Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland, originally the Irish parliament building, confront each other across College Green. Further inland, the Castle, the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham and the Barracks (once royal, then Collins and now the National Museum) constitute a group which surpasses anything of the same date that survives in the British Isles. In his bewitching book, Edward McParland explains why this should be so. Its look is fully matched by the brilliance of its text. With learning enlivened by wit, McParland shows how Ireland suddenly changed architectural gears, from the ploddingly provincial to the startling originality of Edward Lovett Pearce's Parliament House.
McParland's cornucopia overflows with the familiar and the novel. Justice is done to types of buildings not usually much regarded by high-falutin' critics. Not just viceregal billets and the pompous setpieces of the Irish Protestant state, but barracks, schools, churches, almshouses, hospitals, market halls and assembly rooms receive their due.
The itinerary takes the rambler to Ballyshannon, where martial grandeur lingers in the one-time barracks, on to Donegal for Priestley's elegant court room at Lifford, into the midlands for Wilson's Hospital near Multyfarnham and then to Dunlavin, where the market house resembles an opera house or a rural palace of a Sardinian despot. In McParland's exhilarating and entertaining company we dash from the planned towns of Ballycastle, Dunmanway and Villierstown to the school and almshouses at Downpatrick and main-guard of Clonmel. The author and his photographer, the legendary David Davison, have quartered the island in the quest for often elusive quarries: a door-case here, a gate-pier there. Our guide time and again traces designs to distant models, either on the ground in Italy, France and the Netherlands, or in illustrated treatises. In turn, the designs are matched with what survives, frequently in incongruous settings.
These projects are authoritatively located in the larger context of European classicism. They are also related to the society and politics of their time. The embryonic Irish Protestant Ascendancy, gradually relaxing and prospering, accommodated itself fittingly. Yet these new owners of Ireland could not altogether drop their defences. Several architects had learnt their trade in the army, designing forts and ramparts. McParland deliberately limits himself to the public manifestations of this new order. Country and town houses even of the grandest, like Speaker Connolly, the Kildares and Charlemont, are outside his remit. But the public sphere encompassed a variety of semi-State and voluntary bodies involved in charity, education, canal- and road-building and medicine. One of the many novelties of his account is to treat systematically and sympathetically the architecture of these institutions. The Rotunda and Dr Steevens' Hospital, for example, are adjudged the most accomplished hospital complexes of the period.
Some of what was constructed in Ireland was mediated through England, which belatedly embraced the same rational classicism in place of a debased and superstitious Gothic. But, as so often, those from Ireland bypassed England and drank instead at the pure wells of Vitruvius, Alberti, Scamozzi and Palladio in Italy. The Villa Malcontenta and Maison CarΘe at NȨmes were visited as often as Inigo Jones's Banqueting House in Whitehall. Overseas travel, usually the sad lot of uprooted Irish Catholics, also educated the cultural leaders of Protestant Ireland. The former had few opportunities to introduce what they had seen abroad into the Catholic churches of their homeland. In contrast, the Protestants eagerly imported the foreign look into Ireland.
Much of what was built has subsequently perished. McParland, in other capacities, notably though the Irish Architectural Archive and his teaching, has ensured that these achievements - part of an Irish renaissance - are appreciated. He, with others, has worked to repel the Vandals and Goths indifferent to or contemptuous of this unique but fragile legacy. Now, with brio, he has reconstructed the culture which produced these buildings. The resulting text, by turns astringent and aphoristic, is the most impressive - as well as the most visually beguiling - book on architecture in post-Reformation Ireland since Maurice Craig's classics. This work, like Dublin Castle, the Royal Hospital and Parliament House, is set to endure as a monument to urbane learning and civility. Unlike the buildings, McParland's achievement is portable and (thanks to his publisher) affordable, and so can grace the shelves of all.
Toby Barnard teaches history at Oxford University and is currently tercentenery visiting fellow at Marsh's Library in Dublin