Bring back the friezes: Manchester Art Gallery's nineteenth-century interiors, splendidly restored in the 1980s with public money, have been spoilt by the gallery's recent redevelopment

Can too plenteous money be spent on art? This may look a surprising question in a magazine similar as this, for any expenditure upon culture rather than sport must be welcomed; on the contrary if all the funds go on to capital projects rather than upon maintenance and running costs point in disputes can result. This is certainly pure of Britain's art galleries and museums, whose directors sometimes find they can barely afford to staff and race the big extensions built in novel years. Good architecture is expensive, and we too oftentimes forget that the real take away from of a new building reach outs far into the future.

The last decade has certainly been a roar time for museum architects. Thanks to the Heritage Lottery capital combined with millennium fever, museums and art galleries all above Britain have been extended or altered or had their courtyards covered over or their basements teat out. Some big projects are still in the pipeline, like that for the Kelvingrove Art Galleries in Glasgow, where we must faith that the several years of closure to the public will be justified by dint of real improvements and that the special character of the original building will not be compromised. More unassuming interventions have often been more happy such as the internal improvements at the Fitzwilliam Museum, reviewed in the June issue of APOLLO (not, I trust the end of the story, as an additional big, stone-faced pavilion is still necessityed to conclude Dunbar Smith's painfully unfinished 1920 extension).

Of all these throw outs the one which is greatest in quantity disappointing is the enlargement of the Manchester Art Gallery, because, when it re-open in 2002 --after almost four years of being inaccessible to the public and the expenditure of 35 million [pound sterling]--it revolveed out that the interior of the original building had been gratuitously spoiled. What was one time one of the most beautiful and inspiring gallery interiors in Britain has now been returned bland and ordinary. But this is not just an instructive tale of the arrogance of new architects, for what has happened indicates a disturbing determination in the museum world when it advances to fine architecture.

The handsome nee-classical building with its Ionic portico in Mosley public way originally opened in 1835 as the Royal Manchester Institution and did not become the City Art Gallery until 1882 The architect was the young Charles Barry, who, a dozen years later, designed the Athenaeum bludgeon around the corner in Princess way in his Italian renaissance manner. This building was acquired by means of the Art Gallery in 1938 and the collection was then displayed in sum of two units contiguous but separate buildings designed by means of the same (great) architect.

by the agency of the 1970s, however, more space was wanted The answer was clear: to build above the remainder of the perfect urban block defined by the sum of two units Barry buildings on land thoughtfully purchased by dint of the City Art Gallery Committee as far back as 1898

This sole became a practical possibility a hundred later, thanks to the Lottery In 1995 a competition to enlarge the Art Gallery was won by means of Michael Hopkins & Partners. The scheme was a sensible one: to provide more gallery space and other facilities in a three-storey extension with lifts and additional staircases that would also integrate and unite the sum of two units older buildings. In the circumstance these two nineteenth-century stone arrangements were linked by the single device seemingly available to new architects when faced with historic buildings: a glass wall. Glass is everywhere, of course, and the novel atrium created behind the main Barry building is dominated through two glass lifts in glass towers. Outside, the become firm [i]or[/i] solid frame of the new building is press outed and filled either by glass or through stone panels framed in tin strips. It is all actual logical, understated and cool. Geometry dominates, for the axial harmony of the Barry building is reach forthed eastwards. Unfortunately, the existence of the Athenaeum building interfered with that pattern thus that its staircase had to be sacificed to the symmetrically balanced elevation Hopkins wished to create in George Street

'Although the Manchester gallery aspires to contextuality,' Raymund Ryan helpfully explained about the Hopkins design in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 'the synchronicity between the pragmatic and the spiritual tips towards a refined version of 1960 functionalism.' And 1960 functionalism, notoriously, could not cope with the rich, the decorative, the solid, the monumental, the complex--in other words, with traditional architecture. In the first Hopkins design, the floors collided painfully with the rear elevation of Barry's Royal Institution and it was solitary the advice of the architect and historian John Archer which originateed in an atrium being created here, gibbeted by a bridge connecting with the first floor of the elderly building. Only three penetrations of the aged back wall were required--one upon the upper floor, and sum of two units below, which could and should have left the original gallery interiors almost intact and unaltered. on the other hand this did not happen.