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."

LECTURE AT THE AGE UK CONFERENCE

APRIL 2013

Niall McLaughlin was the invited speaker at the Age UK Conference entitled ‘Later Life: Better Health and Care in Tough Times”. The subject of the talk was the role of the architect in designing for dementia, focusing on insights gain from the design of the Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Dublin, as well as the practice’s consultation work for the London Borough of Camden in their design for new residential care homes. The lecture also touched on broader themes of how we develop spatial understanding and language from birth and how this abstract awareness is affected with the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease.