Richard Murphy Architects wins an invited competition organised by RIAS and Fife Council to design the Dunfermline Museum
The site for the new museum sits adjacent to the world’s very first Andrew Carnegie Library and opposite Dunfermline Abbey and Abbot’s House. Access to the building will be through a Grade B listed former bank building, by the unusual device of taking a two storey fragment of the façade and pivoting it during the opening hours of the museum, thereby returning the listed façade to its complete status in the evenings.
The building is organised around a top-lit street, which connects the museum to the heart of the existing library and gives rise to a staircase journey inhabiting thick walls, visiting the main museum space on the first floor before culminating in café and education suite on the roof. The museum is a sequence of spaces with particular sight lines manipulated to focus on a number of historic buildings in the immediate vicinity. The roof-top café is organised as a glazed pavilion in which the entire panorama of the town, the abbey and the distant Firth of Forth can be seen.
|
