Colm Murray

Grangegorman Histories, Site and Society 1770 - 2012

Research Supervisor: Mary Ann Bolger, Niamh Ann Kelly, Brian Ward

Colm Murray has degrees in Architecture, Conservation, Planning and Public Administration.

His doctoral research, co-funded by Grangegorman Histories / TU Dublin scholarship, is on the architectural history of St. Brendan’s Hospital. It examine evidence from the various surviving and demolished buildings and the institutions which commissioned them, to understand the relationship of building design to society, through the lenses of meaning, comfort, urban impact, the difficulty in treating mental illness with architecture, and the day-to-day spatial experience of the institution.

Colm was the architecture officer with the Heritage Council 2005-2023. A career-long interest in the process of ascribing value to places, led to a research scholarship at the Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, in Spring 2016. This investigated the philosophical origins of value ascription for heritage, in the context of the issues raised for the conservation of special places in international good practice charters and explored the interrelation between intrinsic and instrumental values used in place conservation.

He won the IPA Whitaker School Postgraduate Student of the Year award 2019 for his dissertation entitled ‘The Social and Public Value of Heritage’.

He has tutored and lectured in architecture, heritage and planning at School of Architecture and planning at University College Dublin, TU Dublin (then Dublin Institute of Technology) and Waterford Institute of Technology, and at the Schools of Archaeology and Sociology in the University of Galway.

He worked as a National Monuments architect with the Office of Public Works, from 2001 until 2005, as an architectural heritage advisor with Dúchas, and carried out town and county surveys and quality assurance contracts for the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, his introduction to architectural history.

Publications