The Ulster Museum is destined to remain a building that stands somewhat outside time and remote from its society. The building is in two parts that are merged into one: the first Classical, designed by James Wyness and built only in part by 1929, and the second, a transformative concrete extension designed by Francis Pym for a 1963 competition judged by Leslie Martin and opened in 1972 to the most violent year of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The extension is, as Paul Clarke, of the University of Ulster has written, ‘an icon to a period when architecture addressed at the very centre of its responsibility, the optimism of modern life, culture and public space’. Now, after decades of inept alterations and unimaginative curation, its doors are closed for a refurbishment that will disassemble its central ideas together with all the optimism that Clarke alludes to – and this at a time when Northern Ireland has the chance to build the open civil society that it never had and that the museum competition project symbolised in that brief period of opportunity for change forty-six years ago.
A ‘ghastly interregnum’: the struggle for architectural heritage conservation in Belfast before 1972
