STONE-WORK: collective achievement in Anglo-Irish architectural production, 1700-1800

Introduction

STONE-WORK challenges the perception of architecture as a primarily conceptual activity by shifting focus from individual to collective achievement. Despite the emphatic materiality of architecture, its history remains dominated by a sequential model which privileges the agency of individuals and ideas.

Premise

STONE-WORK’s fundamental premise is that architecture results from a cumulative sequence of actions involving an array of actors, great and small. There can be no buildings without materials and no materials without those who procure, transport, and fashion them.

Design and Material Relationship

How can design be related to the material from which it takes form and the skills which give it form? Though interdependence of systems and actors is a key scientific concept, it has had inadequate impact on the study of early modern architecture.

Importance of Stone

Stone, the most valued building material of the period, offers a way into architectural process which forces us to include the broader community involved in the making of buildings. No other medium so fully encapsulates the sequential nature of architectural production involving a wide range of agents of varying skill and authority.

Investigating the Process

Revealing stone’s hidden trajectory from quarry to wall, floor, column, and chimneypiece will probe the nexus of skills, techniques, and support mechanisms developed by communities in its sourcing, supply, and fashioning, and the impact of these processes upon building activity.

Research Approach

This cross-disciplinary research, combining the history of architecture and craft with geology, will produce the first holistic analysis of architecture and stone production, thereby interrogating the relationship of material, design, and execution.

Case Study

The prodigious classical architecture of Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century, richly documented in untapped archival material, is an exemplary episode in monumental stone building which offers a meaningful, accessible, and feasible route into the complex problem of interdependence in architectural production.