The present book is the first edition in theIn this excerpt from Howard's End, E.M. Forster touched on the relationship between the physical structure of the house -stone, wood, glass -and living human beings inhabiting it. Against all odds it may seem that it is the house rather than its occupant that has a life. The idea that buildings can come alive and exist rather like biological organisms is one often heard, both now and in the past. People talk of houses having character, atmosphere, ambiance; houses are frequently experienced as being haunted, eerie or full of 'wonderful powers'.The idea that houses have 'a surer life than we' is convenient from a scholar's point of view. After all, the people who built and lived in these houses are dead and we scholars are left, if we are lucky, with the houses that they gave life to. Stuck with these fragments of the past, we probably all try to wrest stories from buildings, as if we are dealing with speaking human beings rather than with neatly arranged heaps of planks and stones, and rubble. To paraphrase Margaret, a house has a surer life than we do, even if it is empty. Indeed, we often have to make do with an empty, ruined castle or house, but with the help of a phenomenological approach, or of a textual metaphor that regards archaeological artefacts and architecture as language, we can infuse it with sheer human communicative powers. Still, at the end of the day, the castle or house, as Matthew Johnson phrases it, 'remains silent' (Johnson 1999, 12).For archaeologists it has traditionally been, and still is, the custom to turn their attention to the building per se. True, the emphasis has generally shifted from a purely military or art-historical perspective to one where there is increasing attention to the people who constructed and inhabited these buildings. However, 12 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700 in order to find out more about these people and the society in which they lived, we still focus our attention on the materiality of the past. As Ian Hodder asserts, 'specific theories might vary, but there is a widely accepted view that archaeologists need to focus on the particular material character of their data' (Hodder 2001, 10).
Listening to the silence of castlesWhen I started my research it was my aim to elucidate past perceptions generated by, associated with, and projected onto sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Dutch, English and Irish castles and houses. I applied an approach which may be described as phenomenological in that I focused on the bodily experience of moving through the buildings, studying the accessibility of rooms and the pathways between these spaces as well as the relative placements of such features as doors, windows, fireplaces, floors, chimney-stacks, and presses, in the hope of gaining insight into the mindscape behind the structural organisation and the commonplace perception of these buildings.This method did not work for me, though. How much can one conclude about past perc...
