Lecturing at the recently established Royal College of Science in Dublin in 1868, John Ruskin declared that one of the chief reasons for his accepting an invitation to do so was that it allowed him ‘to stand near the beautiful building…which was the first realization I had the joy to see of the principles I had, until then, been endeavouring to teach.’ The edifice to which Ruskin referred is Trinity College Dublin’s Museum Building, now a venerable 170 years old but judged a radical instance of new design when first constructed. Writing in The Irish Builder in May 1866, Sir Thomas Drew declared it to be ‘a great work, most important in its influence on the arts in this country . . . To this remarkable building and to this alone we trace the inauguration of the great revolution in public taste which has since taken place.’ Even while still a work in progress, the Museum Building was exciting comment, William Allingham writing in May 1855, to William Michael Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel), ‘Yesterday in Dublin I saw but hastily the part-finished building in Trinity College, which is after Ruskin’s heart. Style early Venetian, I suppose, with numberless capitals delicately carved over with holly-leaves, shamrocks, various flowers, birds and so on. There are also circular frames here and there in the wall, at present empty, to be filled no doubt with eyes of coloured stone. Ruskin has written to the architect, a young man, expressing his high approval of the plans; so by-and-by all you cognoscenti will be rushing over to examine the Stones of Dublin.’ The origins of the building went back a couple of decades before its construction. In 1833 the college’s board launched a competition for the design of a museum to house  the geological and other collections which until then had been kept in a room in Regent House, the large block through which most visitors enter the campus. A number of architects submitted proposals, while others – not least Decimus Burton – declined invitations to do so. Eventually, in April 1853, a scheme from the firm of Deane, Woodward and Deane was accepted (although John McCurdy, who was the official college architect, insisted on taking credit for the original floor plans).  

The firm of Deane, Woodward and Deane – or more correctly ‘Sir Thomas Deane Knt., Son and Woodward’ – was founded in Cork in 1851 when the aforementioned Sir Thomas Deane took his son Thomas Newenham Deane and the Dublin-based architect Benjamin Woodward into partnership. Two years later the firm won the job of designing Trinity College’s Museum Building and in consequence it opened an office in the capital which thereafter became more important than that in Cork. Further commissions soon followed, not least for the Oxford Museum which, like that in Trinity College Dublin, is indebted to the Venetian Gothic style championed by John Ruskin. In the case of Trinity College, the exterior of the building is relatively plain, faced in blocks of Wicklow granite and broken by sequences of arched windows, those looking over College Park centred on sets of four, one above the over, the upper group also being given a balcony. The pilasters, capitals, voussoirs and soffits are all of Portland Stone, as are the sequence of roundels filled with coloured marbles. In every case, these features benefit from elaborate and individual design (notice, for example, how no two pilaster capitals are the same), exquisite carving work executed by a ‘Mr Roe’ of Lambeth and Cork-born brothers John and James O’Shea, also known for their playful capitals on the facade of the  former Kildare Street Club visible on the other side of College Park. Flanked by arched windows and beneath another balcony, the main entrance to the building has a tympanum of Caen Stone bearing the college crest.  Costing £12,768, three shillings and seven pence, the exterior dressings of the Museum Building were responsible for almost half its eventual figure of £27,980, six shillings and eight pence. 

Since being constructed, parts of the Museum Building’s interior have undergone modification, with many of the larger rooms being subdivided. What remains unchanged is the great, double-height stair hall, approached via a vestibule, the latter containing among other things the skeleton of an Irish Elk. The walls, originally intended to be of rubble masonry covered in plaster, are lined in Caen stone, selected by the architects as being more appropriate to the space. The Imperial staircase of Portland Stone leads to facing first-floor, triple-arched galleries supported by similar arcaded screens on the floor below. The columns are of different coloured polished stone, all of it Irish except for a dark-red serpentinite from Cornwall. There are 14 full columns which cost £13 each, 18  half-columns (£8 each) and 98 feet of Connemara marble used for the stair and balcony handrails (£122, 10 shillings). This great space is lit by glazed oculi set within a pair of shallow domes decorated with polychromatic brick, their central supporting arch carried on stone colonettes. Particularly in consequence of these domes, the impression is given of a harmonious marriage between the Venetian Gothic and Hispanic Moorish styles. Above the vestibule arches, for example, can be seen a series of small six-sided star openings; these are part of the architects’ original ventilation system reminiscent of those found in old hammams. Trinity College’s Museum Building has rightly been admired since first built (and, as mentioned above, even before its completion). The place is still much in use as part of a working university, which explains the somewhat distracting clutter. But that staircase and those soaring domes…

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