RIAI | Irish Architecture Awards

Citation

Western (over €300,000)

We cannot do better than to quote the client "Above all it is a monastic library; a place where monks can pursue everything from a homily to God… There is movement, innovation and contact here as well as stability and serenity."

Architects Comment
The new library for the Benedictine Community at Glenstal Abbey Co. Limerick is the second phase of a significant building programme which includes a new guesthouse and the completion of the Abbey church. A future glazed cloister will link the monastery and church to the library at first floor level.

The Benedictine tradition encompasses learning, work and prayer. The building of the new library reflects a long association with scholarship and learning. The Glenstal library is on a small scale, housing one hundred and twenty thousand books, with an expansion factor for twenty thousand more.

The ground floor has controlled access for visitors, with closed bookstack with provision for compact mobile shelving. The first floor houses the monastic library a handbibliothek, unsupervised and private, where books most used by the community are displayed on free standing shelving, accessible to all monks without having to go through all the officialdom of borrowing from the library. Staircase access links the two stack areas, indirectly lit from above by the three-storey void linking the bookstacks. The main space on the first floor is the circular reading room. A two storey cylindrical drum develops into a clear storey segment admitting light into the drum. This symbolises the meaning of the library and manifests the spirit of the community. The circular plan, which rises off a square base, shows its lineage in library design to Sydney Smirks reading room in the British Museum and Gunnar Asplud’s Stockholm City Library, but on a much smaller scale.

A very restricted pallet of material add greatly to the ‘learning’ character of the building, the structure is reinforced concrete frame with flat slab construction, and concrete block infill, rendered externally. Service runs are exposed, and the bookstacks and archives have thermally controlled ambience.

Client Comment
The new library is Glenstal stands in stark contrast to the church. The latter reflects a bygone day when faith was solid and unquestioned and the lines of structure straight, sure and definite. The library on the other hand is not only different lines but different and varied shapes reflecting a diversity of movement and thought current in the world.

‘Fides querens intellectum’ – ‘Faith seeking knowledge’ says St. Anslem and our new library stands for this not only symbolically but in its day to day activity. There are places for private study along tabled walls that bring light through small windows at once intimate and bright; group discussions and meetings can be held-and indeed have already been-in the conference room on the first floor with its wooden floor and semicircular grey brick wall, its sweep of the monastery enclosure through windows narrow yet revealing. Above all it is a monastic library; a place where monks can pursue everything from a homily to God. One gets a sense of various divisions within yet these are all held together by such differing features as the two large imposing wooden doors of the conference room which open to their identical twins in glass which in turn open out to let the rest of the library in; or the small narrow windows which allow a sweeping view of the lawns around the building or the glass wall on the second floor among the stacks which reveals ground level outside. There is movement, innovation and contact here as well as stability and security. Wooden floors and panelling, glass and grey walls and above all light and silence ensure that the new library is an impressive and distinct essential of our monastery and life.