building

Today (amongst other things) I visited the Belfast Botanical Gardens and the Ulster Museum. The day being marginally cooler than it has been recently lent itself almost perfectly to our chosen purpose of wandering aimlessly from the city in the morning, through to the elegant victorian streets and squares surrounding Queen's University Campus, and on to the gardens and the museum, while still putting on a full display of July sunshine for us to enjoy when we got there.

The museum is set into one side of the garden and most of it sits among peacefully formal city greenery, with one face pointing out into the red-brick elegance of this part of the city - this half of the building looks exactly as you'd expect a museum in a city largely constructed on the back of the industrial revolution to look: the usual nineteenth century grandeur of columns and cornicing enclose galleries of vaulted ceilings divided by arched doorways. However approaching (as we did today) from within the gardens, you see a quite different side of the museum.

Rising out of the leafy tranquility stands one of the most startling examples of brutal mid twentieth century architecture I've ever seen. Geometric slabs of untreated concrete appear to have collided first with each other and then with the rest of the museum. Among them are oddly placed balconies, peering clusters of narrow windows and, over the entrance, a surging up-turned wave of naked concrete which (like the rest of the structure) has taken on a strangely organic texture with the passing of years and rainwater.

Inside, we walked through airy display spaces and exhibits that knitted the two conflicting halves of the building to a point where it very quickly became impossible to discern which was which. A gallery of interactive light sculptures in fibre-optics and nylon led on through the velvet darkness of a special exhibit of nineteenth century sketches into stately galleries of classical oil on canvas.

At one point we moved from a series of excellent exhibits on the ancient history and pre-history of the province to a small contemporary exhibit on youth culture (in which I found a pair of black DMs identical to my own presented in a glass case identical to the ones housing mesolithic axes and arrow heads only a few galleries away). The display was simple and showed nobody present anything they hadn't already seen in the course of their everyday life, but the effect of re-contextualising the everyday was nonetheless quite affecting.

Afterward, back outside in the city under the watchful drone of the ever-present helicopters, I couldn't help wondering (given the context of my surroundings) if this divided city and province was conscious of this epitome of unlikely unity which sits within spitting distance of police stations still barricaded and barred by the trappings of decades of unrest.

(written 4pm 18th July - post delayed due to problems with blogger)