By Hayley Mercier
The new home of the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity’s humanities research institute, was officially opened on 8 September by Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Conor Lenihan. The new building in Fellow’s Square took just over a year to complete. It was designed by award-winning Irish architecture firm McCullough Mulvin.
The building has been short-listed for World Building of the Year along with 236 other projects, including 7 Irish buildings. Amongst these are the Aviva Stadium and Grand Canal Theatre. The winner will be announced in early November at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona.
The institute received €10.8m from the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutes when it was founded four years ago and until now it has not had a permanent home. It describes itself as on the cutting edge of humanities research, and includes a digitisation suite that will employ six full-time staff to work on the library’s ambitious goal of digitising and making available its entire collection, including manuscripts housed in the Old Library.
The building will be open to the public as part of Culture Night on Friday 24 September and during the Open House architecture festival from 7 to 10 October.
