|
American Recognition for Skye Practice Dualchas |
|
|
|
|
The work of Dualchas Building design has been featured in a paper published by the world famous University of California Berkeley. In an essay in the periodical TDSR, Dr Daniel Maudlin places the distinctive house designs of the Skye practice within the context of thousands of years of architectural history in the Highlands.
 Dr Maudlin describes how the traditional blackhouse of Highland society came to be replaced by the whitehouse during the Clearances. They were, he says, 'late 18th century everyday classicism' imported from England and lowland Scotland. He explains how this new style arrived with the sheep farmers as the people lost their ancestral homes and way of life. Symmetrical in elevation and generally 1 1/2 storey, these buildings had no architectural link to more than a thousand years of history that went before.
The Gaels though, the English academic contests, thought of them as an improvement. This is demonstrated by Highland settlers using the classical farmhouse form as the basis for their new world homes, not the longhouse in which most would have been raised. The reason was because the blackhouse was seen by many as a symbol of poverty and a social embarrassment, much like the Gaelic they spoke. And that, according to Dr Maudlin, is why attempts to revive the blackhouse form in the past have been unsuccessful - it was viewed as ill-placed romanticism by outsiders. This also explains the title of Dr Maudlins' paper - 'The Legend of Brigadoon'.
 Dualchas Building Design - a practice ironically started by Neil and Alasdair Stephen in their grandmothers' classically proportioned whitehouse on Skye - are cited for having successfully reintroducing the blackhouse as a modern building type. The Barden house in Coll (1998) is described as being reminiscent of 'the pre-improvement backhouses - the environmental, adaptable, indigenous home of the Highland middle-class'. More recent work, such as Druim Ban at Camuscross, is described as 'a synthesis of the Highland improved cottage and twentieth century modernism'.
Alasdair Stephen, the founder of Dualchas said,
'We are delighted that our work has had academic recognition. We hope that our houses are part of a new cultural confidence, a distinct Highland style which has a link to our past but is unmistakably modern in design and technology.'
The paper is highly critical of Highland Council planning policy which encourages 'Neotraditional' design that completely misunderstands the region's architectural history. This results in houses based on 18th century classicism but without the two fundamental essentials - symmetry and proportion. That means very ugly architecture.
Click here to read Dr Maudlins' paper in full. |
