Holburne Museum
Located in Bath, a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Holburne Museum a decade ago was threatened with closure, little visited with dwindling funds and housed in a failing building. Since re-opening in May 2011 it has seen an increase in visitors of over 600%, created four critically acclaimed temporary exhibitions and re-established itself as the gateway to the only surviving outline of an eighteenth-century pleasure garden drawing attention to its present impact as a place of public enjoyment and celebration.
The brief was to double the available display and education areas and create a sustainable regional museum, with environmental standards that allow significant loans for a temporary exhibition programme. The existing building was refurbished, relocating the main stair to re-establish the central axis and a new extension built to address the gardens that had been cut off in alternations of the early twentieth century.
The articulation of the extension is a tripartite arrangement that reflects the internal uses; gallery walls at the top, gauged openings to the intermediate levels, and transparency at the garden level. An architectural order of ceramic and glass is established; the upper floor is clad in ceramic panels with a deep glaze (achieved by 2 slip coats single fired) and the café at the garden level has a transparent veil of laminated low iron glass, free from complex jointing. The mediating level is a combination of ceramic and glass. A series of ceramic fins conceals the vertical joints of the ceramic panels at the upper level and covers the stabilizing wind posts that carry the outer glass skin. The layers of reflection on the skin of the building in its foliate setting are intentionally ambiguous and reinforce the extensions presence in the garden, in contrast to the formal urban setting and orientation of the original building.