ABSTRACT
This chapter ranges over the territory of Irish architecture from the 1930s through to the early 1970s, highlighting significant architectural events and changes in political temperament as it goes. The discussion opens with the industrious 1930s and the state-sponsored building programmes around indigenous industry, education and the regional and county hospitals. Much of this development lingered through the 1940s but, with the international crisis of the Second World War, the nature and ambition of ‘building the nation’ shifted. Because of Irish neutrality, these war years were by no means straightforwardly staid or stagnant, and attempts towards continuity necessarily coloured architectural development. Following the war, the impact of mid-war projections and planning encouraged a short-lived development boom, accompanied by a batch of notable infrastructural and industrial projects. But by the 1950s, development had slowed, emigration had grown and the culture of Irish architecture became increasingly zany and difficult to define. With the constant change of government due to the woeful economic situation, this period from 1949 to 1957 was the most troubled in architectural terms but also, inadvertently, very interesting. The chapter finishes with signposts to the rising sense of Americanised modernism in the Irish built, economic and cultural landscape from 1958 into the early 1960s.
