Glór, in the county town of Ennis, is County Clare’s flagship arts venue. Since opening in 2001, the 485- seat theatre has played host to everyone from the Irish National Opera to country music legend John Prine. But it always had one slightly unusual feature.

“The main entrance was curiously sited, facing away from the park and historic town centre,” says Keith Williams, founder and director of London-based Keith Williams Architects. When the practice won a 2015 competition to design a library and municipal art gallery next to Glór, it was an opportunity not just to establish a new cultural nexus, but also to reorientate it towards the town. “It was about improving visibility and really redefining this edge of Ennis.”

The result is the DeValera Library and Súil Gallery (meaning “eye” in Gaelic), completed in 2024. The three- storey linear building occupies a narrow site to the west of Glór (meaning “voice”), splaying out like an axe head to the south. The library takes up most of this plan, while Súil sits to the north, nestling against the theatre.

Here, a colonnaded entrance portico acts as a new front door for Glór, presenting a welcoming face to visitors walking across from the park. “We wanted to create a new civic frontage that united all three buildings,” says Williams. The voice would be joined by the eye and the written word. “We call them the primary colours of the arts – the visual, the literary, and performance.”

The main elevations of the new buildings are wrapped in a sweeping 10m-high wall of precast concrete. “Glór is quite a lightweight structure, with areas of render and metal cladding, and we felt we needed to contrast with that. We wanted to show that this was an important civic building that would be around for half a century and more. In Ireland, big public buildings – the courts, churches and bridges – tend to be in pale stone, often Irish limestone. We wanted to continue that tradition, but reinterpret it and make it feel more contemporary.”

The single-skin white precast panels are up to 6m x 1.5m – “as big as we could reasonably make them and get them to site” – with a continuous joint 4m above ground level. The upper panels are polished while the lower band is acid-etched with ribbed elements. “The factory conditions allowed us to get incredibly fine jointing details and finishes – the ribbed texture is very, very finely wrought.” The panels curve gently as the facade follows the line of the site, before bending more sharply around the wider southern end of the building.

The question of the role of public libraries in a digital world loomed large over the project. “Fifteen years ago, everybody was predicting the end of the book. That hasn’t proven to be the case, but what the balance between books and other types of media will be in 20 or 50 years’ time, we can only guess at. Our approach has been to create a host space that allows flexibility and change.”

Internal columns have been kept to a minimum, with grids of up to 9.8m x 7.8m. A 250mm-deep two-way spanning slab is supported on 550mm-deep downstand beams, with services running in the raised floor above the slab. The structure has been left largely exposed, with the downstand beams a defining feature of the interiors. High-quality phenolic-faced boards were used in the front-of-house areas to leave a smooth sheen. Proprietary sleeves were used for the formwork for the round columns, which were cast in single, floor-to-floor pours.

The structural concrete includes locally sourced aggregates and 20% GGBS, in addition to 15% limestone powder, which reduced the cement content of the concrete, and therefore its embodied carbon. This was measured at 750kgCOe/m². The thermal mass of the exposed concrete also helps to reduce energy consumption. “We wanted to create an almost entirely naturally ventilated building, and having a structure that acts as a heat sink and cool store is a very good way of doing that,” says Williams.

Early indications suggest that, in Ireland at least, the demise of the library has been greatly exaggerated. It regularly receives 800 visitors a day, and over 1,000 on weekends – not bad for a town with 27,000 residents.
This popularity has had knock-on benefits for Williams: “A couple of months ago, I was staying in a hotel in Limerick, the nearest city. The receptionist said to me, ‘My boy loves that building – he plays in it all the time’. And I got an upgrade to a massive suite! Normally you don’t want to admit you’re an architect
in case someone takes a dislike to your building …”

Interview by Nick Jones

Photos Ste Murray