Layers of meaning: this addition to a local public library in Waterford adds a distinguishably new layer to the town's urban archaeology.

Historically, the architecture of Ireland reflects its cultural evolution with successive, discontinuous layers laid over each other, giving rise to stylistic tensions and unusual patterns of development. The dominant building material is stone--as the Irish architectural historian Maurice Craig noted, 'Nothing of any antiquity in Ireland is made of anything but stone, and nearly all the stone is grey'.* Ireland's recurring architectural leitmotif might be characterized as mass in the landscape, from megalithic tombs, to Celtic forts and churches and the Big Houses of the nineteenth century. Yet the modern era has witnessed great change. Over the past decade, Ireland's dynamic economy has not only served to reverse the nation's historic diaspora, but has also been the motive power behind an ambitious programme of public building energetically pursued by the current generation of Irish architects.

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Among those working to rediscover and promulgate a sense of regional identity are John McCullough and Valerie Mulvin, whose writings and buildings have long displayed what critic Shane O'Toole calls the 'palimpsestic potential' for architecture in Ireland. Their seminal 1987 publication The Lost Tradition documented an exhaustive knowledge of Irish building types and their built work includes Temple Bar Galleries (AR January 1993) and, more recently, the new Ussher Library at University College Dublin, projects distinguished by a concern for the nuances of urban context, tempered by a powerful abstraction of plane and volume.

The partnership's latest work is the remodelling and extension of Waterford City's public library, a typical upgrading of a local landmark that inventively yet sensitively adds another new layer to the city's urban archaeology. Built in 1905, the existing library is a squat two-storey structure occupying a corner site. The trim Neo-Classical facade is surmounted by a pediment on the main Lady Lane street side, imparting an appropriate air of municipal dignity to the pursuit of knowledge. Walls are made of smooth sawn Kilkenny limestone, but the varied tones of the stone, ranging from pearl grey to charcoal, give the building a curiously piebald appearance. On Bakehouse Lane, where the building turns the corner, a single-storey block faced in rusticated limestone was terminated by a small caretaker's house. Internally, the spaces were arranged around a double-height toplit reading room, but the plan was substantially altered during remedial works carried out in the 1970s.

The redevelopment incorporates a former undertaker's yard on an adjoining site to the west, extending the overall site into an L-shape. As a building type, the modest municipal library has been obliged to adapt or die, relentlessly swept along with the technologically changing times, and the brief called for the by now standard range of electronic facilities to complement the more conventional printed word. With the addition of the new site, the project offered great potential not just for physical expansion, but also for orchestrating an expressive juxtaposition between old and new. This is achieved through carefully layered interventions into the fabric and the skilful manipulation of section and light to create a new diagonal circulation route.

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The main initial move was to close up the existing entrance and transfer it to the new building, a generous three-storey block which completely fills the former undertaker's yard. The new part is wrapped in a smooth skin of limestone, establishing material continuity with the old building, but the size of blocks and the pattern of joints signify a new presence, as does the abstract quality of the facade, with large glazed openings incised into the mass of the stone. The new block contains a new entrance at ground level and a mezzanine that projects over the entrance hall like a protruding tongue. Above this is a new reading room with staff quarters on the topmost set back floor, which emerges out of the new section to anchor the existing building. The floors in the new block stop short of the rear wall on the north side to create a full-height void. Like the central toplit hall in the original building, this brings light flooding down into the interior. The hall, which houses the main reading room, is still the library's spatial focus, but has been opened up to become more permeable, with views over and through it from the floors above.

A new storey was also added on the Bakehouse Lane side, echoing the language of the new extension, so that it becomes a three-dimensional piece within the city, rather than simply a flat addition on Lady Lane alone. Internally, the mass of the exterior is dematerialized in the flowing sequence of airy, luminous spaces, though some sense of physical solidity is preserved in the raw boardmarked concrete walls and stone floors of the new extension. The central double-height reading room is lined in strips of black American walnut, a dark, sensuous timber which unifies and ennobles the space. Detailing is highly assured, with the different layers and materials playing off each other in a Scarpaesque manner, so that both new and old are clearly legible.

Through this astute remodelling and upgrading of a public institution for the new century, McCullough Mulvin add another very particular dimension to the rich, accretional nature of urban architecture in Ireland. C. S.

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* Quoted in an essay by Shane O'Toole, 'On Marked and Abandoned Ground--An Introduction to the Work of Eight Irish Architects', A+U, no 397, 10/03, p112