Interview with Louis Purbrick: ‘H Blocks: An Architecture of Conflict in and about Northern Ireland’
In this interview, Louis Purbrick speaks to Hiba Alobaydi about her H Blocks: An Architecture of the Conflict in and about Northern Ireland, shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion.
Hiba Alobaydi: First of all, congratulations on being shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion. What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for one of the most prestigious prizes, if not the most prestigious prize, in the discipline?
Louis Purbrick: Being shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion is a such an honour; it brings personal recognition as a historian and a writer. I usually feel like I am working at the margins of academic disciplines and it is a great feeling to be placed centre stage. I would like to thank The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for their consideration of my work, H Blocks: An Architecture of the Conflict in and about Northern Ireland, which I also regard as recognition of the importance of the neglected historical site of Long Kesh/Maze prison and the communities affected by imprisonment during a long war in the last quarter of the twentieth century that became so assimilated into everyday life in Britain and Ireland that its status as a war went unnoticed.
HB: The Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion celebrates individuals who have made significant contributions to the field of architectural history. Can you please share a pivotal moment or experience in your career that you believe led to your nomination for this prestigious award?
LP: In 2005, after writing a short commentary on a film by Cahal McLaughlin, Inside Stories: Memories from Maze and Long Kesh prison, I was invited to join Healing Through Remembering, a conflict resolution group based in Belfast devoted to ‘how to deal with the legacy of the past as it relates to the conflict in and about Northern Ireland.’ At the beginning, I was involved in monthly meetings, discussions about the creation of a museum of the conflict: what architectural form in which location would meet the needs of a collective heritage practice? My academic expertise was just one voice amongst many: former police officers, former political prisoners, peace activists, community organisers. It was in these meetings, I began to see how scholarship, especially relating to the built environment, can play its part in collective community practice of historical interpretation.
HA: Your work has clearly left a lasting impact on the understanding and appreciation of architectural history. Could you discuss a specific project or research endeavour that you consider your most influential contribution to the field?
LP: Very early in my career, I edited a collection of essays on the Great Exhibition of 1851 and wrote an introduction that has been widely cited. Like much of any scholar’s early writing, I would express myself quite differently now but, in this introduction, I did attend to how Crystal Palace had power as architecture and idea, as an object and as an image. Of course, Crystal Palace, a huge expanse of prefabricated glass and iron was real but its form held held sway far beyond its actual site, in Hyde Park for six months in 1851 and in Sydenham for eighty years or so. Understanding the power of architecture in its myriad forms, not only as original physical structure, but reproduced in print, photography and film is perhaps my most important contributions to architectural history. The meaning of architecture, as I argue in the H Blocks, is circulated through all its material forms, on paper as well as in concrete.
H Block plan
H Block roll, administration building, 2001
HA: The Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion recognises excellence in scholarly pursuits. Can you delve into your research process and how it has evolved over the years, leading to the recognition you’ve received?
LP: What defined my research process at the H Blocks is fending off the pressure to produce publications rapidly and allowing myself time to fully understand both the architecture and its historical and political context. My research process was slow and site-specific: I have been researching and thinking about the H Blocks for over twenty years. This meant I visited the site of the former prison as it changed over time from an empty but intact complex of buildings through their partial demolition to the current condition of where even the traces of architecture are being overgrown.
I also developed a practice of reading architecture as dispersed fragments of history. When I started trying to piece together the history of Long Kesh/Maze prison its official records were yet to be made available and the only well-known moment was that of the Hunger Strikes of 1981. Drawing upon design historical methods devoted to interpretation of a single object or small collections of things enabled me to offer detailed interpretation of materiality of the prison wall and the prison cell. Written descriptions of prisoners using prison fabrics to communicate with each other or memories of the noises along the prison wings were pieced together with other fragments, such leaflets that carried the H shaped plan of the cell units, to produce an account of the occupation of space rather than one that follows either an official or a media narrative.
Site of former prison Long Kesh Maze, 2003.
H Block cell visible following demolition, 2006
HA: How do you approach presenting complex architectural concepts to a broader audience, considering the diverse range of individuals interested in architectural history?
GB: I am lucky, I believe, because alongside writing, I have developed a research practice as curator and an artist. My favourite example of using curating to explore architectures is an exhibition entitled Maps and Lives (2017). With colleagues at the University of Brighton where I then worked, we invited the public to represent their city on the wall papered floor of a large local gallery. People inserted their own maps, objects, artworks, models of buildings, photographs of significant places, writings about everyday experiences until there was almost no space to walk through the gallery. Interestingly, the exhibition created the city as community rather than commercial space. However, my work as artist is more long-standing and on-going. I am one of arts research collective Traces of Nitrate that uses explores mining landscapes. We focus of extraction of nitrate, copper and lithium from Chile and the subsequent accumulations of financial value in Britain. Our largest work, Trafficking the Earth, a long sequence of photographs and written texts was acquired by the V&A this year. My particular contribution to Traces of Nitrate is using archival and contemporary photography to understand the historical ruins of mining.
