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AN IRISH GENIUS: J H DE W WALLER 1884-1968
Jeremy Williams is fascinated by the extraordinary building
inventions of
James Hardress de Warrenne Waller
The acceptance by the Irish Architectural Archive of a
photographic album documenting about five hundred
Ctesiphon structures invented by the ingenious and neglected
Irish engineer, J H de W Wailer, and built across the world in one
decade, 1943 to 1953, marks the first step in this country's
recognition of his memory. His contemporaries were prepared to
accept his brilliance as an engineer, but they failed to understand
his obsession with transport, communications, self-help, unem
ployment and famine. Only in the emergency conditions of the two
World Wars were his abilities readily appreciated, and apart from a
short memoir written in 1982 by his assistant, Andrew Ross, and
published privately, the one book that has mentioned him since his
death, Mulroy's Architecture of Aggression (1973) illustrates only
a demountable concrete tent devised for desert
warfare and known as a Portable Patrick. There is no reference
to him in the Dictionary of Natonal Biography or in recent studies
of Irish architecture. Three years ago a history of Locke's
Distillery in Kilbeggan (by Andy Bielenberg, 1993), credited
Waller's Ctesiphon warehouse there to an unknown young Trinity
graduate, Jackson Owens, who was in reality Walter's assistant and
T Burroughs, the architect of Wailer's Ctesiphon Church of Christ
the King in King's Weston, Bristol (1950) omit ted all reference to
their church in a history of Bristol architec ture which he wrote a
decade after it was constructed.
James Hardress de Warrenne Waller was the eleventh and
youngest child of George Arthur Waller and Sarah, n6e Atkinson.
His father was born heir to the family home, Prior
Park near Nenagh - an Irish Palladian cube like the
demolished
Bowenscourt - but had left Ireland and a job as a brewer in
Guinness's (procured through the mother being Augusta, daughter
of Hosea Guinness, Chancellor of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin)
to set up as a farmer in Tasmania. Here
James was born and brought up. He was sent to school in
Hobart and worked as a sheep-farmer in Australia and then as
a
miner back in Tasmania. He studied engineering first in Galway
and then in Cork, going also to New York to study reinforced
concrete. His first commission was to build a bridge across the Lee
as an approach to his alma mater, Cork. His first job was as
resident engineer on the (partially surviving) concrete bridge
in Waterford. He formed a partnership in Dublin with a contempo
rary, Alfred Delap. He enlisted with the Corps of Royal Engineers
at the outbreak of the First World War and was awarded a DSO and
OBE. It was in Salonika that he started to
study tents: observing one after it had been camouflaged with a
coating of cement slurry instead of mud, he startled the inmates by
removing the central post. This was to form the basis of his
first studies in light-weight concrete and the invention of his
Nofrango system. In Salonika he also built a jetty out of baskets
filled with rocks, a system he never patented but which has been
used widely since. He retumed to England to marry Beatrice Kinkead,
the daughter of a Galway medical professor. On his honeymoon he had
the idea of a concrete battleship and per suaded the Admiralty to
realise his project in Poole. His thou sand tonne barge (178' long)
the Cretarch, was successfully launched, but just before the
Armistice and it ended up on a French inland waterway. With no
further demand for ships, he was commissioned to construct a small
housing estate in Poole that survives to this day; but a company
set up to build houses
throughout England in 'The Walter System' went bankrupt in 1921,
snuffed out by the brick companies.
Shortly after this first commercial disaster, Wailer was sent by
the British Government to Iraq. Here he discovered the major
architectural influence of his life: the banqueting hall of the
sixth-century palace at Ctesiphon, the first inverted catenary
1. THE GREAT ARCH OF CTESIPHON. The banqueting hail of the sixth
century palace at Ctesiphon in Iraq is the first inverted catenary
vault ever devised.
Wailer's discovery of the building in the 1920s led to his own
invention of a building technique which he named 'Ctesiphon'.
/
2. WAuER's CTESIPHON BUILDING TECHNIQUE ILLUSTRATED. An inverted
catenary arch (shaped on the basis of a curve formed by a chain
hanging freely) was set up using temporary wooden ribs. This frame
was then covered with hessian to which plaster or cement was
applied to form the roofing. The technique permitted large
areas to be covered without the inconvenience of supporting
pillars.
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AN IRISH GENIUS: J H DE W WALLER 1884-1968
vault ever devised (Fig. 1). Waller regarded its unknown con
structor as his progenitor and named his system after the palace's
unpronounceable name.
