the james ussher library at trinity college dublin
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Irish Arts Review
The James Ussher Library at Trinity College DublinAuthor(s): Raymund RyanSource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer, 2002), pp. 82-89Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25502839 .
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Almost three hundred years after the
construction of TCD's first great . . K
library, the new Ussher library is p>-<
ready to open. RAYMUND RYAN
finds that Trinity College 'has
balanced the maintenance of its
inheritance and progressive
architectural patronage with a plomba '**$
Trinity College Library, Dublin, Ussher Library Competition 1997. Completed 2002
Architects:
Builders:
Collaborators:
Structural Engineers: Service Engineers:
Quantity Surveyors:
Photographer:
McCullough Mulvin
Architects
and Keane Murphy Duff
Michael McNamara & Co.
McCullough Mulvin:
Niall McCullough, Valerie
Mulvin, Ruth O'Herlihy, Sinead Burke; Keane
Murphy Duff: Mike
Kinsella, Gary O'Hare, Keith McMullan,
Stephen Mason
O'Connor Sutton Cronin
Homan O'Brien
Brendan Merry and
Partners
Christian Richters
Vti
**??m;*
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ARCHITECTURE
N
gi -
w 1TRINITY
COLLEGE,OLD LIBRARY: Thomas
Burgh, 1712-1732.
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5 Trinity College, Ussher Library:
Granite shards of
the new library.
At the heart of most educational institutions, and per
haps even at the heart of built civilisation, is the
library. From the famous Bibliotheca Alexandrina at
the mouth of the Nile to the havens of learning protected
within such medieval monasteries as that at St Gallen, the
library continues to be both an actual repository of books and
ideal architectural space. At Trinity College Dublin, the Old
Library is one of the great artefacts of Anglo-Irish culture; its
recent neighbour, the Berkeley, is a consummate example of
mid-century Brutalism. Now this elite pair is joined by a third
free-standing library - the Ussher
- as Trinity reconfigures itself
for life in this electronic 21st century.
Anybody frequenting Dublin's south city centre is undoubt
edly already conscious of the Ussher's crystalline presence
immediately behind the University's railings on Nassau Street.
The new building seems to split into three granite-skinned
shards pushing south from the pensive sculptural mass of the
Berkeley (Fig 5). These thin sheer surfaces are clad such that a
rhythm is set up by the dispersal of vein-like construction
joints, a geometric cadence augmented by sporadic voids fram
ing windows behind. From one crevice between the three
blocks soars a splayed hall about which the Ussher's interior is
generated; within another, the architects have inserted a glazed
footbridge - a ponte dei sospiri for Dublin academia?
From Phoenix to Seattle, from the somewhat lumpen empiri
cism of Colin St John Wilson's British Library on London's
Euston Road to the vitreous Cartesian symbolism of Dominique
Perrault's Biblioth?que de France in Paris, the semantic power of
libraries today is closely aligned with their urban settings. At
Trinity, the fragmented geometries of the Ussher result to a large
extent from that library's context. As such, one recognises con
textual traits symptomatic of much recent critical architecture in
Ireland. Like an iceberg emerging at the nexus of architectural
inheritance, landscape (College Park) and the public realm of the
street, the Ussher is also a Machine To Read In.
In a series of articles for Country Life, Edward McParland
rightly describes Thomas Burgh's library as 'stupendous'. Begun
in 1712, the Old Library is both an independent architectural
object and the boundary of that remarkable collegiate space clas
sified by McParland as 'a vast open square...of granite and brick,
cobblestones and lawn, trees, sky and (usually) quietness' (Fig 1).
Essentially one long double-height room raised above an arcade,
84 I
IRISH ARTS REVIEW SUMMER 2002
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Burgh's library was altered in 1860 when Deane and Woodward,
in an 'extraordinary synthesis of Augustan classicism and
Victorian Romanesque,' modified its upper zone and added a con
tiguous barrel vault. 'What had been superb,' McParland writes,
'they made sublime."
In 1961, the University decided to construct a second library
alongside Burgh's then 250-year-old masterpiece. As the result of
an ambitious international design competition, the project was
awarded to Paul Koralek, a young recent graduate of London's
Architectural Association.2 If Deane and Woodward's modifica
tion of the Old Library suggests the sublime in some pre-modern
way, a way that the Trinity alumnus Edmund Burke might well
have recognised, the Berkeley combines robust materiality with
internalised pockets of natural light to invoke its own visceral
response.3 Informed by the more emotional Brutalist tendency
(from 'concret brut' -
exposed concrete) of Le Corbusier's post
War work, the Berkeley is a late-Modern monument (Fig 2).
