From remodelling much-loved institutions with new galleries to carving a new exhibition space – complete with vertigo-inducing viewing platform – into the summit of a mountain, architects are radically changing the look of museums.
Fuelled by the Heritage Lottery Fund, millennium celebrations and Olympic legacy projects, the sector has enjoyed a building boom over the past 20 years, with major museums modernising and expanding, and many British towns and cities revitalising Victorian-era collections or kickstarting regeneration projects with new cultural buildings.
We talked to a number of leading architects about how their work is transforming museums at home and abroad.
Gareth Hoskins, managing director Hoskins Architects, Glasgow
Sadly Hoskins died shortly after this article was published. A tribute has been posted on the company's website.
Contemporary projects are increasingly being dedicated to specific people, locations and events, such as the exhibition centre Hoskins Architects designed for the Culloden Battlefield.
And according to Gareth Hoskins, the character of collections and a sense of place are the distinct drivers that differentiate museum design from everyday architecture.
“We’re currently redeveloping the David Livingstone Museum at his birthplace in Blantyre and a large part of that design is influenced by the magnificent landscape there,” he says. “So much depends on how visitors arrive at a place like that and how they journey through it.”
Hoskins is in no doubt about the power of museum buildings to surprise and delight. As a young boy, he spent many a happy hour in the National Museum of Scotland pushing buttons on its model steam train displays.
Years later, in the early days of his architectural practice, he secured a contract to devise a long-term strategy for the refurbishment of the Edinburgh building.
“It was a huge leap of faith at the time,” he says of the project, which eventually com- prised four phases of work. Tendering processes forced the firm to reapply for each stage with no guarantees of automatic reselection.
“There are companies who are less focused on design who are quite happy to elbow their way into the heritage sector by using their commercial work to underpin the fee bidding, and blow design quality out of the water,” he says.
“Museums need to be fully aware of what’s involved in the process. Sometimes, curators, directors and estates teams have a limited understanding about what the pro- grammes and budgets really entail.”
The Hoskins approach is to liaise with local authorities and other bodies to formulate feasibility studies and to ensure every- one is referring to the same plan.
The firm has designed new exhibition and visitor facilities at the Weltmuseum in Vienna, due for completion next year, and is developing a brief for a proposed new £120m museum for the sultan of Oman.
At the other end of the financial scale, talks are under way to help Discovery Point in Dundee consolidate its plans for a £5m redevelopment; even the initial discussions were typical of the Hoskins no-stone- unturned methodology.
“We were unsuccessful in the bidding for the new Victoria and Albert Museum build- ing in Dundee,” he says. “The Discovery is adjacent to the site so we popped in to ask if they wanted to give some thought about responding to what was soon to be happening next door on the waterfront.”
Peter Irmscher, senior designer, Zaha Hadid Architects, London
The majority of museums rely on good public transport links to ensure the maximum number of visitors stand the chance of enjoying what’s on view.
The Messner Mountain Museum Corones is different: sitting some 2,275 metres above sea level in South Tyrol, Italy, it is accessible by just two routes – a hike through the Dolomites or a scary cable car ride.
A small cave entrance takes hardy enthusiasts inside the mountain summit, where the museum cascades down through the rocks to tell the story of master climber Reinhold Messner. Visitors later return to the open air to stand on a platform offering vertiginous views.
“The internal glacier cave that houses the exhibition reflects the surrounding landscape,” says Peter Irmscher. “Its shape suggests it was formed over thousands of years but we built it in just three.”
Construction was possible for just five months during each of those three years because of heavy snowfall, he adds.
The original brief was just to provide the platform but the project gathered momentum when Messner expressed a wish for an exhibition that chronicled his rise to fame.
“He tells inspiring stories about the extreme points of the planet that he has explored,” says Irmscher. “You need to visualise amazing spaces just to keep up with him.”
Mark Hammond, head of cultural sector, Purcell, London
What begin as small but perfectly formed museum initiatives often lead to long-term relationships, with architects retained to help ambitious institutions through their growing pains.
Mark Hammond has been working with the Wallace Collection in London for 16 years, their most impressive joint venture being the remodelled Great Gallery.
“Among other things, we reintroduced natural daylight, which had been lost when air conditioning was installed in the 1970s,” says Hammond.
“The equipment and air ducts are still of a similar size but we developed innovative ways of routing them to free up space for other things.”
Hammond worked closely with Purcell’s in-house heritage consultants on an analysis of the building.
“As archaeologists and historians, they assessed the significance of component parts to enable us to set ground rules regarding what needed to be kept, what was of less significance and what might have been detrimental to the heritage value of the space,” he says.
But sometimes things don’t go to plan, he adds. During the practice’s period as executive architect to design firm CF Moller at the new Sammy Ofer wing in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, builders made an unexpected discovery.
