The Buildings
The Usher Gallery was designed by the architect, Sir Reginald Blomfield and was officially opened on 25 May 1927 by the Prince of Wales. It is a basically simple building faced in stone with brick panels separated by simplified Tuscan pilasters above which is a frieze decorated with triglyphs and a roof line finished with a balustrade. The portico, central in the south façade, is topped by a broken pediment and urn finials. It stands in a small park on the hillside looking southwards across the lower town.
The new building, designed by the architectural firm of Panter Hudspith (project architect, Hugh Strange), was opened in October 2005 after much hard work including an archaeological excavation. Despite the building's having been designed to rest above the Roman horizon, at the foot of the pit for the lift shaft, it just found the corner of a mosaic-paved passage which had been laid around a courtyard.
Much of the building is faced and paved with Ancaster stone and borrows the concept of the glass-covered courtyard from the British Museum in a feature reminiscent of a medieval alley. This exemplifies the design. The various requirements of the building, permanent display, temporary exhibitions, teaching, café and so on, are represented by corresponding elements of the building which give it, internally and externally, the feeling of an urban community, though the whole forms a distinctive unit in the townscape.
The main entrance is at the northern, uphill end and leads past, to the left, the café which faces south across a sculpturally interesting courtyard and to the right, the shop. Passing the reception desk leads to the orientation hall which is the glass-covered 'alley' passing east to west. From it, the visitor reaches auditorium where video or personal introductions to the museum or to education courses may be given; the education suite; the archaeological collection or the New Curtois Gallery, where touring exhibitions are housed. Below these last two, at the downhill end of the building, are the stores and workshops which service the whole.
Read more about this topic: The Collection (Lincolnshire)
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)