The Old Library is in effect and in practice a museum. The var
ious ancient tomes, including some of Celtic Ireland's most impor
tant illuminated manuscripts, are stacked in formal regimen to
either side of an architectural volume far grander than required by
?mere functionality. In comparison, the
Berkeley - achieved by Koralek with his
former classmates Peter Ahrends and
Richard Burton - prioritises the reader
and the experience of reading over the
previously sacrosanct accommodation of
books. Ahrends Burton and Koralek used
in situ concrete stairs, 'light chimneys' and
tailored furniture to lead the library user
from the entrance plinth through their
multi-dimensional interior to individual
study carrels or occasional bay windows
with views to the outside world.
One of many classical busts lining the
great room of the Old Library is of James
Ussher (1581-1656), radical theologian,
Archbishop of Armagh, and donor of one
of the library's foundation collections:
the Bibliotheca Usseriana (Fig 11). Ussher
now gives his name to this latest library
building, awarded through competition
in 1997 to McCullough Mulvin
Architects working in conjunction with
the long-established Dublin practice,
Keane Murphy Duff. Members of the
Group 91 masterplan for Temple Bar,
McCullough and Mulvin are identified
with the Eurocentric and contextually
driven debates of recent years. Their
architecture is in part figurative, deriving
clues from history and locality.
Before instigating the Ussher, Trinity
did in fact realise a third major library.
Again designed by Ahrends Burton and
Koralek, the Lecky is found in the basement and ground floor
levels of the Arts Building and was built in the late 1970s to
designs again by Ahrends Burton and Koralek. (The practice is
currently adding a penthouse to this block between Nassau
Street and Fellows Square.) The edifice by McCullough Mulvin
and Keane Murphy Duff has not only to hold its own, formally or perhaps even sculpturally, between these quite distinct build
ings but must connect them internally. Thus the strategic deci
sion in the design of the Ussher to extend the Berkeley's
ceremonial plinth as a deep datum within which the secure activ
ities of the library system can take place.
The architects retained the primary entrance to this new
library sequence within the Berkeley (from which an under
ground passage also links back to the Old Library). The Ussher,
therefore, has no front door. Library users will typically enter the
Berkeley at plinth level, then descend via a newly-inserted stairs to
a hall interred between the Berkeley, the Lecky, and the Ussher.
This hall, illuminated from above by a splayed pyramidal
rooflight, functions as an internal crossroads and orientation
chamber (Fig 4). Students and staff then proceed into the primary
gap between the Ussher's shard-like forms, a sheer chasm rising
6 Trinity College, Ussher Library:
Rooflight at level 4.
SUMMER 2002 IRISH ARTS REVIEW 85
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86 IRISH ARTS REVIEW SUMMER 2002
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THE USSHER LIBRARY AT TRINITY COLLEGE
five storeys in height and dropping through two extensive base
ments so that light really does penetrate to even the lowest floors.
From the exterior, the Ussher is sited such that tourists to
Trinity now access the University through a new gate and across
a small drawbridge from Nassau Street. Visitors first purchase
tickets from a corner booth in the southwest corner of the main
new block and enjoy panoramic views of College Park from a
trapezoidal terrace, before proceeding between the Ussher's east
fa?ade and a line of mature, deciduous trees to approach the Old
Library. Facing the Park, the Ussher's east elevation plays a com
positional game with its neighbour. The Ussher is almost entirely
glazed, the Berkeley opaque. Whereas the latter appears as a
carved solid, the Ussher floats towards the Berkeley as a flush, at
times ephemeral, lantern (Figs 2 <Sc 3).
The Ussher is conscious of its chronological setting, its formal
and programmatic relationships. However, one might also claim
that here McCullough Mulvin with Keane Murphy Duff develop a contextual architecture about the evolving symbolism of light.
According to the University's website, the Ussher will have
'360,000 volumes of monographs and research journals.'4 In
recent architectural culture - in this era perhaps too easily cate
gorised as Postmodern - fragmentation has been a recurrent
theme or methodology. First in the historicist collages of, for
instance, James Stirling (Britain) and Michael Graves (United
States) in the late 1970s; then in the quasi-philosophical move
ment known as Deconstructivism a decade later. The fragmenta
tion of the Ussher Library suggests in its site strategy some intent
of the former and in its shard-like thinness and hint of the
dynamic, a stylistic affinity with the latter. Holding such possible
theoretical nuances together, however, is the tall central block
orthogonal to the grid of Front Square and visibly filled with
books. It signals the primacy of the book (Fig 7).
7 Trinity College, Ussher Library:
View of the reader
block from the
atrium looking south.
8 Trinity College, Ussher Library:
Conservation
laboratory with
north lights.
9 McCullough
Mulvin & Keane
Murphy Duff:
Plan of Ussher
Library at Podium
Level.
Facing the Park, the Ussher's east elevation ?^ plays a compositional game with its
*^^:v neighbour. The Ussher is almost entirely I Qf
"";;:?~
glazed, the Berkeley opaque. i
SUMMER 20 0 2 IRISH ARTS REV
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the ussher library at trinity college
IE
10 Trinity College, Ussher Library:
Basement reading room with natural
light through glass lenses.
