Lara May Ó Muirithe
Contributor
The Arts Building and Berkeley Library are perhaps Trinity’s most misunderstood structures. TN talks to Paul Koralek, one of the architects responsible for shaping Trinity’s modern aesthetic.
As a new student to Trinity this year, I have spent the first few weeks of term mostly taking in the new environment, walking around and establishing a psychological connection with its topography. Trinity can be seen as an island site within Dublin, and its architectural configurations confer an individual collegiate identity while simultaneously engaging with the surrounding cityscape. I see a remarkably fluid continuity between the old and new elements of the college.
Although architecture is always a collaborative project, Paul Koralek’s involvement with both the Berkeley Library and the Arts and Social Sciences Building has given him huge responsibility in shaping Trinity’s modern identity and helping the old and the new to coalesce.
Between 1938 and ’68 Trinity’s student population had endured an almost five-fold increase. That was forecasted to more than double. Koralek’s remit was to build a part of Trinity that would facilitate the increase.
In 1961, College decided it needed to have a second library adjacent to Thomas Burgh’s 1712 building. Along with two others, the young Koralek won a competition to design it and was appointed principal architect of the Arts Building, which he worked on from 1969 to 1978.
Between 1938 and 1958, full time students at Trinity increased from 548 to 915. By 1968 the figure had grown to 2,466, with a forecasted growth to 6,000 students. Koralek’s remit was to plan a multipurpose, faculty building to accommodate the expansion.
Previously the departments were dispersed, rather like the Oxbridge model, with people socialising outdoors. The original scheme proposed building where the rugby pitch is, to bring together the sciences and the arts. Koralek was given the rare opportunity to revise them.
I was keen to question Koralek about the connectivity of the old and new elements. It frustrates me that some people, unfairly I think, consider the Arts Building as an appendage to the older buildings on campus, to “Trinity proper”. “As a piece of planning and urban design,” Koralek told me, “it completes the college very well. If you try to imagine what it would look like without it there, you can see that it resolves the geometry of the old part of the college.”
The Arts Building was never designed to compete with the classical ranges in Front Square, so I wonder what those critics who prefer the older areas of College would like to see instead of the Arts Building. An imitation of 18th-century iconography? Such a derivative approach would amount to nothing more than pastiche. The parodying of the old system with its (royal) manifestations of power would undermine Trinity’s modern purpose.
Perhaps any disjunction that is felt between the old and new elements of college could be ones that are imposed upon it by those with a prejudice to the formal aspects of late 20th-century architecture. It is not that people who use the Arts Building necessarily feel estranged by the space. Members of staff tell me that it is generally a good place in which to work, and students are happy to spend time socialising in the new spaces.
“As a piece of planning and urban design it completes the college very well. If you try to imagine what it would look like without it there, you can see that it resolves the geometry of the old part of the college.”
We are obsessed by nostalgia, but one of the merits of the Arts Building is that it has managed to be forward looking without severing itself from the past. A good example of this is the entrance.
John Winter, in Architects’ Journal, writes that the junction of the portal with Nassau Street is “an object lesson in new meets old.” Valerie Mulvin of McCullagh Mulvin, the architectural firm which was responsible (along with Keane Murphy Duff) for designing the Ussher Library, told me: “The best feature of the Arts Block is the elevation to Nassau Street which, to me, is like the walls of an Italian hill town.”
The meanings of the building are ever changing, and the perception of the Arts Building has been in flux since it was built. Dylan Haskins, a Trinity graduate, wrote his undergraduate dissertation on the Arts Building around the themes of scale and identity. Due to a lift on restrictions to archival resources, he was able to deploy previously unavailable material to create the first comprehensive study of the building’s “biography”.
Hopefully, now that access to the archives is open, students will be keen to further this field of study. Speaking with Haskins about his experiences of being a student based at the Arts Building, I was particularly interested in the ways in which people respond to the spatiality of the building and how they navigate its structures.
“Users of the Arts Building tend to have their own defined routes through the complex,” Haskins said. “Because we have our own patterns for relating to the building, it’s often quite difficult to conceive of the whole and how it works, how it’s ordered … If you stand in front of the OId Library and look at the Arts Building, it’s very easy to identify that the block is articulated by four stair towers, yet when there’s a fire drill people always walk for the two central stair wells, often oblivious to the fact that there are more stairs.”
Taking the time to look at the building more carefully can be a transformative experience. Roger Stalley, professor emeritus of the history of art, gave me a tour of the building. Walking through the corridors actualised the concept of the Arts Building as a traversed space.
As a member of the committee in dialogue with Koralek, Stalley understands the building’s origins and meanings. He told me that the architect aimed to construct an individual identity for each department within the monolithic structure. Thus, each departmental area does not face directly out onto the corridor. Unexpected pockets are found, where departments are embedded within their own sub-space.
In terms of unity, Stalley pointed out how parts of the building are quite reflexive; the granite part of the Arts Building that faces onto Ussher Library can be seen as an homage to other buildings that use the material.
