Opening up the museum

The National Museum of Scotland has reopened today after a £47 million restoration by Gareth Hoskins Architects. Eleanor Young spoke to Gareth Hoskins about it.

This was the practice’s first big project when it was still a fledgling four year old practice with its largest project just £2 million. Hoskins is delighted that the project stayed true to the competition sketches. ‘The client was great,’ he says. ‘They trusted us.’

Hoskins’ first big move for the Edinburgh museum was to dig into what staff considered to be the basement, but is actually street level. This opened up a new entrance, under barrel vaulted sandstone, gives a sense of compression before the museum opens up into the Crystal Palace-style ‘bird cage’ above. It is has also freed this new Grand Gallery to devote itself to displaying larger objects. ‘It use to be just a giant cloakroom,’ Hoskins explains.

‘Before intervention only 10% of visitors went beyond the ground floor,’ says Hoskin, amazed. So drawing visitors up through the museum was an important part of the brief. Now lifts can swish them up to the top floor temporary exhibition spaces so people can make their leisurely way down at their own rate through the refurbished galleries. 

Through the 18m high Window on the World installation in the Grand Gallery visitors will be able to see views of the objects in the galleries beyond which include a 1930s gyrocopter, a 6m tall railway signal tower and a girder from the Tay Bridge. The museum’s 20,000 objects, reflecting the natural world, Scottish innovation and other cultures, will be on show in sixteen new galleries.