Summarizing the Georgian architecture of Dublin, Ludwig Wittgenstein (who briefly resided in the city in the 1940s) suggested that “the people who built these houses had the good taste to know that they had nothing very important to say; and therefore they didn’t attempt to say anything” (cited in Colin St. John Wilson, Architectural Reflections: Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture [Oxford, 1992], 63–64). What the philosopher describes, if somewhat epigrammatically, is the urban fabric of houses—constructed mainly in brick and arranged in terraces—which became the defining typology through which Dublin rapidly expanded in the second half of the eighteenth century. The city's growth in this period paralleled the consolidation of political power in the hands of a minority Protestant Anglo-Irish settler class who, by the second half of the century, had acquired the approving term “Ascendancy” as proof of their successes. Their attempts to create an appropriately grand capital to reflect their status and identity is perhaps best exemplified by the work of the Wide Streets Commissioners who, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, opened up certain sections of the city to link conspicuous architectural moments of culture and power. Hewn in stone mainly in a celebratory Palladian idiom derived from the country estate houses of their sponsors, these civic monuments achieved a greater effect within urban space, in part through a designed juxtaposition with the more prosaic but far more widespread hues of the terraced houses that Wittgenstein both categorizes and enjoys as austere, uniform, and mute.

The collection of nineteen individually authored essays contained in The Eighteenth-Century Dublin Town House offer an exploration of this domestic landscape through a wide and considered range of disciplinary lenses engaged across a number of scales. What is provided is a series of fragmentary insights that negotiate the physical and ephemeral phenomena that constituted and affected the shape and uses of the house over time. It is an approach that seems appropriate for a subject that, by the end of the volume, is understood as a system whose variances are almost as constant as they are nuanced yet whose durability and flexibility have allowed it to retain an enduring presence within the city, fulfilling functions almost all of which it was never originally designed for. Perhaps responding to a current Irish zeitgeist of deep economic woe, one of the most conspicuous subthemes evident in the book is an attempt to locate the forms of the Dublin town house within the environment of financial entrepreneurialism that brokered the city's development. In her own essay, editor Christine Casey uses the phrase “economic rationalism” to explain the repetition of elements and constructional techniques and their synthesis into a typology. Elsewhere, through a series of archive photographs and plan drawings of buildings, this system is distilled into a series of three subtypes based on the positioning of elements of vertical circulation: staircases and chimney stacks. These classifications allow comparisons to be made with the plan layouts of contemporary London houses as well as appraisals of other apparent Dublin solecisms.

Vitruvius and Alberti are cited in the discussion of the dichotomy between the austerity of the public facade—which Casey and others view as further evidence of economic imperatives—and the sumptuous excesses of private interiors. A number of essays focus on building components and materials, exploring eighteenth-century technologies and the means and conditions of their production: the brick fields of Dublin are discussed as are the typical types of stone used in the city. The absence of the immediate natural resources and infrastructural developments available to Bath and Edinburgh limited the manifestation of the latter in the Irish capital to small-scale yet conspicuous interventions. Such exigencies would compel the Irish capital to remain, despite its apparent Augustan pretensions, a city of brick. Efficiencies were continued into the interior. Techniques of prefabrication and standardization were common, not only in solid elements such as fireplaces, ornamental fanlights, and stair balustrades, but also within the repetition of stucco motifs and moldings: the art of the stuccodore was often as much about costcutting and the dynamics of business as it was about individual expression or passion.

The description of magnificent but demountable fireplaces that could be removed by departing residents gives an emphatic example of an eighteenth-century need of gesture: to be seen within settings of magnificence even if those settings were ultimately ephemeral. It also reminds the reader that the grand house in Dublin followed seasonal patterns of occupation that mostly corresponded to the sitting of the Irish Parliament. As the cost of maintaining a city residence was expensive, there was accordingly a highly organized rental market that again provided a financial compulsion to build. An examination of, among others things, rental advertisements, dining habits, MPs’ expenses, and house inventories affirms the lavishness of the cultures of occupation behind reticent facades as well as emphasizes stark contrasts between the material lives of the gentry and those of the rest of the population. As a comparison with Edinburgh makes clear, eighteenth-century Dublin was an aristocratic rather than a bourgeois city with the upkeep of its sumptuous housing stock overly dependent on the Irish Parliament. The latter's demise in the Act of Union (1800) predicated the incremental but inevitable appropriation of the spaces of vacated gentry residences by the poor in dense, multiple tenancies that ultimately occasioned the creation of a large and long-lasting landscape of nineteenth- and twentieth-century slums.

The essays presented in this well-edited volume provide pathways through the intricacies of the eighteenth-century town house and, as Alberti would propose, its reciprocal relationships to the wider scale of the city. As suggested by Toby Barnard in his introduction, they often provide an interrogation of the subject that offers new knowledge in a way that is open ended and invites or perhaps even defines further scholarship. In exploring the prosaic in form, the ordinariness necessary in fabricating the magnificent, the serving as well as the served spaces, and the hidden imperatives that shaped the organization of these houses and how they were used, the book counters the rhetoric of the public architecture of Georgian Dublin with the implicit language of what Wittgenstein might call the “meaning in use” of the domestic realm: a language of discretion that, through careful scholarship, admits to quite a lot.