Client: Mary Rose Trust
Design: (architect and design team leader) Wilkinson Eyre Architects, (architect for the interior) Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will
Recommended White Papers
Size: 4,500 sq m
Cost: £27m
Completion time: Eight years
We may no longer think of Britain as a seafaring nation exactly, but our glorious maritime history is still close to our hearts. Our surviving historic ships, such as the Cutty Sark and Nelson’s HMS Victory, represent an era when Britannia really did rule the waves, and as such are popular attractions. The task for architects is often to find the best way of showing off these national treasures to the public while also protecting their now fragile construction for posterity.
Grimshaw Architects’ recent redesign of the visitor centre for the Cutty Sark at Greenwich, which was devasted by fire, involved suspending the ship above its berth (so that it wouldn’t sag) and encasing the lower portion of the hull in glass, a move not popular with everyone, and which saw the project awarded (rather unfairly, if you ask me) the Carbuncle Cup, a prize for the year’s ugliest building.
The latest of our historic ships to reopen to the public is the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s warship which was raised from the Solent in 1982 along with thousands of artefacts from Tudor times (and even some of the skeletal remains of the crew of some 500 who drowned) and now resides at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.
For project leader Wilkinson Eyre Architects and interior architect Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will this sensitive project required a blend of delicate conservation, contemporary architecture and specialist technical expertise.
It all began when Chris Brandon, of Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will, who as well as being an architect has an ancillary career as marine biologist, heard that there was going to be an competition to design a new visitor centre for the Mary Rose. Brandon paired up with Wilkinson Eyre Architects and the two practices came up with the winning proposal.
The museum itself, with its elliptical exterior panelled in planks of Western red cedar, is bound to catch people’s attention – but Brandon says the project was actually designed from the inside out.
‘The initial proposal we and Wilkinson Eyre Architects submitted back in 2005 was actually based on the interior – there was very little information at that stage about what the building would look like. We were pushed very hard to say what it was going to look like, but we said that the important thing was the ship.’
Brandon says the look of the building is largely down to practicality, and that the space was dictated not by a desire to create something nautical-looking (as it may seem), but by the contents of the museum and, most importantly, by the shape of the Mary Rose itself.
‘Once we knew what the shape of the interior was, it was then a question of making the exterior fit as tightly as possible around the interior. It was the shape of the ship and the shape of the missing half of the ship that has given it this sort of elliptical form. That really generated the exterior shape.’
The Mary Rose itself – or the half that is left of it – is protected inside the main building. For now, it is also inside a special ‘hot box’, which is gradually drying out the ship’s timbers over a period of up to five years, and can only be seen through a screen, though this will be removed when the drying process is complete. Brandon says the project was as much about displaying the artefacts that were recovered with the ship as it was about showing off the ship itself. His practice designed a display for the artefacts, including three-tonne bronze guns, that is shaped like the missing half of the ship and sits adjacent to the actual ship. A corridor allows visitors to walk between the two.
Though the recreated port side of the ship is an exact replica of the starboard side, Brandon says he didn’t want this it to feel like ‘a sort of Disney experience. So there was no wood. We used epoxy resin floors and GFRG (Glass Fibre Reinforced Gypsum). So even though it’s an exact replica of the shape of the ship, it’s obvious that we haven’t tried to make a copy of the real thing. It’s very different to the Cutty Sark or the Victory or the SS Great Britain because all those projects are whole ships.
‘Another thing we were keen to do was to make sure that we showed that everything is real and there’s been no reconstruction. The only additions that have been made to the ship are in clear Perspex or acrylic, so that it is obvious they are not the real thing.’
The exhibition spaces were created using a simple palette of unobtrusive materials, including a concrete slab floor covered with epoxy resin and walls made of painted GFRG. Everything is painted either very dark grey or black.
The artefacts have been carefully lit so that it’s almost impossible to see the glass they are sitting behind. ‘It was very important to us to make sure that the light wasn’t shining on the glass as that would really spoil the magic,’ says Brandon. For this reason also, the architects working with exhibition designer Land Design Studio decided to keep explanatory texts to a minimum.
‘We wanted, in a way, to hide the interior and hide the objects, so it became this kind of black space were all you see it the ship itself, the display and the objects themselves. Light is only focused on the objects,’ says Brandon. Words by Jamie Mitchell
Main suppliers:
Exterior materials:
Cladding:
Aluminium standing seam roof:
Single-ply roof:
Aluminium curtain walling:
Aluminium-framed Windows:
Paving slabs:
Expanded metal panels:
Louvres:
Furniture dealer:
Internal folding partition:
