At the heart of most educational institutions, and perhaps 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 undoubtedly 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 framing 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 empiricism of Colin St John Wilson’s British Library on London’s Euston Road to the vitreous Cartesian symbolism of Dominique Perrault’s Bibliothèque 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 contextual 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 classified 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, 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 contiguous barrel vault. ‘What had been superb,’ McParland writes, ‘they made sublime.’1
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 modification 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 various ancient tomes, including some of Celtic Ireland’s most important 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 buildings but must connect them internally. Thus the strategic decision in the design of the Ussher to extend the Berkeley’s ceremonial plinth as a deep datum within which the secure activities of the library system can take place.
The architects retained the primary entrance to this new library sequence within the Berkeley (from which an underground 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 five storeys in height and dropping through two extensive basements 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 façade and a line of mature, deciduous trees to approach the Old Library. Facing the Park, the Ussher’s east elevation plays a compositional 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 & 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 categorised 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 movement known as Deconstructivism a decade later. The fragmentation 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).
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 & 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 reference 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 negotiate: a comfortable horizontal progression, towards the reading zone, skewered by the dramatic book-lined chasm.
Throughout history, the architecture of libraries has been especially conscious of its own symbolism (The Library as Temple; The Library as Open Book at the Bibliothèque 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 electronic 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 communication tools in education and in communal space today.
At twilight, the illuminated interior of the Ussher is clearly visible from College Park - a deliberate exposure, by the architects, 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 created 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 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 protection is afforded by screens laid across window openings recessed into the Park façade. 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 place set apart to contain books for reading, study, or reference.’ 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 simultaneity 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 maintenance 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 historical 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 Tate 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 June 1961).
3 The RIBA Journal (London: Oct 1997).
4 http://www.tcd.ie.
5 http://www.spl.org/lfa/central/oma/OMAbook1299.