11 Bust of
James Ussher
(1581-1656). Old
Library, Trinity
College, Dublin.
12 McCullough
Mulvin & Keane
Murphy Duff: Long section of the
Ussher (right) and
Berkeley Libraries
(left), Trinity
College.
13 Trinity College, Ussher Library:
Night shot of reader
block.
In plan, this Tower of Books is a rectilinear anchor off which
the smallest constituent of the Ussher - the Conservation
Laboratory towards the Arts Block - is splayed to align with
Nassau Street (Fig 9). To the east, overlooking College Park, the
most vitreous and transparent fragment of the library contains
the principal reading rooms. Its splayed geometry flips or mirrors
that of the Conservation Laboratory and helps both to focus
views to the middle of College Park and frame the new interstitial
plaza found between the Ussher, the Berkeley, and the 1979 Arts
Block. In section, visitors arrive at the vertiginous atrium, see it
crossed by glass-balustraded bridges that link book storage areas
(to the west) with the reading terraces (to the east) glazed without
obstruction from floor to ceiling (Figs 7 6k 12). The sides of the atrium -
the skeletal flanks of its columns and
floor slabs - are clad in black American walnut (Fig 7). As a refer
ence to the deep organic tones of the woodwork already furnishing
the Old Library, the walnut, together with the solid red carpeting,
introduces a note of warmth into this interior of glass and exposed
concrete ceilings. Oddly, the walnut siding stops at entry level and
does not descend down through the lower floors. Bookstacks are
pushed flush with the atrium so that they read as a sheer cliff of
books. This is the terrain that the library's users will now negoti
ate: a comfortable horizontal progression, towards the reading
zone, skewered by the dramatic book-lined chasm.
Throughout history, the architecture of libraries has been espe
cially conscious of its own symbolism (The Library as Temple;
The Library as Open Book at the Biblioth?que de France; The
Library as the Sun God Ra at the current reincarnation of Egypt's
Alexandria Library). Trinity's librarian, Bill Simpson, talks of the
Ussher's 'seamless environment', of the 'shift from print to elec
tronic resources' demanding a 'hospitality' to new technologies
and 'flexibility' in use.4 To this end, each of the Ussher's 750
reader spaces is wired for laptop use. Specially-designated Quiet
Areas only underline the omnipresence of advanced communica
tion tools in education and in communal space today.
At twilight, the illuminated interior of the Ussher is clearly vis
ible from College Park - a deliberate exposure, by the archi
tects, of the library as a stacked electronic billboard (Fig 13)? Not everything of course is entirely ephemeral. In the upper
reaches of the Tower of Books, a post-graduate zone is cre
ated about an internal double-height void wrapped in walnut
and linked by its own central stairs. To the west, the
Conservation Laboratory is angled in both plan and section
to reinforce gently a tree-filled space between the Arts Block
and Nassau Street (Fig 8). Conceptually, its roof is a single
plate cut and folded up. As with the inventively-composed
panels of black rubber flooring about exit door and service
I areas, there is a characteristic planarity about most aspects
of this project.
The Conservation Laboratory functions to protect both
ancient and modern manuscripts - a medieval text, perhaps,
next to a score by Gerald Barry. A different kind of protec
tion is afforded by screens laid across window openings
recessed into the Park fa?ade. Made from a woven stainless
steel used in escalators, these protect against any unofficial
ejection of books from the library. At or just below Park level
are suites of offices for the library staff with more orthodox
windows punched out towards College Park. Below again, in
the basement, is the University's Map Room.
The Oxford Universal Dictionary defines a library as 'a
H place set apart to contain books for reading, study, or refer
ence.' In the contemporary world, that sense of the library
as an autonomous or isolated object seems less relevant. Rem
Koolhaas -
today's most influential international architect -
recently wrote of his Seattle Public Library project that 'in an age
where information can be accessed anywhere, it is the simultane
ity of all media, and the professionalism of their presentation and
interaction, that will make the Library new.'5
With the obvious exception of one stunted Civil Engineering
building on College Park, Trinity College has balanced the main
tenance of its inheritance and progressive architectural patronage
with aplomb. McCullough Mulvin and Keane Murphy Duff have
now given Trinity a facility that beckons from its complex histor
ical setting far into the future. The Ussher Library is literally multi-faceted. Only time and use will determine its true quality.?
Raymund Ryan is an architect teaching at UCD. A contributing editor to Blueprint, he is co-author of Building T?te Modern (2000) and author of Cool Construction
(2001). He is also Irish Commissioner for the Venice Architectural Biennale.
1 E McParland, The Buildings of Trinity College Dublin', Country Life (London
1977). 2 The Architect's Journal ( London : 15 J u ne 1961 ). 3 The RIBA Journal (London: Oct 1997). 4 http://www.tcd.ie. 5 http://www.spl.org/lfa/central/oma/OMAbookl299.
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SUMMER 2002 IRISH ARTS REVIEW |
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