Education · Ireland
The Book of Kells Experience
- Client
- Trinity College Dublin
- Architect
- Heneghan Peng Architects
- Location
- Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2
- Completed
- 2023–2024
- Sector
- Education
- Scope
- Freestanding totems on the campus squares · Bilingual directional fingerposts carrying walking times · Entrance portal and glazed door graphics · Large-format graphics to the pavilion exterior · Printed interpretation panels set into the Old Library doorcases · Audio guide and ticketing panels carrying QR codes
The Book of Kells Experience opened in a pavilion on New Square in January 2024, while the Old Library next to it was being redeveloped. The signage had to bring visitors across a protected eighteenth-century campus to a building that was not on any map.
Exhibition space
Retail and support space
Pavilion height
Opened
The Book of Kells Experience opened on 3 January 2024 in a pavilion on New Square: a 600 square metre exhibition hall 10 metres high, with 300 square metres of retail and support space beside it. It was put up in 2023 to keep the manuscript and its visitors in view while the Old Library is redeveloped. The brand identity, including the signage and wayfinding design, is by Pentagram.
Finding a building that is not on the map
A visitor arriving at Front Gate is looking for something that did not exist the last time they came. The direction signs answer in two languages and a number: Leabharlann Berkeley above Berkeley Library, An Taobh Thoir above East End, each with a walking time against it, 1nóim and 1min, 3nóim and 3mins. Dark grey blades on stainless poles, stacked by distance. The freestanding totems stand on base plates laid on the cobbles and the grass rather than fixed into them, which is what a protected site allows.
A temporary building still has to be found.
One mark, many surfaces
The same identity runs across materials that have nothing in common. It is printed at 10 metres on the red cladding of the pavilion, cut in white on the black entrance portal, applied to glazed doors, and reduced to a tombstone totem outside the Old Library arcade. The entrance reads Fáilte above Welcome, with the Trinity College Dublin crest at the foot. Holding one mark legible from a hundred metres away on a red wall and from half a metre away on a ticketing panel is the whole job.
Panels that have to be read, not glanced at
Inside the Old Library the signage carries paragraphs rather than arrows. A panel headed Conserving the Library explains why the shelves are emptying, and that almost 200,000 early printed books have been removed. Another carries a plan of the Old Library over two floors. A third, in teal, offers the audio guide behind a QR code. Each is set into an existing timber doorcase, filling the opening and held within the joinery.
