Architect：Mccullough Mulvin Architects

Location：Rush, Ireland

Project Year：2009

Category：Libraries

St Maur’s Church dominates the village green on the Western edge of the town of Rush. The work to convert it into Rush Library combined a careful investigation and conservation of the existing structure with a particular concern for the rescue of ordinary materials, making a distinctive intervention into it to hold the new facilities.

This is formed as an undulating walnut plane, which fills the nave running across the floor, and up on both sides; the shape is barely contained, pushing tensely against the shell of the existing building. On plan, it is like a clump of seaweed: reference to marine location; in section, it forms an inverted U - with two galleries, the space between them taut and formed like a city street, deforms the route from entrance to ‘altar’, forcing it to meander, glimpses of a coloured termination lost and found again - a central chandelier a reminder of the orthogonality of the plan. Externally, the churchyard became a garden; strips of concrete inset with names of the town and library interspersed with channels planted with grasses and vegetables, the spirit of the graveyard - and the town’s agricultural basis - extended for a new generation

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