Gemma Tipton visits Lismore, which is getting a new art gallery in the castle and a contemporary library in town.
Lismore is postcard perfect. Even the drive into the Co Waterford town is jaw-droppingly beautiful. The road from Cashel and Cahir, for example, includes the Vee viewpoint, where Co Tipperary turns into Co Waterford over Knockmealdown mountain and fields and lakes unfold. The town is dominated by Lismore Castle, standing above the Blackwater river, an edifice of turrets and towers that fulfils a satisfyingly romantic vision of what a castle ought to look like. It is steeped in history: once owned by Walter Raleigh, and since 1753 the Irish home of the dukes of Devonshire, the castle has in more recent times hosted everyone from Fred Astaire and John F Kennedy to Prince Charles.
So far, however, the only part of the castle open to the public has been the gardens. Now one wing has been remade, not as a museum of life in some frozen moment of time but as a gallery for cutting-edge art. William Burlington, son of the present duke of Devonshire, has been overseeing the plans. "Lismore Castle has developed throughout the ages," he says, "so there is no reason to stop that development at a particular point in history."
Burlington, a professional photographer, says the remodelling is the result of his family's long-standing engagement with art. "Any development needs the support and enthusiasm of someone to push it forward, and art has almost always been held in high regard by my family. There was never a plan to have a museum in the wing, but we did want to find a way of opening part of the castle to visitors."
Contemporary art is often charged with elitism, and a contemporary gallery in a private castle could be thought of as even more prone to it. "We are going to have elite art in the gallery," says Burlington, "but only in the sense of it being top flight. What the gallery is going to do is open that art up to a different audience: the people who visit the gardens."
In fact, the art may not come as a complete surprise to them: the family's interest in it has been on view in the gardens for some time. The duke's love of contemporary sculpture means that work by Eilís O'Connell, Antony Gormley and other artists nestles among the castle's magnolias and rhododendrons.
The sculpture gardens and gallery draw on a tradition of aristocratic collection and patronage. The Devonshire collection, amassed over generations and held at Chatsworth House, the family seat, in Derbyshire, includes works by Raphael, Titian, Dürer, Rembrandt, Rubens, Canaletto, Renoir, Reynolds, Gainsborough and Freud.
Even though such a legacy makes art-world introductions and contacts easy to come by, the Lismore gallery, which will be open to visitors to the castle gardens, will have to rely on more than the family's history and reputation - and even its setting - to be a success.
The immediate plan is to invite different curators to programme a major exhibition each year, showing work by leading Irish and international contemporary artists. In the longer term, a residency programme should allow Lismore to play a role in the creation of new work. The inaugural exhibition is a group show curated by Aileen Corkery; it includes works by Matthew Barney, Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Gerrard Byrne, Dorothy Cross, Michael Craig-Martin and Richard Billingham.
The gallery's administrator, Caitlín Doherty, who has joined from Garter Lane Arts Centre, in Waterford city, will also be organising community and outreach projects, working with local schools and groups.
Historic buildings are not always ideal locations for contemporary-art galleries. The problems can include poor access, inconveniently-placed windows, inadequately-sized rooms and features that can't be ripped out to make way for the kind of spare spaces that so much contemporary art needs to be viewed at its best. The New Galleries at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in Dublin, are an example: low ceilings, narrow doorways and a listed interior make circulation difficult and limit the scale of work that can be shown in them.
And yet an old and atmospheric setting can also be paired with a clean, contemporary space to create an unforgettable location such as the Butler Gallery, in the basement of Kilkenny Castle. Gareth O'Callaghan of Jack Coughlan Associates, a Cork-based firm of architects and conservation consultants, will be hoping that Lismore's new space is as successful as the Butler. The company's design for the gallery set out to balance the conservation requirements of the castle, which had been partially destroyed by dry rot, with the specifications of a contemporary gallery.
Old stone walls have been screened off with false walls that float centimetres above the wooden floors, and panels have been created to mask off the windows, should exhibitions require it. The ceiling keeps remnants of the original building, with some exposed beams still on view. The gallery includes two "white cube" spaces, as well as a medieval round tower (the oldest part of the castle), which provides a circular "project room" at one end of the venue. O'Callaghan says: "The new gallery is intended as a deliberately modern space within the castle, and as such it is just the most recent alteration in a long history of architectural change."
All our history and heritage was new once; the difficulty is in working out how to fit future development into our sense of the shape of the past. It is made all the harder in a heritage town such as Lismore. How can we build today without getting trapped in an idealised outline of yesterday? How can we balance the weight of a historic town's past with a contemporary edge?
The history of Lismore is fascinating, and it goes beyond the architectural dominance of the castle. Even though it is tiny, the town once had two cathedrals - it now has one, the Catholic building having been demoted - and 20 churches, and from the eighth century until the 12th century it was the site of one of the world's most important centres of learning. Alfred the Great studied here, and Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, was born here.
The town's people have been cosmopolitan and outward-looking; the illuminated Book of Lismore, discovered in the walls of the castle, includes an Irish translation of Marco Polo's Travels, the book that the explorer wrote while in prison in Genoa at the end of the 13th century.
In the lovely Church of Ireland cathedral, a stained-glass window designed by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, and made by his friend William Morris, is one of only two Burne-Jones windows in Irish churches. More recently, Lismore has swapped such glories for more prosaic successes: it was named Ireland's tidiest town in 2004 (and in 2002 was declared to have the second-best public toilets in the country, after being pipped by the thatched toilets in Gougane Barra, Co Cork).
Gráinne Shaffrey, another architect, agrees with this idea of architectural change. Further along the road through Lismore, Shaffrey Associates has recently completed an addition to the county library headquarters, creating a striking construction of copper and glass as an extension to the former Christian Brothers school, which dates from 1871. The new structure is a much more obvious imposition of contemporary architecture on the town. Shaffrey and the county librarian, Donald Brady, admit that it will take some people a while to get used to it.
"Adare faced a similar problem with development," says Shaffrey. "It was a picturesque town frozen in time in people's minds, if not in reality. Picking up on existing styles within an area in redevelopment is one approach, but in places like Adare and Lismore planning must come ahead of everything. Development can't just be left to the market."
Market forces exert a strong influence on rural Ireland, however. In Lismore, alongside such wonderful bars as the Red House, newer establishments are opening. There is Barça, avery good tapas bar and restaurant, and Caffè Molise, run by Gino Lommano, who moved to Lismore three and half years ago, bringing cappuccino culture with him. Shaffrey says: "When we started work on the project, a few years ago, Lismore was a sleepy town, and now it's buzzing."
In fact, its population has increased by almost 50 per cent in recent years, and the development of the town embraces not just buildings, bars and restaurants but also events such as Immrama, an annual festival of travel writing, which this year hosted Brian Keenan and Michael Palin. "It's a real challenge to handle that change," says Shaffrey, who is confident it was right to build the library in an unapologetically modern style.
"Initially, we obviously asked what approaches we should consider, but if we had added on in the same style you would have had problems with the bulk of the new part of the building. In some instances to do a contemporary extension would be to attract too much attention, but the secret is always to choose the correct approach."
Here, the choice of materials ensures that the library will weather into its surroundings. "I think it will grow on people," Shaffrey says. "But you have to remember that while Lismore is a fascinating town architecturally, it is not all of a piece. The buildings work well together, but they come from many different periods. Lismore has many layers of change within it. The new library building is another."
The same is true of Lismore Castle. The question is whether the rest of the country will catch up with these ideas or whether we wil have to endure another century of historicised architecture that continues to live in the past.
Lismore Castle Arts opens on September 2nd