HA: The study of architectural history often reveals insights about societal, cultural, and technological shifts. Can you please explain how your book H Blocks: An Architecture of the Conflict in and about Northern Ireland uncovered intriguing connections between architecture and broader historical contexts?
LP: Most importantly, the H Blocks: An Architecture of the Conflict in and about Northern Ireland, reveals a material history of the conflict that was euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’. It is not alterative history because that implies it does not focus on the main event, which it does: the building of the H Blocks. But it does tell an unspoken but dominant history of how this architecture shaped the conflict itself. H Blocks were of the conflict, in the conflict, part of the conflict, and researching the materiality of their forms uncovered the often-unrecognised power of architecture in wars of all kinds.
By attending to the actual, physical structures of an architecture of conflict, the cells of the H Block that held male prisoners or the routes through the prison undertaken by female visitors, the complex relationships of the military occupation by a colonial power were manifested in concrete were not reduced to standard explanation of ‘The Troubles’ as a simple sectarian opposition between Catholic-Nationalist-Republican (CNR) and those of Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist (PUL). Architectural history offered a wider lens.
Footprint of H Block exposed after demolition, 2006.
HA: Who or what has been a major source of inspiration for your research and scholarly pursuits? How has this inspiration influenced your approach to studying and disseminating architectural history?
LP: Art historian Professor Marcia Pointon remains the most important inspiration in my academic life, including how I research within the field of architectural history. There are, of course, many meeting grounds in the fields of art history and architectural history, which share definitions of historical periodisation and historical style, however, these traditions of scholarship were not as important in Marica Pointon’s supervision of my doctoral study at the University of Sussex but rather her encouragement to apply the practice of looking closely and attentively at artworks and their small details to large industrial structures: the Crystal Palace and the machinery it contained. My book, H Blocks, which considers the historical purpose of a prison as well as how its meanings may be held in its smaller details, the gaps in the cell doors or the appropriations of cell blankets, could not have been written without Marcia Pointon’s early influence on my research.
HA: As the field of architectural history evolves, how do you stay current with new research methodologies and technological advancements that enhance our understanding of past architectural achievements?
GB: Architectural history has long attended to lived experience, to the cultures created through building as well the buildings themselves. Summarised as spatial relationships, a focus upon people and place can address the overriding challenge to the academy to decolonising its curriculum. Exploring the spatial relationships of experience in architecture can open out into different decolonial positions that examine the hierarchies of inhabiting structures, the ordering of some patterns of living, the suppression and exclusion of others. How to articulate the rhythms, routes and routines of life that architectures have facilitated and have denied, which may be neither written nor spoken requires careful thinking about the act of writing unrecorded histories. For me, it is to Jane Rendall’s work that I have looked for a pathway into writing unrecorded architectural histories.
HA: The Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion celebrates your dedication to advancing architectural history. Could you share a personal or professional challenge you’ve faced and how you’ve overcome it?
GB: The most important personal and professional challenge I have faced as a historian is writing the H Blocks. I always felt it was a book that needed to be written because Long Kesh/Maze prison was such a significant structure but was falling away from historical attention. Its partial demolition was political compromise in the years following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the closure of the site to the public remains part of the political stalemate in the Northern Ireland Executive. Its disappearance from view began to be reflected in an absence of academic scholarship. How to write its history from my position embedded in the UK university system was not straightforward, a complex challenge of the responsibility for a colonial past of British intervention in Ireland and a refusal to appropriate the histories of others. Without participation in Healing Through Remembering and my role, however small, in community activism in Northern Ireland, writing the H Blocks would have been impossible.
HA: Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for the continued exploration and contribution to architectural history? How do you envision your work impacting future generations of scholars and enthusiasts?
LP: My immediate hope is that producing an architectural history of the H Blocks will encourage communities interested architectural heritage to understand their significance and open their site, that of the Long Kesh/Maze prison, for visitors of all kinds: former prisoners and prisoner officers who inhabited the space, ex-soldiers who spent long hours on its perimeter, communities effected by conflict in and about Northern Ireland as well as other researchers. To look further ahead, my thinking about the material force of architecture, as a real thing and representation of itself, an object and an idea of that object, will encourage new scholarship that is not necessary about prisons or conflict but any architectures that so powerfully shapes our social lives.