His next commission was to prove coincidentally logical: he was
given the job of directing four thousand workmen building a railway
across northem Spain linking the Bay of Biscay to the
Mediterranean. Here he came into contact with the building
tradition of the Sassanians, which, having been imported by the
Moors, was still flourishing and inspiring, at that moment,
Gaudi's final design for the Sagrida. At the same time he made
friends that led to commissions forty years later from the
Spanish company Iberlar - the only construction firm ever to
perfectly execute his conceptions.
The money he made in Spain he promptly lost in Ireland on a
bus company serving commuters from Clonmel to Dublin. This
failure led him to concentrate on his engineering partnership based
in Dublin and to codify his inventions, although he never lost his
interest in transport: he published a study on the wear and tear of
Asphalt. 'Coverbond', a new method of reinforcing concrete that he
had devised in Salonika, was followed by a
light-weight concrete system inspired by the slurry-covered
tents
of Salonika that he christened 'Nofrango'. His initial
experiment with this method was a chicken-house in his back garden;
next
was an entire street in Rialto commissioned by Dublin
Corporation in 1928 of terraced two-storied housing that cost ?330
per unit to build (Fig. 8). The street still exists in good
condition, recognisable by the wide overhangs of their slightly
sagging flat roofs. Like much of Waller's output the experiment
was a success but was never repeated.
Only twice during Waller's professional practice in Ireland
did
he receive commissions that stretched his capabilities. The
first was the pier at Foynes - he believed that the Shannon
Estuary
made the finest natural harbour in Westem Europe - where he
developed his experiment in constructing the pier at Stavros
with hessian cylinders filled with concrete, extending his Nofrango
techniques. The second commission, in Dublin, was the extension of
Jacobs' factory as a multistoried Nofrango struc
ture with wide spans and horizontal fenestration. The
architect
and builder of this project were brothers, George and Walter
Beckett, who were part-time Methodist missionaries as well
as
being successful entrepreneurs and both neighbours in Foxrock
(like their cousin Samuel). Walter became such an enthusiast
I~b.J aE^: 3. A COESIpHoN ROOF UNDER CONSrRUCr10N. The workman
is applying the liquid concrete or plaster to the hessian support
which is draped betwen wooden arches. The weight
of the concrete caused the hessian to sag which gave a
corrugated appearance to the surface that was both pleasing and
practical as it reinforced the strength of the shell.
1 4 4
IRISH ARTS REVIEW
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AN IRISH GENIUS: J H DE W WALLER 1884-1968
for Nofrango that he commissioned a private house, presumably to
his brother's design. This survives on Gordon Avenue but is now
deprived of its Irish name Teach Beag (it is now known as Balmoral)
and its concave Nofrango pitched roof. The Becketts were probably
responsible for the staff quarters that Waller con structed at
Rosapenna Hotel in North Donegal for the entrepre neurial Earl of
Leitrim. This remains the core of the present hotel after its
timber predecessor was destroyed by fire. The remainder of Waller's
Irish works of this period were minor schemes for Manning
Robertson, the most modest being a ?225 house. The client was the
writer C P Curran. Set on the moun
tains above Dublin at Ticknock, this survives along with two
neighbours. Robertson also deployed Nofrango in two council
estates: one in Carlow, the other in Wexford. Waller's interest in
cheap housing was linked to his concem
for the unemployed, which at .this time was increasing to crisis
level. With Patrick Somerville-Large and Hugh Delap, his part ner's
son, he founded the Mount Street Club. Waller organised the
renovation of a Georgian house, devised a currency known as a
tally, acquired a farm to provide food and logs to provide fuel.
But he was never able to weld the club into a building team. That
had to await Waller's commissions in the Third
World where survival was the crucial issue. In 1939 survival was
far more relevant in England than in
Ireland. Waller tried to enlist at the declaration of war,
was
deemed too old, and instead decided to contribute to the war
effort as an engineer working in London. Here, working in his
Victoria Street offices disrupted by air raids, he was commis
sioned directly by his best clients, the War Office, to design
portable huts, warehousing, and aircraft hangars. These did not
have to be submitted to the scrutiny and scepticism of countless
committees but instead had to be erected quickly by semi-skilled
labour and had to be defensible and bomb resistant. In these
conditions, using his Nofrango techniques, he reinterpreted the
inverted catenary vaulting invented by the Sassanians which he had
first encountered at Ctesiphon in Iraq.
