Níall McLaughlin
Architects

RIBA EAST AWARD WINNER

MAY 2022

Magdalene College Library has been awarded a RIBA East Award. The New College Library for Magdalene College contains a study space and library, archive and picture gallery. Our scheme appears as an arrangement of simple brick volumes which echo the typical gabled architecture of the existing College. The main library is a suite of interconnecting rooms lined with bookcases, reading desks and galleries, arranged on a tartan grid between interconnecting passageways. Three main reading rooms organise the principal circulation route through the library from the three-storey entrance hall, to a double-height central reading room and up to a long single-height room overlooking the garden.

The RIBA judges commented "A brief to create a college library with a lifespan of 400 years – to replace a library gifted to Magdalene by Samuel Pepys 300 years previously – is no small task. Niall McLaughlin Architects have certainly risen to the challenge with this deft and inspiring temple to learning."

RIBA JOURNAL FEATURE ON THE BISHOP EDWARD KING CHAPEL

JULY 2013

Under the tile ‘Happy Ending’, Jan-Carlos Kucharek has reviewed the Chapel for Ripon Theological College in Oxfordshire. The article reflects on the conversations with the client to develop the design, together with the stories and architectural precedents that worked together to inform the building’s final form. Kucharek writes, “…there’s no questioning the positive effect of McLaughlin’s £2.6m chapel on the picturesque Ripon College, both functionally and aesthetically.” He goes on to describe the elliptical form, accessed on the diagonal between the long and short axes, as “a master stroke.”