The £47 million revamp of Fowke’s Victorian museum, by a team led by Gareth Hoskins, restores the clarity of the building’s original plan.

The great conglomerate that is the National Museum of Scotland provides an interesting rebuke to the malignant architectural stereotype that has all “traditional” architecture down as cuddly and contextual, and all modernism placeless.

Standing on Chambers Street, Edinburgh’s museum quarter, we have, on the left: the somewhat forbidding exterior of the 1860s Royal Museum, an overscaled Florentine super-Romanesque palazzo with pantiles, designed by Captain Francis Fowke of the Royal Engineers (architect, too, of the Albert Hall in London) and dropped into Edinburgh’s delicate medieval fabric; and, on the right, the lively and friendly modernism of Benson & Forsyth’s 1998 Museum of Scotland, carefully accommodating and reflecting (as I remember Benson telling it) every twitch of Scottish architectural history, and almost every view and chipped kerb in Edinburgh.

Of course Benson & Forsyth’s contextual modernism here is curiously similar to its contextual modernism in Dublin and elsewhere. Nevertheless it was, and remains, a standard-bearer for the idea of a progressive Scottish architecture, all the more satisfying when Prince Charles resigned as the museum’s patron over his inability to — we assume — stick some placeless neoclassical grimness on to it.

Inside the two buildings, the paradox remains though reversed. Benson & Forsyth’s interior displays no modernist flexibility, but is densely and intimately moulded around its collection, to the extent that any reconsideration and re-presentation of “Scotland’s Story” would be likely to find itself fighting the architecture.

Next door, in contrast, the success of the £47 million-plus major refurbishment of Fowke’s building, by a team led by Gareth Hoskins Architects, is built upon the flexibility, adaptability and clarity of some proto-modernist thinking.

The plan is a three-dimensional tartan grid of main ground floor gallery spaces — and, above, voids — linked by corridors or elevated walkways that are, themselves, linear galleries. All are focused on the great, soaring and light-filled Grand Gallery, at the building’s entrance, its birdcage ironwork clearly displaying lessons learned from Paxton’s Crystal Palace.

This plan has, through the building’s 150-year history, proved remarkably durable and adaptable, hosting and outliving all manner of presentational and curatorial styles. Indeed, a significant part of Hoskins’ work has been to restore the clarity of the original plan, for galleries at the heart of the building had been enclosed and climate-controlled for paying exhibitions. These have now been tucked up into the upper level and the central galleries reconnected.

There are a few places where, it seems, curatorial greediness for wall space has stoppered the re-opening of one or two obvious links, and there is a further phase to happen, which will complete more vistas; but the long enfilades now clear to the visitor, stitching horizontally through the galleries at all levels, are immensely lively and attractive.

Here objects are left to speak for themselves and, as a result, speak all the clearer

Occupying the 3D grid must be a curatorial joy. The vertical stacks of galleries are themed, in turn, from the left, around natural sciences, world cultures, art & design and science & technology, with the Benson & Forsyth stack at the end for Scotland. Looking up and down the voids it’s clear how the themes stitch together — particularly when the potential for hanging objects through the voids is exploited. But the potential for horizontal links, across the main themes, around, say, geographical or temporal themes, is there too; and, in any case, the rich and varied relationships between objects that the grid offers, allows for unexpected and fertile juxtapositions.

And this is a satisfyingly object-based museum. Eighty per cent of the 8,000 artefacts on display are seeing their public for the first time in generations. Gareth Hoskins Architects has worked with the exhibition designer, Ralph Appelbaum, before at the Culloden Battlefield Museum, where the exhibition was, properly and inevitably, story-driven. But here the objects are left, largely, to speak for themselves, with a minimum of interpretive or interactive baggage, in displays that are simple and open and, as a result, speak all the clearer to us.

Vertical links
If I had a criticism it is that some of the galleries could be busier; though, going forward, the curators may agree, and take the opportunity to present more of the collection, allowing the museum to further evolve — so, in a way, a bit of sparseness is another positive.

The vertical links necessary to activate these stacks of galleries have had to be reinforced. Previously, the trial of the stairs had meant that the upper level galleries were half-dead — less than 10% of visitors made it up to displays that had descended into considerable dowdiness. Hoskins has opened up the centre of the plan, with lifts and escalators feeding visitors to the upper levels. Sitting in the Grand Gallery, it is clear that the movement strategy and opening-up of the upper galleries has been a success, with all levels, via their very visible elevated walkways, alive with people.

Indeed the building is — to use the Scots term — hoatching with folk. Since reopening they have seen an average of 100,000 people across its (free) threshold, every week. The Edinburgh Festival is on, so the centre of town is packed, and the schools have been on holiday; but, still, for a wee city of 450,000 this is a hugely satisfying response to the £47 million investment that the Heritage Lottery Fund, Scottish Government and private fundraising have provided.

New entry sequence
Among all this architectural and curatorial good sense the biggest move is the new entry sequence which, for me, is part successful and part deeply problematic. The museum sits at piano nobile level, with its Grand Gallery accessed via a very grand, public sweep of stairs, up from Chambers Street. The Grand Gallery had become a clutter of reception, cafés and retail. This welcome — the “decompression zone” or ante-room we now need at a museum’s front door — has been moved below the Grand Gallery, into its vaulted underbuilding and opened up directly onto Chambers Street, entry now bypassing the stairs.

I like this new space. It was formerly museum storage, and there has been a deal of major structural works, including rockhead-reduction and underpinning, to open it up. It is calm and cool, a welcome place to come into from the street and a nicely subdued respite before the rise up into the light-filled glory of the Grand Gallery. It is the links that disappoint.

First, the rise into the Grand Gallery is via two symmetrical stairs, set against huge display walls dubbed the Window on the World. These displays rise through the three main levels and feature 800 objects. From across the Grand Gallery the scope and the grand gesture reads clearly, but from the stairs below the height is interrupted by the walkways above, and the stairs themselves lack the grandeur necessary to transport us between these key spaces.

The entry from Chambers Street is even more troubling. The old, original, huge flight of stairs, up to the entrance and piano nobile, is an integral part of the “forbiddingness” I’ve noted; but climbing them is also exhilarating, an exercise that is both literally and metaphorically uplifting, and the moment when you stood on the raised landing and caught your breath before passing into the glory of the Great Court, was one of Edinburgh’s finest. But the stairs now sweep up to huge, locked doors — as did at least a dozen visitors during the half hour I sat on them.

Of course we also need to welcome those who can’t manage the stairs, with equal openness. Setting out the level route so separate, off the street, through the vaulted space and into the centre of the building, does plug visitors efficiently into the central, vertical internal circulation, but it completely bypasses the grand entrance. The architects say they are disappointed the museum’s management has not allowed both routes in — but they deliver visitors into two separate places, and only one has the welcome facilities, so I am not surprised at this pragmatic view. And I cannot see why a combined level and grand staircase entry, and welcome, could not have been managed at the front of the building.

‘Least intrusion’
It would certainly have involved a bolder intrusion into the grade A listed fabric of Fowke’s museum. It is interesting to look at the building’s new elevation and see the mouse-hole entrances let into its skirting as the sort of almost invisible, “least intrusion into the fabric” solution too easily favoured by conservatives.

While I would never argue for the sort of iconic daftness some architects like to stamp on old buildings I wonder whether this fine renewal, and the great public success it has brought with it, has not seen the building more damaged, in its integrity of use, than a more radical solution.

Postscript:

Pictures by Dave Morris