Pavillions on the Turf Visually, the great estates of Ireland infiltrated the landscape with an almost casual elegance. Large expanses of countryside were mapped by slow-growing trees and meandering paths, sunken ha-has and "found" architectural follies, as if these somewhat ingenuous fabrications could screen the artificiality of the total exercise. Tract as rural allotment and tract as constructed text, the great estates are today a gorgeous anachronism, cultural artefacts of a bygone era. In Ulster, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava is reconfiguring her property near Belfast to ensure it a future. Engaging modern aesthetics and public accessibility, her architects are constructing new marks alongside the old. Clandeboye is primarily a nineteenth century creation. One detects its Victorian eccentricity at the Viceroy of India's Lake, an ornamental pool shaped as a giant shamrock, and with the Celtic romance of Helen's Tower, an isolated turret within the forest. The Blackwood Golf Centre plays on this ground and with this cast of characters. Their new architecture signals the late twentieth century within the larger script, inscribing new routes of energy so that the game of golf joins the game of architecture. It presents itself as both sculptural marker and village of pavilions, as a practical mechanism and as a slightly mad bricolage. It's not quite sure whether it's a building or not. As on many properties, this latest insertion is an attempt to tap the landscape for tourism and recreational profit. The Blackwood Golf Centre itself inverts certain established norms. O'Donnell and Tuomey have traced the energy of the driving range and bracketed the movement of golfers to and from the fairways so that their architecture is as much exposed apparatus as hermetic gazebo.

 

Primarily to do with viewing, it has been thought of as a programmatic negative. The trick of the project is not to cut into but to build up the land. The work sits into the topography, with four pavilions (for restaurant, reception, changing rooms, and professional office) presented to the car park as a jaunty wall of cabins. This cluster is then pierced to reposition the visitor on an elongated deck above the curved lip of the lower driving range. Through this terrace the players move with perpendicular and centripetal inevitability; and from it the course is panoramically visible. To complement the surrounding terrain of green, much of the dainty superstructure is rendered red - partly in homage, amid the northern damp, to Malaparte's villa on Capri. The arcing lid of the driving range is made, conversely, from the terne-coated steel of Irish farmyards. The Blackwood Golf Centre is of course a conceit. To be perhaps softened by beds of bushes and saplings, it only pretends to be relaxed. With exposed cedar construction (an obverse) and graphically disposed railway sleepers, it flirts with the vernacular while spilling, nudging, poking with a barely disguised tectonic ambition. O'Donnell and Tuomey's architecture is more interested in figurative presence than in programme or structure. As such, its principle is the cognitive making of settlement and, as such, the Blackwood Golf Centre, in the manner of follies, continues the tradition of architecture in the landscape. [Raymund Ryan]