The Irish Times

Dublin was a very different place in 1961 when Paul Koralek won an international competition to design a new library for Trinity College. Other than Busáras, the city had no modern buildings; its Georgian fabric was still intact, mainly because - as one visiting English critic observed later - "the Irish were too poor to pull it down". The new library was Trinity's first building project for 30 years. As one of the few libraries entitled to receive a copy of every book published in Britain and Ireland, Trinity needed extra storage space to house more than 820,000 volumes. Reading rooms with 469 spaces were also required for a then much smaller student population of 2,600.