Open House Weekend at Trinity College

Posted on: 13 October 2008

Trinity College will take part in the third annual Open House Dublin, along with New York, London and Toronto, this weekend from 16th – 19th October.   Each year, the staff and students of Trinity’s Department of History of Art and Architecture play an active role in this major architectural event, opening up the stunning TCD campus to the public.

Open House tours at Trinity College include a sculpture tour of the campus, led by Catherine Giltrap, Curator of the College Art Collections, tours of the TCD libraries, from historic to modern, led by Ellen Rowley, from the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and a special tour of the Common Room and Loos Bar by Dr. Edward McParland.

Also taking place this year is a guided evening walk, with the College’s buildings beautifully lit, with a different undergraduate student at each major building to continue the tour and  a special children’s tour of the campus, which will bring children through a typical college day ending with a mock ‘conferring ceremony’ in the College’s Exam Hall.

This year Open House weekend features close to 140 buildings and events, almost twice as many as last year with locations and events stretching beyond the city boundaries to Fingal, Ballymun, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and South Dublin. A major new event in this year’s programme is OPEN DEBATE – a public debate on Has Dublin changed for the better, which takes place on Thursday 16 October in Liberty Hall.

Other new aspects of Open House Dublin 2008 include OPEN SPACE, an extended programme of walking tours; CHILDREN’S OPEN HOUSE and CULTURSTRUCTION, a visual arts strand supported by Dublin City Council Arts Office as part of the Open Spaces programme, where four artists have been asked to create site-specific installations / performances to respond to the city’s architecture.

All events are free of charge, and only a small proportion will require pre-booking. A full programme of events is available at www.architecturefoundation.ie and at the Temple Bar Information Centre. Open House Dublin is presented by the Irish Architecture Foundation.