Buildings to house art: The Fitzwilliam Museum

Pretty simple to design an art gallery, you might think. You need wall space, plenty of it; not too much direct sunlight. Perhaps something distinctive about the building to make it clear it is not just a big house or warehouse. Yet if designing a gallery is so simple, why does the actual building that surrounds the pictures we look at make such a difference to our experience? Or to put it another way, why is the Fitzwilliam such a failure as a structure, compared to, say, the Ashmolean in Oxford?

These thoughts are prompted by a reading of Lucilla Burn’s The Fitzwilliam Museum: a History (2016), an interesting if uninspired volume, which reveals more about the building than about the collection (perhaps inevitably, in a single volume).  

The Fitzwilliam Museum was built in three major stages. First, the original museum, designed by George Basevi from 1835 and opened (incomplete) in 1848. The entrance hall was  then revised by Edward Barry and completed 1875. This initial building scores very highly as a object to be admired, but as an art gallery it was (and is) useless. The main galleries are all situated on the first floor that can only be reached by a huge ostentatious staircase that turns back on itself. The hall is so opulent that no art could ever compete with its gaudiness. 

Even Michelangelo's Last Judgement would be overwhelmed by this entrance [Zhurakovskyi - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52310467]

Paradoxically, the entrance hall has a convoluted feel to it; it does not feel like a grand entrance, for all its splendour. There are many more impressive staircases than this, for example Juvarra's Palazzo Madama in Turin:

The Marlay and Courtauld Galleries were the first major extension. They add two storeys to the left of the main building. Designed in the 1920s, they fail (as most buildings would fail, alongside Basevi) to live up to the grandeur of the original building. 

The Marlay Corridor

The most noticeable thing about these galleries is their feebleness. These galleries give the impression that they considered for a moment about competing with the Basevi block but then decided not to compete with the main building, so they retire a discreet distance back from the original front. In doing so, they waste considerable space - they are essentially corridors on two floors with glass cases, and it looks as though the contents of those cases has varied little since the galleries were opened.

A view probably unchanged in the last 50 years

The Courtauld Galleries, an extension a few years later, tried to emulate the least art-focused part of the original Fitzwilliam – the staircase. Again, there is a grand staircase with exquisite detailing, but which is absolutely useless for displaying art.

Courtauld Galleries - great staircase, not much art

After the Courtauld and Marlay extensions, further additions to the Fitzwilliam have been almost apologetic. In the 1960s David Roberts built a further extension, to the left of the Courtauld Galleries. This building is now largely obscured by perhaps the only truly successful architecture in the whole gallery, the Museum Courtyard - most of which isn't a new building at all. This Courtyard is cleverly created by adding a roof between the Roberts Building and the Courtauld Galleries. At a stroke a dreary external courtyard became a lively meeting place and café, that provides an invitation to the galleries beside it (since you can see inside the Courtauld Galleries – a further problem with the original Fitzwilliam, which reveals absolutely nothing of its contents from the outside). At least you can say this Courtyard actually takes into account what is already there, rather than plonking another block alongside earlier buildings without any relationship. 

The Courtyard, successfully linking the cafe and the museum

However even the Museum Courtyard is not without its failings. The entrance  to the museum, the one used today by the majority of visitors, does not look or feel like an entrance. It has an apology of a canopy; there are doors that open automatically the wrong way (opening out to hit the visitors as they enter); and does not integrate with any other structure in the Gallery.

This is where most of the 750,000 visitors a year enter the Fitzwilliam - between the dustbins

All in all, the Fitzwilliam staff deserve sympathy for trying to make some sense of a very poor collection of original buildings.  When the inevitable Lottery Fund moneyarrives, I hope the opportunity is taken to rethink the entire museum and to create some sympathetic and inspiring surroundings for art. There is little sign of that in the existing infrastructure.  The first buildings I would remove are the Marlay and Courtauld Galleries.