I can think of no better words to evoke Niall’s vision of history than those of a famed mentor, Aldo Rossi, with whom he shared a deep sensitivity to the temporal properties of architecture. Here is Rossi describing the experience of Leon Battista Alberti’s heart-stopping basilica in Mantua (the Italian word meaning both time and weather)

‘Just standing in Sant’Andrea in Mantua I had this first impression of the relation between tempo, in its double atmospheric and chronological sense, and architecture. I saw the fog enter the basilica, as I often love to watch it penetrate the Galleria in Milan: it is the unforeseen element that modifies and alters, like light and shadow, like stones worn smooth by the feet and hands of generations of men.

Perhaps this alone was what interested me in architecture: I knew that architecture was made possible by the confrontation of a precise form with time and the elements, a confrontation which lasted until the form was destroyed in the process of this combat. Architecture was one of the ways that humanity had sought to survive; it was a way of expressing the fundamental search for happiness’. 

Though in Palimpsest Niall claims to have ‘inherited’ an understanding of layered, enduring artefacts from the writings of Venturi and Rossi and the works of Carlo Scarpa, was there not already a rich seed bed, borne, like Rossi’s own sensibility, of immersion in a culture haunted by the near and distant past, reverential of the vastness of time and acutely aware of the fragility of human endeavour. Combined, in the case of Niall, with an acknowledged ‘long-term romance with the landscape of Ireland, built, unbuilt and ruined’. Working during the pandemic in the shadow of Knocknarea, I recalled the characterisation of that remarkable landscape in A Lost Tradition, ‘The Valhalla of Knocknarea, Maeve’s cairn and Carrowmore … the roughly executed magnificence of the Irish tumuli’. Unlike historians of art and architecture who tend to shy away from the big picture in favour of historical specificity, Niall was concerned with the longue durée. His was an architect’s vision of history, vision here defined as the ability to see. Not for him the disciplinary and chronological parameters of archaeology and art history, ancient monuments, medieval, early-modern, modern and contemporary.

Unafraid to take a pop, these represented ‘neat and hermetic divisions of chronology and style.’ He rightly saw that traditional art histories ‘tended to invest in pure and complete works set against an abstracted context’ with little place for hybrid structures. And in this he was ahead of the curve which happily has swept away the idealist positions of the past, toppling the musee imaginaire of art history from its pedestal. In this expansive vision of the past, imbued by a sense of elemental forms that is common to both classicism and modernism, Niall approached the transformation of urban form and built typologies over time, allowing his keen eye, and understanding of materials and structure to come to the fore.

Again and again, I have seen familiar structures and places with new eyes. A massive Dolmen near a hotel in County Louth, upon whose summit, we as children aimed pebbles, is suddenly rendered fragile. I felt like running out with a ladder to clear the debris on reading ‘the elegance of the Proleek Dolmen in County Louth where three stone feet hold the capstone aloft’. Elegance indeed, in words which evoke the restrained and soft-spoken enthusiasms of the man. And though I had worked on the Courthouse at Dundalk, studied its contract, elevations and plans, there was new insight to be gained from the architect’s succinct characterisation of mass, volume and function ‘Dundalk courthouse is composed of three rectangles of increasing length on plan: the first a portico facing the public square, the second an open hall with stairs to the galleries, the third contains the symmetrically disposed courtrooms and a processional stair to the grand jury rooms’. This is interpretation by description at its clearest and best. 

Unlike trends in scholarship which seek out the specifics of cultural transfer, Niall’s vision crossed a continent seeing analogies in the forms of buildings and spaces in Ireland and distant parts of Europe, ‘The plan of Ross is like that of a Minoan city, a pattern of densely built courts against the openness of a flat landscape’. The grandiose expanse of Smithfield was akin in volume and form to the Piazza Navona. Students of history are warned against the dangers of universalism and elementalism and reminded that the world view of those who built the structures of the stone age was very different to that of those who constructed monuments of the 8^th and 9^th centuries. There is afoot a critique of 20^th century typological analysis which argues that it results in a flattening of history. Architects by privileging space, volume and mass are seen to produce a horizontal perception of architectural production throughout the ages. How would Niall respond to this critique? More of this anon. 

