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Research Articles

No. 3 (2020): The order

Fine-drawn, drawn-out, redrawn, remembered: A review of the Pym and Lawson project for the Ulster Museum

Submitted
April 29, 2020
Published
2020-06-24

Abstract

In 1963, the British architect Francis Pym won the competition to complete the Belfast Art Gallery, a monumental and neoclassical building designed by James Cumming Winne as a result of a previous competition called in 1914. The classical order of the previous building it is radically revised in the proposal of Pym, designed by a small team from his studio that included the architectural assistant Pat Lawson, who later acquires the role of architect on site, overseeing all aspects and materializing the ideas of the competition, especially after the resignation from Pym to continue leading the project in 1968. With the name of Ulster Museum from the sixties, the architecture conceived by Pym and Lawson will become one of the emblematic works of modernity, in a triple reading: as a revision of the idea of monumentality, generating a new stratigraphic and dynamic order that coexists in continuity with the academic solidity of the preceding one, as a local assimilation of the brutalist expression present at international level at that time, and as the integration of a historical building into a modern project, recognizing and respecting its heritage value and acting with the tools of the present.

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