Celebrating Trinity College Dublin's brutalist gem #berkeley50
One of the great parts of Koralek’s design for the Berkeley is the podium before the building and vast area that lies beneath. The Library has been described as “like a photocopier with the bottom drawer pulled out” – you can see what that means if you look at the plans below, which include the subterranean part:
One of the success stories of this year of celebrations around the Berkeley has been a radical change in the use of some of its spaces: the Iveagh Hall, and the basement beneath it. In a nutshell, the Hall was substantially emptied and excellent new seating installed to make a more social space.
Main and gallery images: Gill Whelan
As we saw last time, the Iveagh Hall was crammed to bursting before it was refurbished. In truth, the publicly accessible areas of it were still crammed *after* refurbishment; the years since 2002 have seen a steady stream of moves of material into, out of, and around the Iveagh Hall. We’ll look at that, and the future of the space, later!
Here’s the architects’ vision of the Hall – which users of the Berkeley of the last 15 years will recognise.
The Iveagh Hall – the main place of interaction between Library staff and our readers on a daily basis – features in very few of our period photographs.
It’s named after the Iveaghs (they of the lovely Iveagh Gardens off Earlsfort Terrace) – that is, the Guinness family. Yes, *that* Guinness family. Continue reading “#17 My Goodness, My Guinness”
From 1967 up until 2002, when entering the Berkeley’s foyer, to your right was the Librarian’s Office, and that of the Deputy Librarian, behind a wall and door. Before the Berkeley was built, the Librarian’s Office was in the west end of the Old Library, in what is now called the Henry Jones Room. We saw this in the video of students swearing the Library oath in the last post.
There are very few images of the interior of the Librarian’s Office, but former Librarian Peter Fox took a video of it before he left in 1994 to become Librarian of Cambridge University Library:
Last time we took a quick look at some of the changes that accompanied the refurbishment of the Berkeley’s lower floors in 2002. Here we continue with more of the dramatic changes in the foyer. Continue reading “#14 Let There Be Light”
