PROJECT 3 041
PROJECT INFO Architect
Níall McLaughlin Architects
Client Magdalene College
Completion January 2021
floors and gabled pitched roofs structures. Brick chimneys animate the skyline and stone tracery picks out the windows. The practice wanted the new library building to follow these architectural elements. It says:
‘We used timber instead of stone for our window tracery, which will weather over time to become a silvery grey like the stone. We worked carefully with our builders to find a variety of bricks that would match the tapestry- like quality of the older college buildings. At the same time, this is a modern building that employs innovative passive ventilation strategies to minimise energy in use and engineered timber structure to reduce carbon embodied in its construction.’
The New Library contains a study space and library, archive and picture gallery and appears as an arrangement of simple brick volumes which echo the typical gabled forms of the existing college. The main library is a suite of interconnecting rooms lined with bookcases, reading desks and galleries, arranged on a tartan grid between interconnecting passageways. Conceived as a journey towards the light, three main reading rooms organise the principal circulation route through the library from the three-storey entrance hall, to a double-height central reading room and up to a long single-height room overlooking the garden.
The New Library uses interrelated elements as a crucial part of the design makeup. A regular grid of brick chimneys supports the
floors and bookstacks and carries warm air up to ventilate the building. Between each set of four chimneys there is a roof lantern bringing light down into the spaces below: air rising and light falling. The library is complex and thoughtful in the way that the space is divided and not a library seen anywhere else before. Think more along the lines of a well-considered open plan ofice, which was very interesting to walk through.
Above The gabled pitched roof structure, seen from below and demonstrating diffusion of light
Below An exterior view of The New Library, including the distinctive chimneys
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