“You sometimes receive calls from some- one on site saying, ‘We’re going to have to take another wall down’, but one day a contractor rang to say, ‘We’ve found 16 skeletons and they’re definitely human’,” says Hammond.
“They turned out to be 16th- or 17th- century sailors. We gave them a decent burial in a cemetery at Leytonstone.”
The new three-level interior of the Grade 1-listed west wing provides public access to the naval archives, says Hammond, who adds that philanthropy and sponsorship on such a scale will take on greater significance in tough financial times.
But funding is filtering through some surprising channels, he says. “We’re doing a project with the Stow Maries aerodrome in Essex where buildings have remained unaltered since 1919.
"It received £1.5m in Libor fines levied on the banks, which has allowed people to think about not only how the site can be restored but also how to generate income long term.”
Clare Hughes, partner, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Bath
A former film-maker and curator, Clare Hughes uses her background in visual storytelling to turn new and refurbished buildings into more engaging participatory experiences.
“Narrative is the key,” she says. “Often, the architectural response to a brief will be spatial and conceptual, but my response is focused on what visitors will take away from a visit – something that architects don’t always consider.”
Hughes – a former BBC television and radio director – went back to her roots to help her firm forge a new future for the east wing of London’s Alexandra Palace.
“We could have installed a black box as a gallery but I wanted to develop a design language to bring out the stories and express the history, not obscure it,” she says.
Those stories relate to the building’s past as a 19th-century entertainment venue and theatre as well as the early home of the BBC, she adds.
“I suggested taking the language of the TV studio into the refurbishment plans, using temporary elements such as flats and scenery.
“Rather than having a beautiful welcome desk that looked like it might have come from the Royal Academy, for example, I suggested we have a pop-up version that could be moved around,” Hughes adds.
Her current year-long Winston Churchill Fellowship research mission is documented in her online Reimagine Museums project, which considers possible futures of cultural buildings.
Jim Eyre, founding director, WilkinsonEyre, London
“Architects like to work with cultural organisations because they deal with people who have a vested interest in working in their building,” says Jim Eyre.
Eyre’s practice was hired to breathe new life into the New Bodleian – now the Weston – library in Oxford as the archival storage had fallen below required standards.
The building is in a sensitive setting – when originally designed as a depository by Giles Gilbert Scott, there was little attempt to engage with the wider Broad Street environment, which also incorporates Nicholas Hawksmoor’s neoclassical Clarendon Building and Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre.
“The library had a plinth running around it and high sills that said ‘keep out’,” says Eyre.
The idea of turning the edifice into a library of special collections with new reading rooms and exhibition spaces (see p57) started to emerge.
“The key was to open up the ground floor facade, giving it a welcoming public face – this was a shift for the university when you think of its colleges having tiny openings in the street you’re not encouraged to enter,” says Eyre.
User-friendliness was also at the centre of WilkinsonEyre’s work on new galleries and visitor spaces at the Wellcome Collection in London.
“People veered off towards the cafe or shop because it was not obvious you could access exhibition spaces on the upper floors,” says Eyre.
His solution was simple: a non-concentric spiral staircase in steel that entices visitors into moving onward and upward.
Hugh Broughton, director, Hugh Broughton Architects, London
The key to successful museum makeovers is a thorough understanding of the original architects’ intentions for use as inspiration for new ideas, says Hugh Broughton.
His firm won a Riba competition to design a Heritage Lottery Fund-backed east wing for the Maidstone Museum & Bentlif Art Gallery in Kent, complete with improved educational and retail facilities and better use of storage and exhibition spaces.
“At Maidstone, the design appears radically at odds with the host architecture – it is a gold and glass construction attached to Queen Anne brick gable elevations,” Broughton says.
“But the connections with the past are there in the design details, even if they have been twisted in a contemporary manner.”
Broughton’s firm also won a competition to design a gallery for the Portland Collection on the Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire. The challenge was to ensure a new facility – due to open in March – sat comfortably in a courtyard of attractive architecture, but Broughton’s original design had to undergo radical alterations.
“The new gallery is set within the walls of a long former racehorse training building and the original plan had been to expose the inner brickwork, but there was some nervousness about damp so we redesigned and used top-lighting to add drama and volume,” he says.
Broughton is currently redeveloping the Henry Moore Foundation store at Perry Green in Hertfordshire and, rather than planning a grand new edifice to house all the functions of the facility, he has reshaped a series of smaller structures.
“This is a positive planning feature as we aren’t cluttering up the countryside with new construction work,” he says of the site, which reopens in April.
“The artist’s name obviously adds a frisson to the exercise but we weren’t competing with the sculpture; the building had to be completely reticent, while reflecting the modernist era in which Moore worked, as well as responding to the rural context.”
