Three Rambling Houses

This article is from the archive of Roca Gallery. It was first published in May, 2024.

Rambling houses, gathering places for music and storytelling, open at all hours to the passerby, were a common component of traditional life in old Irish villages. Passage House, Stone Vessel, and Hedge Theatre, a series of three rambling houses, designed and built one each year for the past three years, are clustered in close relationship between two fields in the farmland at Fartha. The pavilions are located at the intersection of pathways between the studio and the workshop at the Joseph Walsh Studio.

Intended as experimental structures, as demonstrations of local skills, they are built in locally sourced materials; timber, thatch, and stone. Three open-air pavilions, free of functional restriction, sculptural in their form, social in their purpose.

We wanted to celebrate the capacity of local craftsmanship and natural materials, testing our own understanding of structural form and building material, stretching the limits of traditional construction. We wanted to make contemporary structures as a tribute to vernacular architecture, to value things well-made by hand, using the old ways of working to build something unexpected and new.

Construction details were worked out on site together with the workmen: builders and carpenters, thatchers and stonemasons, were all closely involved in the project. No contract documents, no technical specifications, no detailed working drawings.

The pavilions are convivial meeting places, sites for performance and conversation, relaxation and stimulation, provoking new connections between people and place. Rambling houses redefined.

Passage House

The Passage House has no doors or windows. Just a stone floor dug into the ground, a timber skeletal bone structure like an upturned boat and a thatched roof that appears to be floating in air.

It’s a place of passage, located at a point of convergence between furniture design studio and production workshop. A place of pause, a shelter to stand in out of the rain, to slow down and admire the folding landscape of fields and hedges.

The stone flagged floor and solid stone piers, standing stones and sitting stones, are taken from a nearby quarry. The drystone field walls are quarried out of the site. Larger orthosats come from a further quarry. The structural timber is Irish-grown Douglas Fir. The reeds for the thatched roof were cut in the shallow waters of the Shannon.

We worked from initial sketches into a series of scale models and then on to full-scale mock-ups of junctions that were tested in the workshop. Joinery details were developed with the added expertise of a Japanese carpenter. The timber-to-stone connection plates were forged by a local blacksmith.

Stone Vessel

Stone Vessel, the second of our three rambling houses at Fartha, is built entirely out of stone. It is aligned east-west to the rising and setting sun. A shrine-like gathering house, chamfered at its corners, faceted in its outline. Inside the prismatic profile, a softer interior is hollowed out, an acoustic cavern. The floor is stone, the walls are stone, the roof is stone.

Work started with four stonemasons, growing to fifteen: one woman came from France and a team arrived from Japan. Knowledge and techniques were shared. Japanese masons, who built the boundary walls, selected boulder stones from the quarry on site, a different way of walling than the horizontally bedded stonework favored by the Irish masons.

A collaborative commitment emerged, a spirit of meitheal, an old Irish word for cooperative work for the common good. The meaning of the project, the engagement of minds in work made by hand, was confirmed time after time in the process of the work.

Stone Vessel, archaic in its form and monolithic in its construction, is built to last a long time.

Hedge Theatre

Hedge Theatre, currently under construction, is a curvilinear quarry-like configuration, an open-air auditorium. The contour-terraced shape is inspired by the irregular pattern of tree rings. It will be almost invisible from afar, approached through cuts out of a grassy mound, a landform hidden in the hedgerow, through which the Passage House and Stone Vessel are seen through a screen of trees. A demountable timber framework, poles lashed together with rope, will support sail-like canopies to provide shelter from sun and rain at summer performances.

Freedom and restraint

On the one hand, in the absence of a function-driven brief, we were able to think about these three structures from first principles, unconstrained by conventional processes of client requirements, without planning considerations or project management. On the other hand, the limitations imposed by the given conditions of the situation, the capacity of available building material, the skills and know-how of local and visiting craftsmen, helped narrow the field of creativity and focus the mind.

Tradition does not deny invention. Initial freedom, an open question at the ideas stage, was soon corralled into a collaborative enterprise, a shared curiosity and special pleasure taken in the making of the work itself. Nobody asked why we were doing it, conversation was concentrated on the task at hand. How the work could be done. And how to do it well, with fellow feeling, working together as a team.

Main image: Aerial view, Rambling Houses, Cork, Ireland, 2022, O’Donnell + Tuomey, Joseph Walsh Studio. Photo © Donnacha O’Brien