Celebrating Trinity College Dublin's brutalist gem #berkeley50
5th May 1961: J.V. Luce, who had been a driving force in the quest to build a new library for Trinity, wrote to Paul Koralek to tell him he had been awarded first prize. Here we have Paul rereading a copy of that letter in October 2017:
At the start of the year, we looked at a vision of the “Library Extension” from 1957. That was produced in an attempt to give donors something to visualise in the allotted space rather than a serious proposition of what the design should be. But there are many other more fleshed-out might-have-beens from the completion to design the Library – if you are interested in what some of those looked like, the excellent Archiseek website has a page devoted to them. Continue reading “#43 What Might Have Been 2”
On 13 October we were privileged to welcome the Berkeley’s architect Paul Koralek to speak to a sell-out crowd in the Edmund Burke Theatre, to discuss the Berkeley Library with John Tuomey and other guests.
Luckily, we captured it all for posterity (with decent sound too, thanks to our expert cameraman) – so let’s allow all our guests to speak for themselves. Enjoy!
This week, we were privileged to welcome the architect himself, Paul Koralek, back to Dublin and Trinity.
The first of his official engagements was to open a new exhibition detailing the design and construction of the Berkeley at the Irish Architectural Archive, curated by Donal Hickey.
In our last post we saw that the Berkeley’s site was a stand of trees, between Fellows’ Gardens to the west and College Park to the east, with New Square to the north and Nassau Street to the south. The main image shows this vista from New Square, reproduced from the pamphlet International architectural competition for a new library building. Continue reading “#6 Trees Come Down”
The area where the Berkeley Library was eventually built was once a copse of trees, facing into College into the area known as Fellows’ Gardens – now, Fellows’ Square.
Continue reading “#5 When All This Was Fields”
The appeal for funds for the new library was wide-ranging, and in the great tradition of universities looking for funds, Trinity turned towards its alumni with 11,000 copies of the pamphlet Extension of the College Library: An appeal to our graduates printed and sent to graduates in 1957.
The main image above shows a detail from that booklet, subtitled “How the new building might look”. It’s a very different realisation of what would be appropriate for the space that eventually housed the Berkeley – but it’s easy to see why, nestled between the Old Library and the Museum Building, this might be thought the appropriate tack to take.