Fuelled by the Heritage Lottery Fund, millennium celebrations and Olympic legacy projects, the sector has enjoyed a building boom over the past 20 years, with major museums modernising and expanding, and many British towns and cities revitalising Victorian-era collections or kickstarting regeneration projects with new cultural buildings.
We talked to a number of leading architects about how their work is transforming museums at home and abroad.
Gareth Hoskins, managing director Hoskins Architects, Glasgow
Sadly Hoskins died shortly after this article was published. A tribute has been posted on the company's website.
Contemporary projects are increasingly being dedicated to specific people, locations and events, such as the exhibition centre Hoskins Architects designed for the Culloden Battlefield.
And according to Gareth Hoskins, the character of collections and a sense of place are the distinct drivers that differentiate museum design from everyday architecture.
“We’re currently redeveloping the David Livingstone Museum at his birthplace in Blantyre and a large part of that design is influenced by the magnificent landscape there,” he says. “So much depends on how visitors arrive at a place like that and how they journey through it.”
Hoskins is in no doubt about the power of museum buildings to surprise and delight. As a young boy, he spent many a happy hour in the National Museum of Scotland pushing buttons on its model steam train displays.
Years later, in the early days of his architectural practice, he secured a contract to devise a long-term strategy for the refurbishment of the Edinburgh building.
“It was a huge leap of faith at the time,” he says of the project, which eventually com- prised four phases of work. Tendering processes forced the firm to reapply for each stage with no guarantees of automatic reselection.
“There are companies who are less focused on design who are quite happy to elbow their way into the heritage sector by using their commercial work to underpin the fee bidding, and blow design quality out of the water,” he says.
“Museums need to be fully aware of what’s involved in the process. Sometimes, curators, directors and estates teams have a limited understanding about what the pro- grammes and budgets really entail.”
The Hoskins approach is to liaise with local authorities and other bodies to formulate feasibility studies and to ensure every- one is referring to the same plan.
The firm has designed new exhibition and visitor facilities at the Weltmuseum in Vienna, due for completion next year, and is developing a brief for a proposed new £120m museum for the sultan of Oman.
At the other end of the financial scale, talks are under way to help Discovery Point in Dundee consolidate its plans for a £5m redevelopment; even the initial discussions were typical of the Hoskins no-stone- unturned methodology.
“We were unsuccessful in the bidding for the new Victoria and Albert Museum build- ing in Dundee,” he says. “The Discovery is adjacent to the site so we popped in to ask if they wanted to give some thought about responding to what was soon to be happening next door on the waterfront.”
Peter Irmscher, senior designer, Zaha Hadid Architects, London
The majority of museums rely on good public transport links to ensure the maximum number of visitors stand the chance of enjoying what’s on view.
The Messner Mountain Museum Corones is different: sitting some 2,275 metres above sea level in South Tyrol, Italy, it is accessible by just two routes – a hike through the Dolomites or a scary cable car ride.
A small cave entrance takes hardy enthusiasts inside the mountain summit, where the museum cascades down through the rocks to tell the story of master climber Reinhold Messner. Visitors later return to the open air to stand on a platform offering vertiginous views.
“The internal glacier cave that houses the exhibition reflects the surrounding landscape,” says Peter Irmscher. “Its shape suggests it was formed over thousands of years but we built it in just three.”
Construction was possible for just five months during each of those three years because of heavy snowfall, he adds.
The original brief was just to provide the platform but the project gathered momentum when Messner expressed a wish for an exhibition that chronicled his rise to fame.
“He tells inspiring stories about the extreme points of the planet that he has explored,” says Irmscher. “You need to visualise amazing spaces just to keep up with him.”
Mark Hammond, head of cultural sector, Purcell, London
What begin as small but perfectly formed museum initiatives often lead to long-term relationships, with architects retained to help ambitious institutions through their growing pains.
Mark Hammond has been working with the Wallace Collection in London for 16 years, their most impressive joint venture being the remodelled Great Gallery.
“Among other things, we reintroduced natural daylight, which had been lost when air conditioning was installed in the 1970s,” says Hammond.
“The equipment and air ducts are still of a similar size but we developed innovative ways of routing them to free up space for other things.”
Hammond worked closely with Purcell’s in-house heritage consultants on an analysis of the building.
“As archaeologists and historians, they assessed the significance of component parts to enable us to set ground rules regarding what needed to be kept, what was of less significance and what might have been detrimental to the heritage value of the space,” he says.
But sometimes things don’t go to plan, he adds. During the practice’s period as executive architect to design firm CF Moller at the new Sammy Ofer wing in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, builders made an unexpected discovery.