Koralek’s work is unorthodox and, in its empiricism, does not adhere to abstract formulations. Nevertheless, it can be situated within the modernist lineage. Cultural production dating from the early and mid-20th century – what Eric Hobsbawm called “The Age of Catastrophe” – was beset by ongoing belligerence.
One of the most important artistic movements emerging from the wreckage of the first world war was purism, which in its measured and cerebral nature was the antithesis to the discordant eruption of Dada in 1918 and, latterly, the phantasmagoria of surrealism. In 1920, Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (better known by the pseudonym Le Corbusier) established the purist group and published a purist manifesto in the group’s journal, L’Esprit nouveau (The New Spirit).
The magazine was dedicated to promoting the functionalist planning of architecture and city space. In its distrust of intuition – considered to have “capricious” tendencies capable of misleading one from the “guide towards discovery” that is invoked by logic – the purists espoused that imposing technocratic and rational order upon art could improve society.
“Users of the Arts Building tend to have their own defined routes through the complex because we have our own patterns for relating to the building, it’s often quite difficult to conceive of the whole and how it works.”
Ozenfant’s and Jeanneret’s still-life paintings from the 1920s aim to evacuate the external turmoil of Europe by creating order through formal structure; the objects are flattened across the picture plane, the horizontal and vertical being shown simultaneously in the same plane while additional formal detail is omitted. This should elevate the viewer’s senses through a “state of mathematical lyricism.” These ideals were transposed to the field of architecture.
Many of Koralek’s older peers at the Architectural Association, where he trained in the 1950s, had fought in the second world war and believed that, as a social art, architecture had tremendous potential in rehabilitating society. Some of the principles of purism and Bauhaus (Koralek has worked with Marcel Breuer, the Bauhaus student) gained a renewed urgency.
When applied to painting, the tenets of logic, order and control may seem like cold speculation, but with the practical art of architecture it becomes manifest that they can produce an awesome affect. Koralek’s Berkeley Library stands as a masterpiece in mid-century brutalism. Informed by the brutalist (from béton brut, French for exposed concrete) tendency of Le Corbusier’s post-war work, it is a display of the more emotional tendency inherent in such structures.
The augmentation of vital materiality of the concrete with the areas of natural light, which emanates from above and floods into our reading areas, is stunning. Le Corbusier said: “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses seen in light,” and something of this feeling can resonate strongly at the Berkeley Library.
“The Berkeley Library and Arts Building… were built under different political conditions, the Berkeley Library was built using College money and the Arts Building was built using government money.”
Testament to the paradoxical nature of Koralek’s architecture, the library demonstrates that it is possible to have a visceral experience of architecture that is borne from rational design and the deployment of calculated and geometric forms.
However, Le Corbusier’s is an exclusive definition of architecture: not all buildings invoke an emotional and aesthetic response in people, and nor should they, because architecture has a multiplicity of roles to fulfill. Judgments of taste are secondary to the ostensible need to provide useful space.
Working on the Arts Building, Koralek was working under different economic conditions, and so the considerations were necessarily more utilitarian. When I asked Koralek of the contemporary reception of the Arts Building, he said:
“On the whole, it was positive. The Berkeley Library was positively received, which makes it difficult for the Arts Building to live up to Berkeley Library. They were built under different political conditions, the Berkeley Library was built using College money and the Arts Building was built using government money …
“When we were commissioned, I asked for a brief. The college said they needed a facility for 6,000 students. There were very few precedents at the time; there were not many new universities. It was trailblazing. To their credit, the college set up a committee to discuss what it should be.”
While the lecorbusian spirit-raising affect will not be felt by everyone who enters the Arts Building today, the building has proved over the years that it succeeds on a sociological level. This is due to Koralek’s empiricist approach to architectural practice: form is of extrinsic value, what must come into play is a dynamic relationship between form and function.
As part of the ongoing dialogue he maintained with the committee in College, in 1970 Koralek was proactive in organising visits to some of the new university buildings in Britain. The objective of the trip was to generate discussion about the suitability of these buildings in terms of teaching spaces, and not in terms of the aesthetic pleasure they might have afforded.
“The building has proved over the years that it succeeds on a sociological level. This is due to Koralek’s empiricist approach to architectural practice: form is of extrinsic value, what must come into play is a dynamic relationship between form and function.”
The Arts Building communicates a modernist belief in the credibility of the future. Koralek tried to envisage the future needs of the institution and, apart from the current problem with overcrowding due to massive expansion (hardly the architect’s fault), it is generally able to accommodate the technologies of the 21st century.
I have heard the Arts Building described as variously resembling a car park and a supermarket. Perhaps, in this instance, the tendency to discuss architecture in metaphorical terms reveals that a full appreciation of the building might still be wanting. Perhaps it has not yet been grasped that the Arts Building looks exactly like what it is: a purpose-built faculty building designed to anticipate the demands of the modern-day educational experience. We are very lucky to have it and should not treat it with ambivalence.