His earliest non-military clients were farmers. The first was
Alistair McGuckian who subsequently set up Masstock, the
intemational company than has done so much to develop agri culture
in the Middle East. A vaulted cattle shed, two hundred feet long,
built without reinforcement in 1941 at Massarene, was demolished
five years ago. His next Irish commission was an
experimental farm east of Mallow for the Ballyclogh Cooperative.
This survives but is much mutilated. The first sight of this
cluster
of parabolic vaulting set, not in the Arabian desert, but in the
lush pastures of North Cork (the Irish counterpart to Hassan
Fathy's contemporary village of Gouma in Kamak) must have
been so startling that it had to be conventionalised; yet enough
fragments remain to show how much we have lost.
This farm led to several untraced creameries and two garages in
nearby Mallow for the Ford agent, William Thompson (Fig. 5). The
earlier (1948) in Shortcastle was a single parabolic vault
spanning sixty feet and springing from a concrete frame
struc
ture that served as a car showroom to the street. This was
4. j H DE W WALLER (1884-1968): Modelfarrn Buildings, Spain.
Waller used the Nofrango principle in the construction of Ctesiphon
buildings in many parts of
Africa and Europe.
5. J H DE W WALLER: Model of a garage budding for WJ Thompson in
Mallow, Co Cork (1948). The single parabolic vault had a span of
sixty feet. Wailer put the experience which he had gained in
designing aircraft hangars and other military
structures for the War Office during the Second World War to
later use in industrial and commercial buildings such as this
one.
_zI~
6. j H DE WALLER: Model for a Cow Shed. This is probably one of
the buildings for agriculture shown by Waller at the Spring Show.
The model of the military-look
ing farmer at the entrance to the shed was probably one that had
been used by Waller in the display of some of his military projects
during the war.
1 45
IRISH ARTS REVIEW
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AN IRISH GENIUS: J H DE W WALLER 1884-1968
topped in execution by a first floor administration block. The
later garage (195 1) on the
Cork Road consisted of two adjoining parabolic vaults, one
terminating in an apse. This has been demolished, a fate shared by
many of his Irish
commissions. The most ambi tious of his agricultural struc tures
of the time, built for Lord
Dunraven at Adare Manor, partially collapsed during con
struction and was dismantled in secrecy. Also vanished are a
precast concrete factory in. Coleraine, warehousing in Waterford
for Clover Meats and a golf club in Cootehill. This was for a
chicken farmer, I P Gannon. who snonsored an
exhibition of models at the RDS Spring Show of a Ctesiphon
vault, summarily destroyed at the end of the show (Fig. 7). The
models made by an assistant, A C Aston, no longer exist. The
economy of Walter's system led to opposition from the building
trade, spearheaded by the Plasterer's Union; and his next patrons
were entrepreneurs taking advantage of the lack of organised labour
on the African continent.
Waller's surviving work in Ireland includes a modest apple store
near Bray for his friend Patrick Somerville-Large, whose security
was much tested by out of bound pupils of a local school - it was
my own first experience of one of Waller's structures. Then there
are several large agricultural structures built for Denis Baggaley
at Grange near Trim and now owned by the
state. His most significant commission, the Whiskey Bonded
Warehouse for Locke's in Kilbeggan, is sited like a colossal
congested black jelly fish on a small island. It still star
tles visitors who, emerging from a tour of Ireland's oldest
distillery, come face to face
with a possible Martian invasion. But after forty-five years it
still performs its function.
The Seagram Chivas Distillery in Paisley was Waller's last
Ctesiphon structure. Due to his fear that he would die and leave
his wife
penniless, he negotiated an agreement with Seagrams in Canada to
sell the patent of his
system for an annual pension transferable to his widow. This
agreement was honoured by the company who used his system for their
distillery but never deployed it again.
Waller retired to Devon where the album (now in the Irish
Architectural Archive)
was discovered twenty-five years after his
death by his daughter, Beatrice Carfrae. The photographs record
his Irish and English prototypes; the large factories built for
Roberts in South Africa, for Taylor Woodrow in Nigeria, and Van den
Bergh in Zimbabwe as well as further factories in Kenya and
Tanganyika; village housing in the Belgian Congo, in Egypt and
India (where Nehru is shown visiting the institute set up at
Rorkree by Wailer's erst while German partner, Dr Kurt Billig);
models of accommoda tion for the Palestinian refugees presented to
King
Abdullah; experimental struc tures in Australia; and holiday
villas. model farms and an air
port designed by Julio Calderon de Guzman and Fernando Moreau
Barbera in Spain. There are churches in Plymouth, Carmarthen,
Bristol, Nigeria and Cyprus, where Waller also designed a grain
store. Famine was his last great preoccupation and in his battle
against hunger he transcended all divisions class, creed, race and
state.
