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Public Lecture – HANDCRAFTED BRUTALISM: the Berkeley Library’s making in context

Wednesday 8 March 2017
17:30 – 19:00
North Training Room, Berkeley Library
Trinity College Dublin
Register here. Event is free but booking is essential.

“…an inspired building, subtle in its relationship to the existing buildings and squares, plastic in detail and magnificent in its internal lighting effects.”
Christine Casey, The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin

The Berkeley Library, opened in 1967, is widely regarded as one of Ireland’s finest modern buildings. In 2017, the Library of Trinity College is hosting a series of events to celebrate the first fifty years of the building and consider how it might continue to inspire and delight in the future.

Ellen Rowley, architectural and cultural historian, starts our series of public architectural events with a talk on the origins and impact of the Berkeley Library.

This lecture situates the Berkeley Library in its local and architectural histories. Drawing from the principal architect’s – Paul Koralek (of Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, ABK) – personal recollections of designing, making and remaking the library for Trinity College in the early 1960s, we set out to understand why the structure stands and behaves as it does. We explore the territory of post-war architectures of education and the meaning of library, as well as trying to unpick the controversial label ‘Brutalism’; all to the backdrop of a growing university, in urgent need of updated reading and storage space in mid-century Ireland.

The event will conclude with a screening of the wonderful Building for Books film produced in 1958 as part of a fundraising campaign for the new library.

Dr Ellen Rowley is an Irish Research Council Fellow based at UCD School of Architecture and Dublin City Council Heritage Office.

She works between the academic and heritage sectors so as to best disseminate her ongoing research into Dublin’s twentieth-century built environment. Educated in Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University, Ellen is an architectural and cultural historian with a passion for teaching (having won a Provost’s Teaching Award during her time as lecturer in TCD). She recently completed volume 1 of More than Concrete Blocks (Dublin’s Architecture 1900 – 40) and is working on Volume 2 (1940 – 73, to come out at the end of 2017), and was co-editor of Yale’s Art and Architecture of Ireland series, Volume IV, Architecture 1600 – 2000 (YUP, 2014). Her essays on Modernism and Irish architecture are widely published in Ireland and internationally.

Event image: Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections.