The Book of Trinity College Dublin 1591-1891Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland)
History
The Book of Trinity College Dublin 1591-1891
Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland)
Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland)
The name of the accomplished architect who designed the west façade
of the College is, strange to say, lost to history; but we know at
least that Sir William Chambers, the architect of Somerset House,
designed the buildings looking on Parliament Square, as well as the
fronts of the Theatre and Chapel, and that the work was carried
out from his drawings--for he never visited Ireland--by his very
accomplished assistant, a Lancashire artist of the name of Mayers,
who also designed and superintended the internal decorations
of the Theatre and the Chapel. There is good reason to suppose
that some of the ornamental work of the façade, by whomsoever
originally designed, was carried out by Smith, the modest architect
or handicraftsman who prepared the plans for the Provost’s House
in 1759. There are two large clocks--separate timepieces--placed
over the inner and outer pediments of the façade respectively,
showing the time within and without the College. They are built
upon horizontal cast-iron plates, with 7in. main wheels, dead
beat escapements, and electro-magnetic seconds. The pendulums are
connected by wire with the Observatory at Dunsink. The time is
indicated upon cast-iron dials, enamelled dark blue, and each 6ft.
6in. in diameter. Both these clocks were placed in their present
position in 1878.
The noble expanse of ground that is enclosed by the principal
buildings of the College is too large to be called a quadrangle,
being six hundred and ten feet long, by three hundred and forty
feet broad, at the widest part, and it is too irregular in shape
to be called a square. It is the survival of at least five more
ancient and less spacious enclosures--(1) the Old Square,[151]
built in 1685, and taken down in 1751 to make room for the present
handsome granite buildings known as Parliament Square, in grateful
memory of the source from which the funds had been provided for
the building; the Library Square, built in 1698, and the oldest
portion of the College buildings now in existence, and which was
itself divided into two quadrangles (2 and 3) by some new buildings
standing east and west, which were taken down in the middle of the
eighteenth century. The space between the present Dining Hall and
the Fellows’ Garden was also divided into two quadrangles (4 and
5) by the old Hall and the old Chapel, which formed a continuation
of these departed “New Buildings” to the westward, as far as the
centre of Parliament Square.
THE CHAPEL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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