Concerns with typology, analogy and alteration over time led Niall away from monuments to the quotidian, from the ‘obvious stone giants’ including this wonderful house, to the everyday elements of city, town and countryside and the negotiation of power, economics and design which characterises architectural production in all ages. It is this sense of the quotidian which informed his vision of Ireland’s capital in Dublin: an Urban History and enabled a penetrating analysis of the eighteenth-century terraced house which is arguably the book’s greatest achievement. A decade before Elizabeth McKellar blew apart the top-down and design-led generation of London’s urban fabric as framed by mid 20^th century writers, Niall was seeking to understand how classical tenets of urban design were being negotiated in the cut and thrust of building speculation in Georgian Dublin. His book is not a story of architects or patrons nor of style but of conditional urban growth and built form, ‘part architecture, part building’. Architects are bit players in a vast arena of agency. In writing these words, I see now more clearly what Niall’s work meant in 1989 to a budding architectural historian still immersed in doctoral research and not yet fool-hardy enough to embark on a microscopic study of the city.

No wonder that the eighteenth-century Dublin house with its distinctive exterior sobriety and its decorative internal ebullience would become a topic of enduring interest. I am immensely proud that a conference and subsequent published volume on the 18^th century house launched in this room 12 years ago would draw from Niall a post-script to his 1989 volume and one of his most eloquent essays on domestic architecture in which he recalled the genesis of his preoccupation with the typology. ‘I grew up in the ruined and gap-toothed Dublin of the 1970s and 1980s and spent formative years wandering down derelict streets, walking into ruined yards, up broken staircases, through rooms with groaning floors, swinging shutters and peeling paint. Georgian houses – ruins forensically exposed in structure and plan by their dereliction – provided wonderful instruction to an architectural student in the planning of urban space.’ And just listen to this ‘ Houses represented the city’s detailed material nature, old bricks, walls and gates which were made beautiful and valuable in themselves; they could be assessed as single units or terraces as part of an urban design. Alternately, and perhaps poetically, the city could be imagined as thousands of rooms piled high on one another, rooms whose uses and occupants over centuries formed personal and family histories’.

I recall poring over the plates of Niall’s Dublin book and seeing the fecundity of domestic plan types from two-room diamond stack to bowed three-room, dog-leg form. The level of distillation in just one page of the Dublin book is remarkable and could not be matched by very many pages of thick description. Look at these A and B types houses from base to top, two rooms with corner, central or party wall chimney stacks and the top-lit stairhall sandwiched between, moving up to two large first floor rooms of increasing scale with rear dog leg stair lit more practically from large accessible windows and to the top an increasingly complexity of plan form with projecting closets, bows of semicircular and segmental form and offices to the rear. Put these together with inventories, newspapers advertisements and family papers and we begin to understand the lives of their occupants who received visitors in ground floor dressing rooms derived from courtly practice and filled their two-room piano nobiles to the brim on high days and holidays. Later I would understand what it took to generate those images, a remarkable level of work and sustained commitment alongside the day job. Of course, as in teaching and research, the two were sides of the same coin. For Niall and Valerie ‘only through a clear-sighted reclamation of context can a new architecture grow to inhabit its rightful place between past and future’. 

In conclusion let me return to the thorny issue of horizontal history and the challenge that by focusing on typology or elemental forms a certain flattening occurs. In this Niall may well have drawn to his aid John Ruskin’s persuasive view of history ‘Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.’ Niall McCullough brought his creative energy and architectural vision to bear on the architecture of the past and gave eloquent voice to enduring characteristics in building production. His vision will endure.

—Prof. Christine Casey, Trinity College Dublin