IT WAS ONCE THE MAGNETIC OBSERVATORY AT TCD
I have made a few attempts to get close enough to photograph this building but every time the gates were locked and today was no different. I had a small camera so was able to photograph through the railings but I was very much constrained.
When the New Library on the Trinity Campus was completed in 1967 the west side of the complex faced – across Fellows’ Garden – a small building of Portland stone in the style of a classical Grecian Doric temple. This building was the Magnetic Observatory, and was built in 1837 by the architect Frederick Darley for the purposes of conducting experiments in magnetic research.
All the materials used in its construction had to be devoid of magnetic influence, and so, copper, brass and gun-metal were substituted for iron. Lloyd’s son Humphrey was Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at the time, and the building was his laboratory. One of Lloyd’s particular interests was geomagnetism, and he, with the astronomer Edward Sabine, established a global network of magnetic observatories. Together they were the first to confirm the link between solar activity and magnetic disturbances here on Earth.
At the time of its construction the Observatory stood in what was then the garden of the Provost’s House. Thirty years later – in 1867 – Humphrey himself became Provost of Trinity, and lived in that house until his death in 1881. An earlier post referred to the then Taoiseach Eamon de Valera formally opening the Magnetic Observatory as a manuscripts room in 1957, the building having been used as a map store since 1912.
From the completion of the New Library in 1967 until 1971, when the Observatory was removed to make room for the construction of the new Arts and Social Science Building, Fellows’ Garden was bounded on three sides by Library buildings – the New Library, the Old Library, and the Manuscripts Room and 1937 Reading Room.
Soon after its dismantling the Magnetic Observatory was gifted by TCD to University College Dublin, and it was rebuilt, stone by stone, on the Belfield campus between 1974 and 1975. After a refurbishment in 2003 which saw the building converted into a cinema, it now houses the Frank O’Kane Film Centre.
