The Luan Gallery Athlone | Keith Williams Architects

The project for the new 630m2 gallery for contemporary art is located on a spectacular site overlooking the River Shannon, adjacent the town’s historic bridge, castle and the Catholic church of St Peter & St Paul. The scheme adapts the town’s historic 1897 Father Matthew Hall into a new gallery, adds a new wing to provide temporary white box gallery space and adds a river ambulatory overlooking the Shannon linking the two spaces. The Luan Gallery has been established to promote a dynamic contemporary visual arts programme of both established and emerging artists. The Luan has already developed strong links with Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art enabling it to bring major contemporary art to the regions. Built to designs by William Tanner the 1897, the original Father Mathew Hall was commissioned as a temperance hall. It was hoped through providing a centre offering recreational facilities and a temperance café that workers from the nearby woollen mills would eschew the public house and remain sober. Subsequently the hall became a concert venue, and then in 1947 it was handed over to Athlone Town Council, the upper floor becoming the town hall until 1949 when a branch library opened on the ground floor. In 1980 the entire building was renovated and re-opened as a library, but has been vacant since 2004 when the library re-located to the new Civic Centre also by Keith Williams.