Join Professor Christine Casey of Trinity College Dublin as she takes part in the Paul Mellon Centre’s Book Night.

Christine will present her new publication, Architecture and Artifice: The Crafted Surface in Eighteenth-Century Building Practice (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2025), in conversation with fellow authors Richard Ormond, Lynda Nead, Elizabeth Goldring and Sam Smiles.

Built between 1759 and 1762, the Provost’s House at Trinity College Dublin exemplifies the artistry and material sophistication of eighteenth-century Irish domestic architecture, while embodying a tension between public display and private seclusion. This paper, presented at Within|Without: The Archaeology of Partitions in the Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, on 18 October 2025, explores how its crafted façades and richly finished interiors reveal the illusionistic nature of materiality and the performance of architectural display in the period.