For a total change of pace we started one morning with a visit to the Riverside Museum, one of a string of new buildings in an area along the River Clyde. The location of the museum is on the site of the former A. & J. Inglis Shipyard within Glasgow Harbor, on the north bank of the River Clyde and adjacent to its confluence point with the River Kelvin. This site enables the Clyde Maritime Trust’s SV Glenlee and other visiting craft to berth alongside the museum. This is the front entrance.
The Riverside Museum building was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and engineers Buro Happold.The internal exhibitions and displays were designed by Event Communications. Replacing facilities at the city’s Kelvin Hall, the new purpose-built museum is the first to be opened in the city since the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in 1993 and is expected to attract up to 1 million visitors a year. Although containing approximately the same floor space as the previous museum facility at 7,500 sq m, it creates a more environmentally stable home for Glasgow’s significant Transport Technology collections. The building also houses a workshop and office space for the Clyde Maritime Trust. The rear of the museum, facing the river, is equally dynamic, as seen in this (sunnier) Wikipedia photo.
You can get the best sense of the overall form from the Wikicopter – though I have to say that having an overall sense of the building’s form doesn’t help much once you go inside.
Zaha’s buildings are all about fluid forms – sometimes that works with the program, and other times – not so much. Since opening, the Riverside Museum has received generally positive reviews. However its layout continues to be regularly criticized by visitors; the chief complaint being that a significant portion of the cars on display are positioned on shelves mounted at great height.
Visitor reviews indicate that this has been disappointing for car enthusiasts and also for Glaswegians with fond memories of visiting the Transport Museum at its previous location, which displayed the exhibits at ground level allowing visitors to see the cars up close and look inside them. I think they have a point – but look at the form ! I could see places where the dynamics of the form and the dynamics of the displays could have been partners in the experience.
But it’s pretty clear that the fluid ramp of automobiles and the fluid roof have only a coincidental relationship – too bad. There were indeed some fascinating transportation icons on display. Is this a sidecar experience or what.
And of course, in the homeland of the steam engine, there are steam engines, both small and large.
But the museum does its job of moving from the past to the near past and the shift to urban mass transit. This seemed like a pretty fun way to have to ride downtown first thing in the morning.
On the upper level the disconnect between the building and displays becomes really obvious.
The design intends that you should be able to see many of the vehicles from above; and that can be done. But it’s a hard experience for youngsters (as above) to really participate in; and it makes it difficult to include exhibits directly at this level.
I understand that the intent was to be able to see the ship models from all sides; but a more traditional setting could perhaps have controlled the glare and reflections that seemed to be an inherent part of the experience. It also seemed as if the didactic part of the museum experience involving photos and text got short-changed. This photo gives a dramatic example of what happens when a less than seaworthy design slides down the ways.
So all in all, a challenging museum tour. A fascinating collection, but so many collaborative opportunities missed. Out front at the end we took in a bit of the public art, some over-sized furniture.
This has been done before and is generally fun just for the Jack-in-the-Beanstalk scale that makes everyone smile. In this case we smiled but also wondered whether the setting in front of a transportation museum couldn’t have inspired a better connection to the presence of the river and the context of the museum. On that note we headed for another totally different spatial experience.
Travel Design Impressions 