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.

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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.

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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.

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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