In 1993, a proposal for an exhibition devoted to Waller under
the auspices of UNESCO failed to gain the necessary support of the
Irish government and had to be abandoned; it is to be hoped
that this decision will be reconsidered.
JEREMY WILLIAMS is audwr of A Companion Guide to Architecture in
Ireland 1837-1921 (Dublin 1994)
7. DIsPLAY STAND OF WALLER BUILDINGS at the Royal Dublin
Society's Spring Show. 1950s. The exhibition of Ctesiphon Buildings
for Agriculture and Industry was sponsored by a Cavan
chicken-farmer for whom Wailer had
designed a golf club.
8. j H DE W WALER (1884-1968): Housing schene, Rialto, Dublin.
1928. The scheme was part of an entire street, Loreto Avenue, which
is still intact, commissioned by Dublin Corporation.
1 46
IRISH ARTS REVIEW
Article Contentsp. 143p. 144p. 145p. 146Issue Table of
ContentsIrish Arts Review Yearbook, Vol. 12 (1996), pp. 1-242Volume
InformationFront MatterEditorial [pp. 1-3]A Diary of the Art Year
in Ireland [pp. 4-26]The Quest for Sir Edward Lovett Pearce [pp.
27-34]Irish Goldsmiths' Work of the Later Middle Ages [pp.
35-44]Tourism and Industry Killarney and Its Furniture [pp.
45-55]Adolescent Architecture and after the Formative Years of
Timothy Hevey (1846-78) [pp. 56-60]Irish Portraits in the Eton
College Leaving Collection [pp. 61-65]William Sadler's Views of
Killua Castle, Co Westmeath [pp. 66-70]Kathleen Cox an Irish Potter
of the Thirties [pp. 71-79]Aloysius O'Kelly in Brittany [pp.
80-84]Aloysius O'Kelly and the Illustrated London News [pp.
85-90]Aloysius O'Kelly in America [pp. 91-95]'Yeats Souvenirs'
Clues to a Lost Portrait by J. B. Yeats [pp. 96-97]Mrs. Duncan's
Vocation [pp. 98-101]A. W. N. Pugin and St. Patrick's College,
Maynooth [pp. 102-109]The Irish Harp on Glass [pp. 110-114]A Master
Craftsman: Carey Clarke, PRHA [pp. 115-125]Daniel Maclise and a
Bankrupt Patron [pp. 126-129]The Talented and Idle Mr. William
Gandy in Ireland [pp. 130-138]Oliver Hill in Killiney an Irish
Victorian House Remodelled [pp. 139-140]Timothy Turner: An
Eighteenth-Century Dublin Ironsmith [pp. 141-142]An Irish Genius:
J. H. De W. Waller 1884-1968 [pp. 143-146]Choosing the
Battleground: Robert Ballagh's Paintings [pp. 147-155]Couture for a
Countess Lady Rosse's Wardrobe [pp. 156-163]Irish Silver Spoons
[pp. 164-167]The Adare Bureau-Cabinet and Its Origins [pp.
168-169]'Recreating the World' Recent Irish Architecture [pp.
170-180]The Claddagh Ring [pp. 181-187]Book ReviewsReview: untitled
[pp. 188-189]Review: untitled [pp. 189-190]Review: untitled [p.
190-190]Review: untitled [pp. 191-192]Review: untitled [pp.
192-193]Review: untitled [pp. 193-194]Review: untitled [pp.
194-195]Review: untitled [pp. 195-196]Review: untitled [pp.
196-197]Review: untitled [pp. 197-198]Review: untitled [p.
199-199]Review: untitled [pp. 199-200]Review: untitled [pp.
200-201]Review: untitled [pp. 201-202]Review: untitled [p.
202-202]Review: untitled [pp. 202-203]Review: untitled [p.
203-203]Review: untitled [p. 204-204]Review: untitled [pp.
204-205]Review: untitled [p. 205-205]Review: untitled [pp.
205-206]Review: untitled [pp. 206-207]Review: untitled [pp.
207-208]Auction Records for Irish Painters [pp. 209-213]Price Guide
to Irish Art [pp. 214-225]Back Matter