“You sometimes receive calls from some- one on site saying, ‘We’re going to have to take another wall down’, but one day a contractor rang to say, ‘We’ve found 16 skeletons and they’re definitely human’,” says Hammond.
“They turned out to be 16th- or 17th- century sailors. We gave them a decent burial in a cemetery at Leytonstone.”
The new three-level interior of the Grade 1-listed west wing provides public access to the naval archives, says Hammond, who adds that philanthropy and sponsorship on such a scale will take on greater significance in tough financial times.
But funding is filtering through some surprising channels, he says. “We’re doing a project with the Stow Maries aerodrome in Essex where buildings have remained unaltered since 1919.
"It received £1.5m in Libor fines levied on the banks, which has allowed people to think about not only how the site can be restored but also how to generate income long term.”
Clare Hughes, partner, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Bath
A former film-maker and curator, Clare Hughes uses her background in visual storytelling to turn new and refurbished buildings into more engaging participatory experiences.
“Narrative is the key,” she says. “Often, the architectural response to a brief will be spatial and conceptual, but my response is focused on what visitors will take away from a visit – something that architects don’t always consider.”
Hughes – a former BBC television and radio director – went back to her roots to help her firm forge a new future for the east wing of London’s Alexandra Palace.
“We could have installed a black box as a gallery but I wanted to develop a design language to bring out the stories and express the history, not obscure it,” she says.
Those stories relate to the building’s past as a 19th-century entertainment venue and theatre as well as the early home of the BBC, she adds.
“I suggested taking the language of the TV studio into the refurbishment plans, using temporary elements such as flats and scenery.
“Rather than having a beautiful welcome desk that looked like it might have come from the Royal Academy, for example, I suggested we have a pop-up version that could be moved around,” Hughes adds.
Her current year-long Winston Churchill Fellowship research mission is documented in her online Reimagine Museums project, which considers possible futures of cultural buildings.
Jim Eyre, founding director, WilkinsonEyre, London
“Architects like to work with cultural organisations because they deal with people who have a vested interest in working in their building,” says Jim Eyre.
Eyre’s practice was hired to breathe new life into the New Bodleian – now the Weston – library in Oxford as the archival storage had fallen below required standards.
The building is in a sensitive setting – when originally designed as a depository by Giles Gilbert Scott, there was little attempt to engage with the wider Broad Street environment, which also incorporates Nicholas Hawksmoor’s neoclassical Clarendon Building and Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre.
“The library had a plinth running around it and high sills that said ‘keep out’,” says Eyre.
The idea of turning the edifice into a library of special collections with new reading rooms and exhibition spaces (see p57) started to emerge.
“The key was to open up the ground floor facade, giving it a welcoming public face – this was a shift for the university when you think of its colleges having tiny openings in the street you’re not encouraged to enter,” says Eyre.
User-friendliness was also at the centre of WilkinsonEyre’s work on new galleries and visitor spaces at the Wellcome Collection in London.
“People veered off towards the cafe or shop because it was not obvious you could access exhibition spaces on the upper floors,” says Eyre.
His solution was simple: a non-concentric spiral staircase in steel that entices visitors into moving onward and upward.
Hugh Broughton, director, Hugh Broughton Architects, London
The key to successful museum makeovers is a thorough understanding of the original architects’ intentions for use as inspiration for new ideas, says Hugh Broughton.
His firm won a Riba competition to design a Heritage Lottery Fund-backed east wing for the Maidstone Museum & Bentlif Art Gallery in Kent, complete with improved educational and retail facilities and better use of storage and exhibition spaces.
“At Maidstone, the design appears radically at odds with the host architecture – it is a gold and glass construction attached to Queen Anne brick gable elevations,” Broughton says.
“But the connections with the past are there in the design details, even if they have been twisted in a contemporary manner.”
Broughton’s firm also won a competition to design a gallery for the Portland Collection on the Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire. The challenge was to ensure a new facility – due to open in March – sat comfortably in a courtyard of attractive architecture, but Broughton’s original design had to undergo radical alterations.
“The new gallery is set within the walls of a long former racehorse training building and the original plan had been to expose the inner brickwork, but there was some nervousness about damp so we redesigned and used top-lighting to add drama and volume,” he says.
Broughton is currently redeveloping the Henry Moore Foundation store at Perry Green in Hertfordshire and, rather than planning a grand new edifice to house all the functions of the facility, he has reshaped a series of smaller structures.
“This is a positive planning feature as we aren’t cluttering up the countryside with new construction work,” he says of the site, which reopens in April.
“The artist’s name obviously adds a frisson to the exercise but we weren’t competing with the sculpture; the building had to be completely reticent, while reflecting the modernist era in which Moore worked, as well as responding to the rural context.”