This year Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, designed by McCullough Mulvin, is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a weekend programme of talks, events, performances, and conversation reflecting on the organisation’s forty-year journey. On Saturday 10th June at 12:30pm, Valerie Mulvin will take part in the panel discussion "How to Build a Studio" with Ruairí O Cuív, Gerard Byrne, and Ellen Rowley, discussing the making and impact of TBG+S and the importance of studio spaces.

In 1993, McCullough Mulvin Architects was commissioned by Temple Bar Galley + Studios to augment the building in Temple Bar. The brief sought a quality studio environment of thirty individual rooms and the provision of a new street-facing gallery. The building was, as architect Valerie Mulvin notes, ‘a hugely important part of our life and our development as architects.’ TBG+S was to be an anchor building in the newly formed Temple Bar Cultural Quarter, housing 24 arts organisations, funded by European Structural Funds, leading to the creation of many new public cultural buildings in Temple Bar, by talented young architects in the early 1990’s. Today, TBG+S remains an exemplar studio and gallery building. The studios are light-filled and spacious; the gallery is easy to access, and flexible to the demands of contemporary art and exhibition display. Part of the building’s magic is its support of an artist’s community right in the centre of the city. However, over the last decade or more, the city has lost many studio spaces. And though there are various plans for new studio provision on the horizon, these have yet to manifest. The need to provide studio spaces of decent quality, various scales and secure tenure, in the city, has never seemed more apparent and urgent.

Tickets can be booked through Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.