ARTS, HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES Art In Stall Trinity Today spends the afternoon at TRIARC to find out more about the projects they are working on, and explore their very different office space J ust getting to the Trinity Irish Art Research Centre - TRIARC – is an adventure. You go through the Arts Block and out a side door, and down some steps and in another door where you have to swipe your staff/student card, and along a shaded, wilded tunnel, where birds proliferate and you might see squirrels or the campus fox, and then you’re into a lovely, cobbled courtyard fronted by an austere early Victorian building. It’s exceptionally quiet, perhaps the most peaceful and sheltered spot on campus. Remarkably, Grafton Street is just over the wall. TRIARC is housed in what used to be the Provost’s Stables. It’s over a century since any Provost kept horses here but the stables lay unused until 2007 when it was repurposed by the Department of History of Art and Architecture to house their recently established research centre for Irish art. Following a generous benefaction from the late Fred Krehbiel, co-chairman of Molex Inc, award-winning architects O’Donnell + Tuomey renovated the stables, creating a seminar room, study spaces, staff offices and a library/reading room of over 2,000 books and catalogues. TRIARC also houses the largest image archive of Irish art in the world, including three collections donated to the college: the Crookshank-Glin collection on 17th to early 20th century painting and sculpture and the Stalley and Rae collections on medieval art and architecture. A valuable resource for other historical and cultural disciplines, these are regularly consulted by visiting scholars. O’Donnell + Tuomey were sensitive to the space – on the groundfloor, TRIARC has kept the original granite flagstones complete with gutter running through, and the horse stalls have been converted into spacious study spaces for postgrads. I haven’t been told who made the donation, but I thank them every day We met Aoife- Marie Buckley, a graduate in architecture who is in the third year of her PhD on the ‘architectural narrative of the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI)’ and divides her time between TRIARC and the NGI archives; and Sorcha Ní Lideadha, who is finishing her PhD on 17th century Spanish prints. Sorcha is funded by the Irish Research Council and Aoife-Marie, rather excitingly, by an anonymous donor – ‘I haven’t been told who it is, but I thank them every day.’ Both found it difficult during lockdown when they couldn’t come in. Aoife-Marie’s thesis was ‘more or less on hold because it’s dependent on studying physical archives - those in NGI, in particular, aren’t yet digitised’. They are delighted to be back in the spacious, tranquil centre. Sorcha likes eating her lunch in the courtyard to the distant rumble of the Luas overhead. ‘It’s a privilege to be here,’ says Aoife-Marie, ‘it was before, and now even more so’. Upstairs, TRIARC’s current Director, Angela Griffith, has her office in what used to be a coachman’s room beside the library (previously the hayloft). She explains that TRIARC is strongly ‘inter-connected’: ‘We work very closely with our colleagues across college, such as Trinity Library on archives, collections and exhibitions, and with centres such as the Long Room Hub and departments including History and English. We have multiple research
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