be sure you are wheeling your own bin back in, and not someone else’s. What has developed is a weird array of fonts and handwritings, most of them achieved with an arresting slovenliness. Though, as we can see above, some people try to beautify the things.

The terms in question are waltritus (wall + detritus) and necoration (non + decoration). The first image here is classic waltritus. This featureless and yet busily adorned wall in a Dublin alley displays a downpipe, double guttering, staining, wiring, a wiring sheath, window bars, vents, various boxes and traces of former installations. No decision was made to make this wall like this, yet many separate decisions have been made to achieve this end result.

Classic Waltritus

If waltritus is the material object or objects that we can see, then necoration is the process by which it gets there. Necoration is the unplanned, taste-less, undesigned, ad hoc embellishment of an existing structure.

Now onto the boot scrapers. These photographs were taken on a snowy January afternoon in a network of small Victorian streets of workers’ housing in and around Lennox Street in Dublin 8. The boot scrapers are all identical and very simply fashioned.

The more we look at these boot scrapers, the more their individuality begins to emerge. The one above has been painted the same colour as the front door, for example. This is perhaps not necoration, rather a deliberate aesthetic decision. Then again, it was most likely the most sensible, ad hoc decision for the painter who noticed the rusting hoop beside his or her bucket of light blue paint.

Further observation reveals true waltritus and necoration, however. A thin white plastic housing has been installed to cover gas pipes on many houses, for example. There are also small green boxes affixed to cables, as well as plain metal boxes, and modern ventilation grilles have been inserted.

In some cases the boot scraper has been removed, while in others the cavity in the wall has been painted. For some it has use-value, while for most I suspect it hardly exists at all. When it is used, it is for locking bikes. Every boot scraper is clean, with no sign of being used for cleaning shoes, even when they are caked with snow.

We find ourselves paying attention to the small adjustments made to door sills. Some have tiles, some not. Some doors have a hinged lip to let the rain run off, while others have brass strips housing draught seals. Some people paint their door a different colour to the narrow frame around it, while others don’t go to the trouble.

Some have retained the antique-looking perforated ventilation bricks. They are often to be found at the least well-kept doors, and at doors of the most conservative, dark colours. Are they a marker of poverty?

The aim of these admittedly monotonous image is not to reveal or document detail, rather to show how waltritus has an accumulative, unselfconscious and monotonous effect. Necoration is a process that is the result of a combination of neglect, year-to-year maintenance and renovation, so we tend not to see it, or rather we tend to regard it as a process of natural change.