Britain’s oldest museum reopens 7 November after a thrilling revamp
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Beyond the Grecian entrance lobby, Architect Rick Mather has shoehorned a huge, modern concrete-and-glass box into the courtyard. From the surrounding streets, this generous extension is invisible; the streetscape, a heady mix of medieval, Georgian, Regency and Victorian Oxford, is untouched.
Mather’s extension actually doubles the museum’s display space. Its six floors – one underground – boast no fewer than 39 new galleries, including four for temporary exhibitions, together with an education centre, offices and Oxford’s first rooftop restaurant. Yet, for all its space, clarity and light, this is a complex design. The galleries are set on two different axes (north-south and east-west) over the six floors. Some are three metres high, others six. They come together like a multidimensional jigsaw puzzle, the pieces connected by enclosed glass bridges passing through and over a great central stairwell, lit from above. This stairwell is itself a quietly spectacular space, one side of which is given over to a gleaming white architectural cliff into which are set flight after flight of white Portland stone stairs, linking the tiers of galleries and the rooftop restaurant. While the geometry is intricate, the effect is relaxed, engaging and generous.
While Mather’s Ashmolean addition is a magical combination of cool stone, oak floors, spruce plywood, polished plaster, steel, glass and zinc, all its elements have been brought together with a lightness of touch. This is a characteristic of Mather buildings, from his Zen restaurants of the 1980s to the new Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, but here it is also down to the way the architects and engineers have tucked the mechanical and electrical services into the walls. So floor-to-ceiling heights are as generous as they can be, while what Mather calls his “fat walls” double as recessed exhibition spaces. The result is a building in which every last inch is hard at work, while giving the opposite impression.
Christopher Brown, director of the museum since 1998, and Mather have not only brought fresh life to the Ashmolean; they have also given Oxford a fine new public place where visitors can meet, eat and while away rainy days rummaging happily through one of the country’s great treasure chests. The fact that this enchanting museum is also an active seat of research and scholarship only adds to its lustre, while the reality of seeing so many objects – squirrelled away for too many years – out on display will make the Ashmolean a museum to return to, time and again.
Excerpted from an article by Jonathan Glancey for guardian.co.uk
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